This is a tale of two city incinerators.

They were operated according to safety standards; they were operated dangerously.

There was organized crime involvement, and the military, too. Environmental racism was alleged in both cases.

People rose up in protest of one of the incinerators. That one was shut down forever; the fate of the other perhaps depends upon the will of the Beacon Hill community. Are they willing to gather their collective force to bring down medical waste incineration at the Veterans' Administration Hospital?

The distant city is the South Bronx, an area largely taken over by slumlords and left for dead by whites in the 1970s. Since then, most of the residents of this densely-populated area have been Latino--largely Puertorriquenos, many of whom can trace their ancestry back to African slave stock. It contains vibrant, bustling communities; it also has expanses of extreme poverty and high crime. And lots of children throughout.

Though the residents are New York City taxpayers, public services like trash collection and street re-paving happen a lot less frequently than in whiter areas. Schools have older books and fewer computers, more pupils per classroom, and lower scores on achievement tests.

And the local hospital, Bronx Lebanon, was burning its medical wastes.

The medical waste incinerator operated for years before the community succeeded in shutting it down. During those years the hospital quietly added an annex to the emergency room just to handle the dramatically increased respiratory cases.

This is how South Bronx community organizer Nina Laboy, now a Seattle resident, told me it happened:

One day, when the incinerator at Bronx Lebanon Hospital was 98 percent completed, citizens from a more affluent part of the city, researching an incinerator in their own community, found out about the incinerator about to start up in the South Bronx. They told a minister in the South Bronx that his family and congregation could be poisoned by this medical waste incinerator that was about to spew emissions in their midst.

The minister contacted other groups active in his community. By the end of 1990 they had formed the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition.

Soon after the incinerator started up, the Coalition did some research among their neighbors and found out that rates of cancer, lung disease, and asthma were increasing, higher than anywhere else in the city. Anybody could observe that; most people just didn't realize that incinerator was in their community, spewing toxins into their air, into their children's lungs, into their mouths, and onto their skin.

Now, the hospital wasn't actually operating the incinerator. No, they had just signed on as the sponsor of the facility, which was built and operated by a company called Remtech, that was eventually bought out by a company called BFI, one of the largest waste disposal companies in the world.

It took some time to uncover those bits of information, because politicians and the hospital simply lied to the community. In fact, the community actually paid for the incinerator in a bond issue, which politicians claimed was meant to establish a recycling facility!

Once it became clear that the company, the hospital, and the politicians would resort to any low means to keep that incinerator running, the community group decided to resort to any means necessary to shut it down.

They exerted continuous pressure on politicians and government regulators, sought and got continuous media attention with children's marches, elders' marches, stopping motorists to tell them that the incinerator was killing them, too--in that largely-Catholic community, they even held an exorcism of the damned incinerator. Anytime, anywhere, at any meeting about health, area planning, the environment, whatever, they would raise the issue.

They had to force their elected officials to join with them. All of the officials had endorsed the incinerator at first, but the Coalition held demonstrations at the politicians' offices to embarrass them into allying with the community they were supposed to represent.

The company and the hospital kept claiming the facility operated within the legal limits of emissions. The citizens kept refuting those legal limits, armed with information that showed that the most concentrated source of deadly dioxins is medical waste incinerators.

The company kept saying they'd form a community advisory group to help monitor the facility. Citizens said, "We don't want to monitor it; we just want it shut down!"

The company and the hospital waxed poetic, describing the state-of-the-art equipment they were using. The community said, "We don't call incineration an art."

The company and the hospital bleated that they'd never want to poison anybody; meanwhile, the company was being cited for faulty incinerators all up and down the East Coast.

Finally, while looking for the source of the money behind the incinerator, the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition discovered information that linked their incinerator to a federal investigation of organized crime in the waste disposal industry!

The original owner, Remtech, walked away under a flurry of investigation and went bankrupt. They may not have made as much money as they wanted, but they sure didn't lose as much as they would have had they been held responsible for the pollution, illness, and death they had caused.

Under BFI, the incinerator continually flunked emissions tests. Finally, because of the community's constant vigilance, self-education, and persistence, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation intervened and shut down the incinerator in 1997.

The community, spearheaded by a remarkable multi-ethnic coalition, won. BFI has agreed to convert the facility to an autoclave, which is much healthier for the community. BFI is also providing the community with $200,000 for an environmental benefits program.

Next week: The story on Beacon Hill.