The lead story in this paper Sunday was about the state expanding its probe of TCE contamination throughout Endwell.

Amen! It's about time.

TCE, or trichloroethylene, is a solvent for cleaning metal parts. It has been used commonly in manufacturing throughout the Southern Tier as well as the rest of the nation.

Before Love Canal, when America woke up to industrial health hazards, it was not uncommon to dump TCE and similar chemicals without any concern for leaching into the groundwater. There were simply not the strict regulations that we have today.

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, "drinking or breathing high levels of trichloroethylene may cause nervous system effects, liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and possibly death." A planned health study of IBM Endicott workers will aim to see if there is a connection between their exposure to TCE and disproportionately high rates of testicular and kidney cancer, as well as heart defects.

If the state is taking recommendations for places to test for TCE in Endwell, here are a couple sites they should visit:

* Robinson Hill Road south of its intersection with Struble Road. Back in 2003, several people contacted me about a place north of the former IBM gun club where they claimed chemicals were dumped decades ago. (This is a site above the old IBM burn pit that the company tested in 2003.)

The people who contacted me said they saw contaminated fill and big drums containing chemicals dumped repeatedly at the site. Workers would laugh that nothing grew there, they said.

That year I visited the dump site with a coworker and took some photographs. It was creepy. Right before the field slopes into woods, there was bare ground. The earth was a sickly gray, and greenish lichens were the only vegetation. Why would that be the case when the field around it looked healthy?

If chemicals were dumped here, could they have dripped down the hill toward where an upper-middle-class neighborhood has been built? When we drove down there to see if there was a similar sight below, we found some dense woods on Biscayne Terrace. The air inside seemed dead, we both noted, as opposed to the fragrant air one expects in the woods. There were no birds in the trees. Nothing grew beneath them except some very odd-looking bright red mushrooms.

If you continue down the hill you encounter Patterson Creek, which runs through the heart of Endwell and past Maine-Endwell High School. If chemicals had been dumped at the site, could they have leached into the soil and traveled down to the creek? Would children playing in the creek have been affected?

* Areas around Brixius Creek. In 2003, I exchanged e-mails on the chemical dumping with Robert Kropp, the former Town of Union supervisor. Kropp, who died in 2005, wrote that "sometime in the early '70s, I received a phone call from the EPA advising me that IBM was spilling unauthorized chemicals into Brixius Creek." He had an attorney contact IBM and was told later that IBM planned to build a treatment plant at the dump site. Kropp relayed that information to the EPA and "assumed that IBM took care of the problem."

Was it taken care of? State testing could prove if it was.

Back in 1995, a cancer cluster of nine children with leukemia and one with lymphoma was designated in the Town of Union. Some lived not far from Brixius Creek, which winds through Endicott and Endwell. A child living near Patterson Creek in Endwell contracted a rare kidney cancer -- Wilm's Tumor. No answer was found for the cluster.

Back in 1986, concerns of higher-than-average leukemia rates found in Endicott, Endwell, Johnson City and Vestal spurred state testing of water sources. Again, no connection was made. It is interesting to note that in Endicott, the rate for male cases of leukemia was 99 percent higher than the expected number of cases, but it was 127 percent higher in Endwell. The rate for female incidence of leukemia was 76 percent higher than the expected number of cases in Endwell.

Could these trends be linked to chemical dumping? Perhaps. I'm not a scientist or a health expert, but I share concern with those people who alerted me to the alleged dump site. That's why it's good news to hear that the state is expanding its TCE probe across Endwell.

On Wednesday morning, I drove back to the site on Robinson Hill Road that I visited in July 2003. The site is edged by tall evergreens. The grass was about a foot high; on my last visit, it had been mowed. Maybe it was just a chance that the ground was bare that day four years ago, I thought as I strode across the dew-covered field. And then suddenly the tall grass stopped. There it was -- a large bare spot of grayish earth covered with lichens.

Between this spot and Struble Road, as well as farther down the road to the south, are modern luxury homes. You would think this site would be prime property for development. Why has no one touched this field?

Perhaps what those readers told me in 2003 is true.