Two years ago Anajai Calcano gave birth to a baby with no arms
She lives in a small wooden house with no indoor plumbing in a rural village in northern Dominican Republic, not far from where coal ash generated by Virginia-based AES Corp. wound up at the edge of the sea. More than 50,000 tons of coal ash laden with heavy metals was left at a port abutting local homes for years while the company, politicians, prosecutors, environmental activists and bureaucrats argued — and residents got sick.
Roger C. Fine, the man responsible for bringing the ash into the country, says it was only supposed to be there 90 days, but when officials shut down the operation, it ended up sitting for over 2 years.
Robert Vance, who filed the suit with Steve Phillips of Levy Phillips & Konigsberg in New York and Ian Conat of the Bifferato law firm in Wilmington, Del., sent medical experts to the town.
“Over 1,000 people got sick,” said Vance, who accompanied The Miami Herald on a visit to the area. “We tested 42 people, and more than half of those tested had abnormal, unsafe levels of arsenic in their blood.”
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