Toledo Blade — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began studying 14 sites for possible contamination Monday in what has become a years-long quest for the source of a childhood cancer cluster in this eastern Sandusky County community.

About a dozen EPA personnel and contractors surveyed a vacant lot and began taking soil samples Monday, representing the federal government’s first involvement in the effort to determine the cause of at least 37 childhood cancer cases within a 12-mile radius of Clyde. Four children have died.

The vacant lot once housed a company called Formulated Products. The EPA removed hundreds of drums of chemicals from the site in the late 1990s. It was believed nothing was buried on the site, but with the outbreak of brain and central nervous system tumors, lymphoma, leukemia, and other forms of cancer among children in the area since 1996, federal authorities are now investigating the site, along with 13 others.

Most of the sites are former dumps that closed before the 1970s, prior to the era of modern solid waste management and regulation.