Answer to Question 1a:

Your initial steps should be:

1. meeting with members of the community to document their concerns
2. contacting the appropriate public health and environmental agencies to obtain any available background information on the plant and community
3. Try to establish a mechanism for communications.
4. Obtain demographic and geographic information for the community and process information for the industry.

Do not make false promises. Be aware such situations will typically arise Friday afternoons, you will often not get the entire story and need to get more information.

NOTE: The basic information you need is available by looking up the History and a description of Love Canal, available from the side bar on the left.

Back to the question

Postgraduate Diploma in Occupational Health (DOH) - Modules 3: Occupational Medicine & Toxicology (Basic) by Profs Mohamed Jeebhay and Rodney Ehrlich, Health Sciences UCT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. Major contributors: Mohamed Jeebhay, Rodney Ehrlich, Jonny Myers, Leslie London, Sophie Kisting, Rajen Naidoo, Saloshni Naidoo. Source available from here. For any updates to the material, or more permissions beyond the scope of this license, please email healthoer@uct.ac.za or visit www.healthedu.uct.ac.za. Last updated Jan 2007.
Disclaimer note: Some resources and descriptions may be out-dated. For suggested updates and feedback, please contact healthoer@uct.ac.za.