Jimmy Anderson was diagnosed with leukemia in 1972.
When you live for years and years with a child that you're always consciously aware of could die anytime, life is never the same.
Convinced that contaminated water caused her son's disease, Ann Anderson is suing nearby industries in a case on the forefront of science and the law.
Now on NOVA Toxic Trials.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide.
Additional funding was provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies supplying health care products worldwide.
And by Allied Signal, a technology leader in aerospace, electronics, automotive products, and engineered materials.
It could be any American town, but it's not.
Because in Wilburn, Massachusetts, some people say local industries have caused the deaths of children.
A meeting of the local environmental group, formed like so many across the country in response to concerns about toxic waste.
This is face for a cleaner environment.
It could be a typical group, some parents, some young people, some retired, like Al Ballastieri, whose knowledge of local industry comes in handy.
Bruce Young, the Episcopal minister here, and Anderson housewife, one of the founders.
Okay, we have some guests tonight, so I'm not sure if everybody knows everybody else.
Is the gentleman on the left over here? His name is?
Tonight is unusual.
This is a friend of yours?
Lisa Smith.
Are you from Wilburn or?
No, I'm from Dorchester.
Dorchester, and you're here for?
I work for the law firm of Foley, Hoag, and Elliott.
Foley, Hoag, and Elliott?
Correct.
And what are they?
They're a law firm in downtown Boston.
And why would you be here?
Because we're interested in what happens at the meeting.
Why would that be of interest to Foley, Hoag, and who's the last guy?
Elliott.
Why would that be of interest to them?
Because we represent WR Grace.
In fact, FACE is not typical.
Some of its members, including Ann Anderson, have accused major corporations like WR Grace
of causing the leukemia which struck their families.
In the fall of 1985, with the trial just four months away, legal jostling was much in evidence.
But the origin of the case goes back many years to the quiet East Wilburn neighborhood
where Ann Anderson lived with her family.
In 1972, Jimmy Anderson, then aged three, was diagnosed as having leukemia.
Ann Anderson and her husband came face to face with probably the worst news that parents can hear.
And somehow, always in your mind, you're prepared for the fact that one of us can go before the other,
but you're never prepared for that with a child.
A child is your legacy that's supposed to outlive you.
And so when you live for years and years with a child that you're always consciously aware of could die anytime,
life is never the same.
As those years went by, Ann Anderson found her son was not alone.
What I began to notice in the neighborhood were, besides right here where we were with Jimmy,
was across the way in that street going down that way were two children diagnosed with leukemia,
a young adult diagnosed with leukemia, and then across the pond and back was another child diagnosed.
And down the street away across from the main street was another child diagnosed.
And then a few streets over, another child was diagnosed.
The very next street, another child was diagnosed.
This was not a normal neighborhood.
The specter that haunted Ann Anderson was that some hidden poison was destroying her neighborhood.
Eventually, her concerns were to draw to this small town of 35,000 investigators from the state,
from the federal government, leading scientists and doctors, and finally an army of lawyers.
From the beginning, it was the water supply where Ann Anderson thought the problem lay.
In East Woburn, it corroded the pipes, often smelled bad and had a brown color.
It was a well-known local annoyance.
Until recently, Woburn's water was pumped entirely from underground in a series of deep wells like this one.
The wells feed into the water pipes under the streets and are controlled from a fine old pump house
built on the pond which used to provide Woburn's water a century ago.
The old steam pump's a museum piece, but right alongside are the modern remote controls for the well pumps
constantly drawing up the groundwater and feeding it to the citizens of Woburn.
Within the town's 13 square miles, there are two main areas of underground water supplies, or aquifers as they're called.
The aquifer to the west supplied by 1960 six town wells and had reached its limit.
So the town turned to the untapped Aberjona River aquifer to the east and drilled two new wells, G and H, alongside the river.
This is well H, right beside the Aberjona River, here only a few feet wide but flowing above a huge reservoir of underground water.
A few hundred feet away, tapping the same rich aquifer, is the other new well, well G.
The new wells were installed in good time to handle Woburn's growing water needs, as Tom Mernin, a city engineer, recalls.
This here is well H, which is our furthest point, furthest most well in this field.
I've been here since 1967. I actually never went online until late 72.
But wells G and H caused problems. The water in this aquifer is high in natural dissolved minerals.
It met all the standards, but people didn't like it.
You were getting spots, brown spots on your clothes. Your linens were turning white, you were turning brown.
Your dishwashers would be brown, it literally turned brown. Just aesthetically, it just didn't, it was good quality water at the time.
It was fine, but it just didn't go over.
Although the local newspaper would often field complaints about the water, Anne Anderson's concerns were not widely known for several years,
until a remarkable chain of events took place, witnessed by an alert reporter here, Charlie Ryan.
As you'd expect, Charlie Ryan covers everything from the school committee to local crime.
But as an ex-well driller, he also happens to know about water supplies.
In April of 1979, one of my responsibilities with the newspaper was to cover the police blotter over the weekend.
And on that particular Sunday, when I went into the station and looked at the blotter,
I saw mention of some midnight dumping of about 185 barrels.
The barrels were spread out over the site, and some of them were near the river.
Charlie Ryan was on the spot when state officials came out to take a look.
He quickly told them that wells G and H weren't too far away.
He mentioned that the river, the Abidjanah River here, flows by two of the city's drinking water wells about a little less than a mile downstream.
The state collected samples from G and H and sent them to their water pollution laboratory,
which by another chance happened to be one of the first in the country to try out new equipment,
which can identify low-level contamination by synthetic chemicals.
A special analysis revealed five chemicals with high levels of the common industrial solvents, tetrachlorethylene and trichlorethylene.
The levels were several times higher than the new suggested standards of the time,
and so the state immediately closed down the wells.
It was just like a click in my mind. That's what it is.
I could never be convinced after that that nobody could convince me that the contamination in that water was not causing that problem.
The dumped barrels, it turned out, contained harmless materials, so the origin of the contaminants in the wells was a mystery.
But one obvious place to look was up on Woburn's locally notorious Industriplex development.
For a hundred years, the site of major chemical operations like Merrimack Chemical, Monsanto and Stauffer Chemical,
these 400 acres were lying derelict.
Now redevelopment was underway as the Massachusetts economic miracle created new high-technology industries.
Al Ballastieri from the Face Environment Group used to work here, and since he's retired, he's delved into Woburn's industrial history.
Woburn was also the center of the country's leather tanning industry.
Leather scraps were then boiled down into glue, and the leftovers are now here on Industriplex, inside these overgrown mounds.
With redevelopment, as the mounds were excavated, they released a gas which spread for miles, greatly upsetting Woburn's neighbors.
The Woburn odor, as it was called, brought in state officials.
And by 1979, Al was telling them about the site's history and about the possible presence of arsenic,
although back then he didn't know that this pit was full of it.
This is your arsenic or lead bit. You see this jug here?
This has poison on it, and it's made by the Swifton Company, but it's a Merrimack Chemical product.
And that's the byproduct that's left over that they couldn't use, I guess, and they just dumped it out here in a bed.
By the fall of 79, Charlie Ryan was on to the story, and the city was about to discover it had toxic waste dumps, as well as the Woburn odor and contaminated wells.
When we broke the story that first or second week in September, the city knew nothing about it, at least officially,
and the mayor's reaction, at least, was, you know, well, don't print anything, you're going to frighten people.
You know, we felt that it was more important that people be aware of what's going on up there.
Not that we disagreed with them, it wasn't going to frighten people, but people are entitled to know.
Soon after Charlie Ryan's arsenic story, the final element in Woburn's toxic problems fell into place at the Episcopal Church.
This is Anne Anderson's church.
She'd mentioned her suspicions about the water to the minister from the start, and while he was initially skeptical,
they together spent several years trying to establish just how much leukemia there was in Woburn and how much would normally be expected.
Anne Anderson and the minister, Bruce Young, had met with little cooperation from health officials,
and by the end of 1979 were ready to take matters into their own hands.
Frustration just reached the point where I said that there was only one thing to do that I knew of that we hadn't done already,
and that was to go public with it.
And with Anne's consent, in October of 79, I wrote a very small piece in the local newspaper
asking parents who had children with childhood leukemia to come to the church to a meeting.
He took the letter around to the newspaper where, as it happens, he saw Charlie Ryan and told him all about it.
Soon after the meeting, he and Anne Anderson plotted the leukemia cases on a map.
And with her calling out geographical quadrants and me putting a dot beside them,
it became obvious that one section of town, the section of town in which Anne lives, was coming up more often than other parts of town.
And so when all was said and done, we had 12 cases of leukemia documented, eight of which were within a half mile of her home.
The cases seemed to cluster in East Woburn, whereas the west of town was relatively clear.
Check your eyes, blood pressure, and work my way from town.
Kevin Kane is one of those East Woburn cases.
Today he's cured, and the physician responsible is John Truman of Massachusetts General Hospital.
Lymph nodes to see if they're enlarged.
He was Jimmy Anderson's doctor, too.
Indeed, noticing Woburn children in the waiting room here was one of the things which aroused Anne Anderson's suspicions.
Bruce Young immediately showed the leukemia cluster map to John Truman.
He literally grasped me by the shoulders and said, John, sit down here and look at this map, which I've drawn.
And sure enough, there he had a cluster of kids with leukemia, and it was very impressive.
For several years, Bruce and Anne had been telling me that this was the case, and I had not been alert enough to recognize the reality of it.
Meanwhile, Charlie Ryan had been pursuing the story with a contact at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and the result was a shock.
The publishing of that story set off an awful lot of shockwaves, and that suddenly changed the nature of the entire hazardous waste problem in Woburn
and lent a great deal of credence to Bruce and Anne's concern, question, suspicion that perhaps the water may have something to do with elevated rates of childhood leukemia.
Woburn wasn't alone. Toxic waste was on the nation's collective mind.
Love Canal had been evacuated. Woburn had cancer.
People realized that the environment isn't just the birds and the bees. It's public health, too.
Since the Love Canal has begun, my child has developed asthma, liver problem, kidney problems. What's going to happen in the next six months?
I love my son. I don't want to see him dead.
The city of Woburn has the dubious distinction of having more cancer than any other city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Within a year, citizens from Love Canal in Woburn had helped bring about the Superfund bill to clean up waste dumps.
In a half a mile radius, there have been eight children diagnosed with leukemia.
This area here, is that correct?
While there was general agreement that chemicals should not be allowed to pollute the environment, there was no political or scientific consensus, and still is none, on possible health effects.
To investigate Woburn's leukemia cluster, in early 1980, John Cutler came up to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from the Federal Centers for Disease Control after requests from both John Truman and the state.
We decided to do a case control study whereby we would interview the parents of the cases and interview parents of children of the same age and sex who were randomly chosen from school rosters to see if there were differences between those two groups.
The interviews were extensive. Lifestyles, diet, play habits, past illnesses, pregnancy histories, but the results were disappointing.
We found that, one, there was no thing in common for the leukemia children that made us suspect an environmental cause, and there was nothing different between the leukemia children and the control groups.
Industriplex was quickly ruled out. The children didn't go there, and its many pollutants seemed stable on the site. Wells G and H were simply an unknown.
At that time, there was very little information about how the water was distributed, so we were not able to make any conclusions about what the well water might have played in this particular outbreak.
It was a clear cut, black and white conclusion. The leukemia children had no known factor in common, therefore the studies showed nothing. It had been the standard approach, but Bruce Young had foreseen the results at an earlier meeting he had requested with health department officials.
When I did have the meeting, it was couched in terms that I could be of some assistance to the community if I would not bring the community to the point where they expected to get anything from this study.
Wasn't it obvious the cluster was significant? Unfortunately not. Clusters appear and disappear regularly across the country. Dozens have been investigated, and no cause has ever been found. They could be an effect of pure chance.
At the Arizona State Health Department, the Deputy Commissioner is the man who once supervised cluster investigations, including Woburn, for the Centers for Disease Control, Glenn Caldwell.
We have found very little over the years, and my feeling is most of the time we will not be able to pin a particular cause and effect event to a leukemia cluster.
And so I think the communities find that very dissatisfying. We do too, and it is one of the major frustrations of doing leukemia studies for the last 20 years.
It's hard to have much faith and confidence in any study that they themselves don't have faith and confidence. And going in, you know, we just didn't have a good feeling because of that, and we didn't expect to find anything because they didn't expect to find anything, and nothing was found.
Here in the Midwest, a rare case illustrates the essential evidence needed before environmentally-caused disease can really be pinned down. Evidence that usually is not available and was not in Woburn.
John Alstead is a victim of arsenic poisoning.
You feel that, John?
Yeah, I think I can feel something.
You think so? Just barely, huh?
Arsenic destroys nerve fibers, first affecting the extremities, known technically as a peripheral neuropathy.
John Alstead was fortunate that Dr. Ivers, the neurologist here, realized arsenic was involved before the next step, brain damage, had begun.
Keep getting stronger as it comes up?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Is it normal now?
I can feel you on my...
You can feel about the same. Okay.
John Alstead lives in Perham, Minnesota.
He was a foreman at Bob Hammer's Construction Company when they built their new headquarters here.
This is where we put the well down over here. This was done in 1971 when we built the complex.
We couldn't get city water at that time, so we had to put the well down.
This well is down approximately 31 feet. As you can see, I documented that well up here on the wall at that time.
Every day, Bob Hammer's employees, including brother-in-law John Alstead, took coolers filled with a clear, attractive groundwater out to their job sites.
My supervisors in the field were drinking this, and 10 minutes later they'd go back out in the woods and throw up.
And I was drinking it here in the shop and, you know, in our coffee, you know, and the same thing was happening to me.
And, of course, when you get the cramps, what do you do? You go get another drink of water.
In the end of May, I finally went to the doctor. I just couldn't take any longer.
And he said, go back home. You got the flu.
And this went on for another couple of weeks, and it didn't get any better.
I went back to him again. He said, well, you still got the flu, or something's wrong.
So he was sitting there talking, and I was telling him my feet were tingling and cold.
It felt like they were always like they were cold and halfway to sleep.
And he reached down and he pulled some hair on my lower part of my legs down here, and I didn't know he pulled them.
And then he called Fargo and he talked to Dr. Ivers, and within three days I was in St. Luke's Hospital.
And so it looked to me like he had a peripheral neuropathy.
And one of the type of things that we always are concerned about in this is some type of poisoning with heavy metals.
And we started finally pinpointing it down that I always had this water cooler, and I drank that same water every day, except for Saturdays and Sundays.
Mondays morning they usually felt pretty fair. By Monday afternoon I started getting sick again.
And this way, eliminations, that's the way we figured it out.
When he was given a chance to know what was going on and to start figuring out, he just gave me an excellent story.
He was an environmental epidemiologist in this situation.
Because arsenic persists in the body, samples from the victims could be run through the standard test for its presence.
And sure enough, this telltale pink color provided the confirmation.
The analysis of the well water told the same story, arsenic at 400 times the allowable level.
So where was it coming from?
In the 20s and 30s, throughout the Midwest, arsenic insecticide had been used to fight the great grasshopper plagues.
It turned out Bob Hammers had had the misfortune to sink his well right through the site of an old forgotten poison bait mixing station.
Recently the arsenic was dug out and trucked away, leaving the victims with one slim consolation.
At least they fully understand what happened.
They had known symptoms of arsenic poisoning.
There was arsenic present in the victims' bodies.
There were high levels of arsenic in the soil in well water.
And there was a solid link between the contaminated water and the affected people.
So it's not surprising that in Woburn, no link was established between the contaminated well water and leukemia.
The chemical contaminants do not persist in the body, making detection after the wells were closed impossible.
The water distribution pattern, and therefore possible contact with contaminated water, was not known.
And the cause of leukemia, in any case, is a mystery.
This is the Silressum chemical plant in Lowell, Massachusetts, before it was cleaned up in 1978.
Today the area has been covered over, but when it was in operation the plant released numerous chemicals into the air,
often the same kind as were found in Woburn's water.
Nearby residents were convinced these windblown poisons had somehow damaged their health,
and in 1983 there began a remarkable effort to investigate.
The study was to be based around a large-scale survey.
Since the analysis would be statistical, anything which might bias the results, like inaccurate residency lists, had to be minimized.
Statistical methods, quite different from the black-and-white approach of the Woburn investigation or of PERM, need special techniques.
If the person were convicted for a second drunk driving offense, how severe would the penalties be, generally speaking?
Very severe? Somewhat? A little? Or not at all?
Trained and impartial interviewers at the University of Massachusetts Center for Survey Research were to gather the data.
To ensure that correct procedures are used, the interviewer's techniques are constantly monitored by a supervisor.
The Silressum questionnaire, 38 pages long, asked a wide variety of questions about health, diet, family history, occupation, and so on.
People who could not be reached by phone were tracked down at home.
For reliable results in surveys, it's essential for response rates to be high.
And built into the survey were some key questions on what the subject believed.
This could be a crucial source of error called recall bias.
At Boston University Medical School, the designer of the study, David Ozenoff, explains.
If you live near a waste site and you have a headache, one of the first things you're likely to think of is it's that waste site again that's causing my headache.
You may be right about that. That may be very true.
The net result is that people who have that belief remember that they had a headache much better than somebody else for whom a headache is just another minor event in life.
Have you ever felt ill or had a health problem that you believe was caused by the air in your neighborhood?
No.
No? I'd like to begin with some questions.
By concentrating on those who believe that living near a waste site did not affect their health, Ozenoff could produce an unbiased conclusion.
Even people who thought that the air in their neighborhood around the waste site was perfectly fine, that it didn't make them sick, that it was great air to breathe,
and that when they got up in the morning, the best thing in the world for their health was to go out and take a deep breath of good old, low air.
Even those people had more health complaints, and they had health complaints in a very specific pattern.
The closer they were to the waste site, the more likely they were to complain of a very specific set of self-reported symptoms.
This comparative kind of result, more likely to have persistent colds or wheezing or heart palpitations, is essentially a statistical conclusion.
It's not black or white, like the Purim Arsenic Investigation or Woburn.
It's often the only way of dealing with complex toxic waste health studies, and the Harvard School of Public Health devised just such a study for Woburn with highly controversial results.
Ann Anderson was involved, although it was a terrible time for her, just after her son Jimmy died in 1981.
She and Bruce Young were invited to give one of a series of informal talks that the school arranges on unusual public health problems.
It happened that two experts in medical statistics were in the audience that day, Steve Legacos.
There was this sense of concern that all of their questions hadn't really been answered.
And Marvin Zellin.
And out of that meeting, we hatched what was commonly referred to as the Woburn study.
The idea was to turn Woburn from the usual mixture of parades, shops, families, life and death, into a community of numbers of health statistics.
If bad town water had in fact triggered childhood leukemia, then the Harvard researchers thought it surely must have caused other problems, which good statistics ought to be able to detect.
Zellin and Legacos decided to avoid the complication of adult disease, which can take years to develop,
and investigate, as well as leukemia, the outcomes of Woburn's pregnancies, everything from miscarriages to birth defects.
The problem was that a huge survey would be needed.
And here the researchers turned to Ann Anderson's FACE group for help.
FACE organized a team of 300 volunteers to administer a long-health questionnaire by phone to over 8,000 households.
The next task was to find the amount of water from wells G and H that each household had received through the city's pipe system.
The researchers combined city pumping records with an analysis done by state engineers to produce this map.
East Woburn received the highest proportion of G and H's contaminated water, reducing gradually to the west of town, which received none.
Ann Anderson lives in East Woburn, well inside the area that got most bad water.
The results, which came some three years later, were couched in the same, more likely to, statistical language as the Silresum study.
Nevertheless, the message was clear.
Marvin Zellin.
The results we found were that some of the congenital abnormalities and some childhood disorders were positively associated with access to water from wells G and H.
And essentially the more water residences had from these wells, the greater the risk of getting these particular adverse health events.
With regard to leukemia, again, children who had more access to the water were at higher risk.
In fact, what we found is that children with leukemia had twice as much water from the wells as one would expect from living in the town.
It's good and it's not good. It's the confirmation that you're looking for, but you don't really want it.
Because what's been difficult to live with becomes increasingly difficult to live with.
I mean, there you have Harvard telling you that it's all true, and you wish it wasn't. You don't want it to be true.
Many people didn't believe it was true.
There was a storm of criticism, notably from a senior Harvard colleague who has declined to be interviewed,
and from an expert panel commissioned by the American Industrial Health Council, a chemical industry group.
Nova provided a copy of the panel's review to the Harvard researchers, who then responded to the panel's chairman.
The chairman has since declined to be interviewed on the grounds she needs time to digest Harvard's response.
Nova asked Zelen and Lagakos to reply to the most frequent criticisms.
First, the survey was biased, either deliberately by the face volunteer interviewers
or by recall bias of respondents who believed that living near wells G and H caused problems.
The thinking might be that an interviewer who wanted to bias this study would over-report things in the East,
figuring that that's probably where the wells were pumping, and under-report things in the West.
Well, fortunately, for nine of the 23 years of the study period, the wells were not pumping in East Woburn.
So we were able to compare disease rates in East Woburn with those in West Woburn for those nine years
when there was no wells pumping, and there were no differences between East and West.
Now, if this bias occurred, it would have caused East to look worse than West.
A second criticism is that leukemia has continued.
There have been three new cases in Woburn in children conceived after the wells were closed.
But close examination shows all three cases live outside the area, whichever received any contaminated water.
East Woburn has no new cases so far.
To get a direct idea of whether the wells may or may not have been implicated,
it would make sense to look at disease rates in East Woburn.
It would make no sense, no more sense to look at West Woburn than it would be to look at another town.
And so far, there have been, amongst children born since 1980, based on the latest information we have,
there have been no new cases of leukemia.
That's only partially reassuring because there's been very little follow-up, and chronic effects you need to follow up longer.
So that evidence is consistent with what you would expect to see, it seems to me,
if the wells had been partially responsible.
The next criticism, perhaps the most fundamental,
is simply that the chemicals found in the water have never before been associated with childhood leukemia.
Although true, Harvard says it misses the point.
Marvin Zellin.
That an observational study, like what we conducted, cannot show cause and effect.
We can only show association.
And one way of viewing our results is it's in the same spirit as the lung cancer and cigarette smoking.
If you go back over the history, there was a strong association discovered between lung cancer and cigarette smoking.
And only many years later were they able to formulate scientific hypotheses and investigate them about cause and effect.
This is one of the country's main facilities where cause and effect are investigated.
It's the National Toxicology Program in North Carolina,
which recently reported new and controversial results relating to leukemia.
Here the effects of many different chemicals on laboratory animals are studied under rigorously controlled conditions.
There's chemical-free sterile bedding.
Ultra-clean water bottles.
High purity feed.
A typical study will expose a hundred animals by inhalation, injection, or feeding to a single chemical for two years,
during which the health of each individual animal is meticulously tracked.
As the study proceeds, organs like this liver from sample animals are examined.
After sectioning and staining, this sample reveals an obvious tumor.
By these methods, both tri- and tetrachloroethylene have been shown to cause cancer.
The effects of trichloroethylene in mice are that we do see tumors in the liver.
In rats with trichloroethylene, we have not seen any sort of tumorigenic response.
The tetrachloroethylene studies, again we saw liver tumors in mice, and we saw leukemias in the rats.
This new rat leukemia result has been criticized because the strain of laboratory animal used has a high natural rate anyway.
In general, the relevance of animal studies to people is often challenged, but for McConnell they serve a vital warning function.
Not all chemicals produce cancer in animals, as someone might suspect.
And in fact, of those chemicals that even we are suspicious of, less than half produce cancer in animals.
Therefore, if one does find a chemical that produces a carcinogenic response in animals,
I think one has to take that result seriously and suspect that it does have the potential of causing a toxic effect in people.
That might be disputed here at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, where leukemia clusters studies are based.
A leading staff toxicologist here, Renata Kimbrough, recently reviewed the results of studies of solvents like tri and tetrachloroethylene when used in industrial settings.
In many studies, nothing was really found.
And so, together with the fact that there are thousands of people that work in industry where these solvents are used,
and we haven't really been able to observe any effects, I'm wondering how significant the animal studies are.
Another concern is that levels of environmental contamination are usually much lower than industrial levels.
And the concentrations that have been measured in water have been 10 to 50,000 times less than what the workers are exposed to.
So there's a tremendous difference in the exposure, and we haven't really seen any very significant health effects in workers.
The truth is that we know very little, the scientific community knows very little, about the health effects of a combination of chemicals at low doses, perhaps protracted exposures.
The effects of those on humans, we just don't know.
We just don't believe that the trachloroethylene or tetrachloroethylene or whatever was in drinking water caused the leukemias.
And simply because these chemicals are everywhere in the environment, and there are areas in the United States that have much higher levels,
have had much higher levels for long periods of time, and we don't have any leukemia clusters.
Should it be so in one area and not in another? That to me just really doesn't make any sense.
I had a pathology professor who used to say, when you hear hoofbeats, you don't think of zebras.
And we're hearing hoofbeats up in Woburn, and all the explanations to account for it, as far as I'm concerned, are people who say maybe it's not horses but zebras.
Well, I think we know what the zebras are and what the horses are, and I think the horses are contamination of well water in that community.
At present, science cannot, with absolute certainty, either confirm or deny a connection between Woburn's leukemia and the contaminated wells.
But that's exactly the question that a trial jury will be asked to decide.
The Superfund Toxic Waste Cleanup Bill does not compensate those who believe their health has been damaged.
People must file a lawsuit for themselves, and in Woburn, one was filed in early 1982 by Ann Anderson and seven other families, among them Donna Robbins.
Donna lost her boy, Robbie, to leukemia in 1981 when he was nine.
There's a devastation, initially, being told that you've got a child with leukemia.
It's worse when they relapse, and then you know there's no hope of them really surviving it.
And, of course, you know, losing that child.
I don't know how to put it in words.
It's just a lot of pain.
You know, all the torture and everything that they go through, you know, the therapy and the sickness, the side effects.
There's just so much involved with it, you know, and you've got hope.
Going through that whole thing, you know, there's a little ray of hope that, well, maybe you'll be lucky and he'll survive it.
And when you defeat it in the end, it just makes you wonder what it's all about.
Life dealt harshly with Robbie. Before his leukemia was diagnosed in 1976, a hip operation had gone wrong, leading to a medical malpractice suit.
Donna's lawyer, in that case, spoke to other parents at meetings at Bruce Young's church.
The Woburn lawsuit is the result.
You could call it revenge in its own way, you know, but it wasn't necessary for our children to die.
Because of them being neglectful and dumping their waste in the backyard.
Downtown Boston on a Saturday morning.
At work is Jan Schlichtman, also a malpractice lawyer, who took over the plaintiff family's suit from the original attorney.
Since this is a contingency case, he stands to gain substantially if successful.
Woburn is the best known in a rapidly expanding new field, toxic tort cases.
These cases, unfortunately, are the laboratory.
Unfortunately, it's people who lived in East Woburn who were the rats and the mice.
And what happened to them and the injuries that they have are going to demonstrate that, in fact,
there is a connection between the chronic low-level exposure and very serious health problems.
The possible sources of contamination, as opposed to the health effects, is an easier question to pursue.
Work by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began in 1980 with the analysis of test wells, and it's continued since.
This well is being drilled down into the aquifer beneath the Aboriginal River, one of about 200 placed in the area so far.
An aquifer is actually a series of sand and gravel layers between the surface and the underlying bedrock.
Here they're about 100 feet thick.
The layers are saturated with groundwater, which are the supplies which wells G and H drew upon.
The groundwater flows roughly north to south in the same direction as the river, but much more slowly, about a foot a year.
The EPA found that both tri- and tetrachloroethylene were widespread in the groundwater, but the highest levels formed an obvious patch,
less than a mile long, surrounding wells G and H.
Potential sources were, upstream, the cryovac division of W.R. Grace and Unifirst, a contract uniform supplier.
Across the river was the Riley Tannery and an associated strip of woodland, both then owned by Beatrice Foods.
The plaintiff families did not just rely on the EPA.
There was also a friend of Al's who provided the information for a home-drawn description of the W.R. Grace site.
He told me they used tri-chloroethylene up there, and I knew it wasn't a very good material.
They used paint solvents, lacquer solvents, and they disposed of it out in the back area or on a dumping ground area.
The cryovac division of W.R. Grace makes vacuum packaging machinery for the food industry.
This is one of their products under test.
It's essentially a small metalworking operation which uses the usual cutting and cooling fluids and industrial solvents,
many containing tri- and tetrachloroethylene.
The company soon had to acknowledge what had been going on, as Bill Cheeseman, their lawyer, recounts.
Grace reported to EPA in 1982 that it had poured 10 to 15 drums of old paint and paint thinners and the like into a hole in back of the plant
that had been dug in connection with some construction activity.
These were the standard size, 55-gallon drums, although we don't know whether they were all full or partially full at the time.
Subsequently, a few months later, we learned after further investigation that a few actual drums may have been placed into a hole in that area,
and we arranged with EPA in 1983 to excavate those drums, and we did find six drums in the ground at that point.
Again, we can't tell from the remains of the drums whether they were empty. It appears that they may have been.
In addition, we reported to EPA in 1982 that occasional small amounts of old paint and paint thinners and the like
had been disposed of on the ground from time to time, perhaps as early as the early 1960s and from time to time for several years after that.
Engineers acting for GRACE, the plaintiff families, and the EPA cooperated to excavate the dump area at the back of the plant.
This videotape was shot by the plaintiffs for later use in court.
They found paint sludge from drums and solvent contamination in the soil.
Analysis of groundwater samples from the site have since shown trichloroethylene levels up to 6,000 parts per billion.
The government's proposed new drinking water standard is five parts per billion.
Across the river, the tannery and the nearby strip of woodland it owned were also investigated.
It was immediately clear that the woodland had been used as a dump site, although by whom and when is not yet known.
It was clear here also that the site was heavily contaminated.
Groundwater samples taken from these wells showed levels of trichloroethylene contamination on the order of 230,000 parts per billion.
Right at our feet, we took a soil sample from this sandy material from about 24 inches down.
The material was analyzed at the lab and came up with 54,000 parts per billion tetrachloroethylene and approximately 32,000 parts per billion trichloroethylene.
Lab analyses from well 78 taken just this spring showed levels of trichloroethylene in the groundwater of approximately 180,000 parts per billion.
Well G is within approximately 600 feet of this location.
For Universe, the picture is unclear.
Tetrachloroethylene used for dry cleaning was once stored here and the groundwater close to the site is contaminated with a solvent.
But where it came from and how much reach the wells is not yet known.
Company officials refused to comment and Universe has made a pretrial settlement with the plaintiffs for a reported $1 million.
Who is responsible for the contamination of the wells as opposed to their own sites will be pursued both in the trial and by the EPA.
This is Grace's position.
Our calculations suggest that the most that Grace could have been responsible for if its material has reached the wells at all is one or two percent of the total.
Exactly where the wells drew their water from was tested in late fall of 1985.
Here a reopened well H is drawing up water from the ground.
The waters then piped away and discharged outside the study area.
Both G and H are gradually run up to their former pumping levels supervised by government scientists.
Okay it's staying at about 400 gallon per minute.
All over the area underground water levels are recorded and they will be for the next 30 days as the pumping effect spreads throughout the aquifer.
Across the river test wells on the Tannery Woodland site were monitored too.
Although NOVA was not allowed on the site government sources later said that water levels here did show a response to pumping.
The test confirmed that wells G and H draw their water from upstream as expected.
Because water levels on the Woodland site showed in effect G and H could in theory draw from there as well.
But a full computer analysis must be completed before that's settled.
Up to a tenth of the nation's groundwater supplies may be contaminated so studies like these are becoming quite common.
Once work is completed the underground flow patterns in this aquifer will be understood and the sources of the contaminants will be reasonably clear.
That's in contrast to the medical side where the cause of the leukemia cluster is as yet unknown.
Because the Harvard study shows only statistical correlations not cause and effect that presents the plaintiffs with problems as their legal advisor Tony Reusman explains.
If cases had to depend upon epidemiologic studies like the Harvard ones in order to prevail first because of the cost there would be far fewer cases that could prevail.
And secondly I think in terms of the average juror listening to an epidemiologic study as the basis for causation they're going to be troubled by the fact that the author of the study is going to talk about correlations and not causation.
So they're busy searching for hard physical evidence which could link directly to the well contaminants.
Since trichloroethylene is a well-known cause of irregular heartbeats for example all the plaintiffs are undergoing tests to see if they show any.
And sophisticated blood analyses are being used to see if the plaintiffs immune systems show any direct effects.
Neither study is yet complete and no one knows if they will shed any light on perhaps the most important questions for the people of Woburn.
What caused the leukemia and is the threat over?
With leukemia still a mystery disease science cannot yet provide the answers but the law soon will because science and law have different standards Tony Reusman.
We are not attempting to prove to a scientific certainty causation scientists have a different theory of causation.
It's much closer to the criminal liability standard beyond any reasonable doubt.
Our job is to establish causation at a moment in time.
At this moment in time we ask the jury take the available information in front of you and answer the question what caused these injuries.
That's a more probable than not standard 51 percent is what's required.
And those are those kinds of judgments that scientists make are fine when the scientists are in their own sphere.
When we're in the legal realm where we need answers you can't tell the people of the country much less the people in Woburn.
We don't know to a scientific certainty beyond all reasonable doubt exactly what did this.
And another 50 years worth of exposures will produce enough bodies for us to be certain.
That's not an answer.
The law is more humane than that.
And the law says we've got to answer the question now.
Thank you.
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