When a high number of cancer cases struck the suburban community of Woburn, Massachusetts, the town mobilized to investigate why. The result was a landmark study of the effects of hazardous wastes. NOVA explores the legal and scientific implications of the link between environmental pollution and illness.
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00:00Jimmy Anderson was diagnosed with leukemia in 1972.
00:15When you live for years and years with a child that you're always consciously aware of,
00:25could die any time, life is never the same.
00:35Convinced that contaminated water caused her son's disease,
00:39Ann Anderson is suing nearby industries in a case on the forefront of science and the law.
00:45Now on NOVA, toxic trials.
00:48Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide.
00:59Additional funding was provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, supplying health care products worldwide.
01:08And by Allied Signal, a technology leader in aerospace, electronics, automotive products, and engineered materials.
01:21It could be any American town, but it's not.
01:42Because in Woburn, Massachusetts, some people say local industries have caused the deaths of children.
01:50All right, the first item on the agenda is the secretary's report.
01:54A meeting of the local environmental group, formed like so many across the country in response to concerns about toxic waste.
02:03This is face for a cleaner environment.
02:07It could be a typical group, some parents, some young people, some retired, like Al Ballesteri, whose knowledge of local industry comes in handy.
02:18Bruce Young, the Episcopal minister here. Ann Anderson, housewife, one of the founders.
02:24Okay, we have some guests tonight, so I'm not sure if everybody knows everybody else.
02:28There's a gentleman on the left over here, his name is...
02:31But tonight is unusual.
02:33Lisa Smith.
02:34Are you from Woburn?
02:36No, I'm from Dorchester.
02:38Dorchester, and you're here for?
02:40I work for the law firm of Foley, Hoag, and Elliott.
02:42Foley, Hoag, and Elliott?
02:44Correct.
02:45And what are they?
02:46They're in downtown Boston.
02:47And why would you be here?
02:48Because we're interested in what happens at the meeting.
02:51Why would that be of interest to Foley, Hoag, and who's the last guy?
02:54Elliott.
02:55Elliott. Why would that be of interest to them?
02:57Because we represent W.R. Grace.
03:00Oh, W.R. Grace.
03:02In fact, face is not typical.
03:05Some of its members, including Ann Anderson, have accused major corporations like W.R. Grace of causing the leukemia which struck their families.
03:14In the fall of 1985, with the trial just four months away, legal jostling was much in evidence.
03:20But the origin of the case goes back many years to the quiet East Woburn neighborhood where Ann Anderson lived with her family.
03:28In 1972, Jimmy Anderson, then age three, was diagnosed as having leukemia.
03:35Ann Anderson and her husband came face to face with probably the worst news that parents can hear.
03:43And 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.
03:55A child is your legacy that's supposed to outlive you.
04:00And so when you live for years and years with a child that you're always consciously aware of could die any time, life is never the same.
04:23As those years went by, Ann Anderson found her son was not alone.
04:28What 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.
04:41A young adult diagnosed with leukemia.
04:44And then across the pond and back was another child diagnosed.
04:48And down the street away across from the main street was another child diagnosed.
04:54And then a few streets over, another child was diagnosed.
04:57The very next street, another child was diagnosed.
05:00This was not a normal neighborhood.
05:02The specter that haunted Ann Anderson was that some hidden poison was destroying her neighborhood.
05:07Eventually, 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.
05:25From the beginning, it was the water supply where Ann Anderson thought the problem lay.
05:31In East Woburn, it corroded the pipes, often smelled bad and had a brown color.
05:36It was a well-known local annoyance.
05:42Until recently, Woburn's water was pumped entirely from underground in a series of deep wells like this one.
05:49The 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.
06:01The 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.
06:13Within the town's 13 square miles, there are two main areas of underground water supplies, or aquifers as they're called.
06:25The aquifer to the west supplied by 1960 six town wells and had reached its limit.
06:32So the town turned to the untapped Aberjona River aquifer to the east and drilled two new wells, G and H, alongside the river.
06:44This is well H, right beside the Aberjona River, here only a few feet wide but flowing above a huge reservoir of underground water.
06:55A few hundred feet away, tapping the same rich aquifer, is the other new well, well G.
07:02The new wells were installed in good time to handle Woburn's growing water needs, as Tom Mernon, city engineer, recalls.
07:14This here is well H, which is our furthest point, furthest most well in this field.
07:20Been here since 1967. Actually never went online until late 72.
07:29But wells G and H caused problems. The water in this aquifer is high in natural dissolved minerals.
07:36It met all the standards, but people didn't like it.
07:39We were getting spots, brown spots on your clothes, your linens were turning white, you know, turning brown.
07:45Your dishwashers would be brown, you know, literally turning brown.
07:50Aesthetically, it was good quality water at the time. It was fine, but it just didn't go over.
07:59Although the local newspaper would often field complaints about the water,
08:03Ann Anderson's concerns were not widely known for several years,
08:07until a remarkable chain of events took place, witnessed by an alert reporter here, Charlie Ryan.
08:14As you'd expect, Charlie Ryan covers everything from the school committee to local crime.
08:20But as an ex-well driller, he also happens to know about water supplies.
08:26In April of 1979, one of my responsibilities with the newspaper was to cover the police blotter over the weekend.
08:33And on that particular Sunday, when I went into the station and looked at the blotter,
08:38I saw mention of some midnight dumping of about 185 barrels.
08:43The barrels were spread out over the site, and some of them were near the river.
08:49Charlie Ryan was on the spot when state officials came out to take a look.
08:53He quickly told them that wells G and H weren't too far away.
08:57I mentioned that the river, the Abagona River here, flows by two of the city's drinking water wells,
09:02about a little less than a mile downstream.
09:05The state collected samples from G and H and sent them to their water pollution laboratory,
09:10which, by another chance, happened to be one of the first in the country to try out new equipment,
09:15which can identify low-level contamination by synthetic chemicals.
09:20A special analysis revealed five chemicals with high levels of the common industrial solvents tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene.
09:38The levels were several times higher than the new suggested standards of the time,
09:42and so the state immediately closed down the wells.
09:46It was just like a click in my mind. It was, that's what it is.
09:53I could never be convinced after that, that, nobody could convince me
09:58that the contamination in that water was not causing that problem.
10:03The dumped barrels, it turned out, contained harmless materials,
10:07so the origin of the contaminants in the wells was a mystery.
10:11But one obvious place to look was up on Woburn's locally notorious IndustriPlex development.
10:18For a hundred years, the site of major chemical operations,
10:21like Merrimack Chemical, Monsanto, and Stauffer Chemical,
10:25these 400 acres were lying derelict.
10:28Now, redevelopment was underway as the Massachusetts economic miracle created new high-technology industries.
10:36Al Ballestieri from the Face Environment Group used to work here,
10:40and since he's retired, he's delved into Woburn's industrial history.
10:46Woburn was also the center of the country's leather tanning industry.
10:50Leather scraps were then boiled down into glue,
10:52and the leftovers are now here on IndustriPlex inside these overgrown mounds.
10:58With redevelopment, as the mounds were excavated,
11:01With redevelopment, as the mounds were excavated,
11:03they released a gas which spread for miles, greatly upsetting Woburn's neighbors.
11:08The Woburn odor, as it was called, brought in state officials,
11:12and by 1979, Al was telling them about the site's history
11:16and about the possible presence of arsenic,
11:18although back then he didn't know that this pit was full of it.
11:22This is your arsenic or lead pit.
11:24You see this jug here?
11:26This has poison on it, and it's made by Father Swift & Company,
11:30but it's a Merrimack chemical product,
11:33and that's the byproduct that's left over.
11:35They couldn't use it, I guess, and they just dumped it out here on a bed.
11:39By the fall of 1979, Charlie Ryan was on to the story,
11:43and the city was about to discover it had toxic waste dumps
11:47as well as the Woburn odor and contaminated wells.
11:50When we broke the story that first or second week in September,
11:54the city knew nothing about it, at least officially,
11:57and the mayor's reaction, at least, was, you know,
12:01well, don't print anything. You're going to frighten people.
12:04And, you know, we felt that it was more important
12:07that people be aware of what's going on up there.
12:09Not that we disagreed with them it wasn't going to frighten people,
12:12but people are entitled to know.
12:14Soon after Charlie Ryan's arsenic story,
12:17the final element in Woburn's toxic problems fell into place
12:21at the Episcopal Church.
12:23This is Anne Anderson's church.
12:30She'd mentioned her suspicions about the water to the minister from the start,
12:34and while he was initially skeptical,
12:36they together spent several years trying to establish
12:39just how much leukemia there was in Woburn
12:42and how much would normally be expected.
12:44Anne Anderson and the minister, Bruce Young,
12:50had met with little cooperation from health officials
12:53and by the end of 1979 were ready to take matters into their own hands.
13:01Frustration just reached the point where I said
13:04that there was only one thing to do that I knew of
13:06that we hadn't done already, and that was to go public with it.
13:10And with Anne's consent, in October of 79,
13:14I wrote a very small piece in the local newspaper
13:18asking parents who had children with childhood leukemia
13:22to come to the church to a meeting.
13:26He took the letter around to the newspaper,
13:28where, as it happens, he saw Charlie Ryan and told him all about it.
13:32Soon after the meeting, he and Anne Anderson plotted the leukemia cases on a map.
13:37And with her calling out geographical quadrants
13:42and me putting a dot beside them,
13:46it became obvious that one section of town,
13:50the section of town in which Anne lives,
13:52was coming up more often than other parts of town.
13:57And so when all was said and done,
14:00we had 12 cases of leukemia documented,
14:048 of which were within a half mile of her home.
14:08The cases seemed to cluster in East Woburn,
14:11whereas the west of town was relatively clear.
14:14Check your eyes, blood pressure, and work my way from top to bottom.
14:18Kevin Kane is one of those East Woburn cases.
14:21Today, he's cured, and the physician responsible
14:23is John Truman of Massachusetts General Hospital.
14:27Lymph nodes to see if they're enlarged.
14:31He was Jimmy Anderson's doctor, too.
14:33Indeed, noticing Woburn children in the waiting room here
14:36was one of the things which aroused Anne Anderson's suspicions.
14:40Bruce Young immediately showed the leukemia cluster map to John Truman.
14:46He literally grasped me by the shoulders and said,
14:49John, sit down here and look at this map which I've drawn.
14:53And sure enough, there he had a cluster of kids with leukemia.
14:59And it was very impressive.
15:02For several years, Bruce and Anne had been telling me that this was the case,
15:07and I had not been alert enough to recognize the reality of it.
15:14Meanwhile, Charlie Ryan had been pursuing the story
15:17with a contact at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health,
15:21and the result was a shock.
15:24The publishing of that story set off an awful lot of shockwaves,
15:29and that suddenly changed the nature of the entire hazardous waste problem in Woburn
15:34and lent a great deal of credence to Bruce and Anne's concern, question, suspicion
15:41that perhaps the water may have something to do with elevated rates of childhood leukemia.
15:47Woburn wasn't alone.
15:49Toxic waste was on the nation's collective mind.
15:54Love Canal had been evacuated.
15:56Woburn had cancer.
15:58People realized that the environment isn't just the birds and the bees.
16:03Since the Love Canal has begun, my child has developed asthma, liver problems, kidney problems.
16:11What's going to happen in the next six months?
16:13I love my son.
16:15I don't want to see him dead.
16:17The city of Woburn has the dubious distinction of having more cancer
16:23than any other city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
16:26Within a year, citizens from Love Canal and Woburn
16:29had helped bring about the Superfund bill to clean up waste dumps.
16:33In a half a mile radius, there have been eight children diagnosed with leukemia.
16:39This area here, is that correct?
16:41While there was general agreement that chemicals should not be allowed to pollute the environment,
16:46there was no political or scientific consensus, and still is none, on possible health effects.
16:53To investigate Woburn's leukemia cluster, in early 1980,
16:57John Cutler came up to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health
17:01from the Federal Centers for Disease Control,
17:03after requests from both John Truman and the state.
17:07We decided to do a case control study whereby we would interview the parents of the cases,
17:13and interview parents of children of the same age and sex
17:17who were randomly chosen from school rosters
17:20to see if there were differences between those two groups.
17:23The interviews were extensive.
17:26Lifestyles, diet, play habits, past illnesses, pregnancy histories.
17:31But the results were disappointing.
17:33We found that, one, there was no thing in common for the leukemia children
17:39that made us suspect an environmental cause,
17:44and there was nothing different between the leukemia children and the control groups.
17:50Industriplex was quickly ruled out.
17:53The children didn't go there, and its many pollutants seemed stable on the site.
17:58Wells G and H were simply an unknown.
18:01At that time, there was very little information about how the water was distributed,
18:06so we were not able to make any conclusions about what the well water
18:11might have played in this particular outbreak.
18:15It was a clear-cut black-and-white conclusion.
18:18The leukemia children had no known factor in common.
18:21Therefore, the study showed nothing.
18:24It had been the standard approach, but Bruce Young had foreseen the results
18:28at an earlier meeting he had requested with health department officials.
18:32When I did have the meeting, it was couched in terms that
18:38I could be of some assistance to the community if I would not bring the community
18:45to the point where they expected to get anything from this study.
18:49Wasn't it obvious the cluster was significant?
18:52Unfortunately not.
18:54Clusters appear and disappear regularly across the country.
18:58Dozens have been investigated and no cause has ever been found.
19:02They could be an effect of pure chance.
19:06At the Arizona State Health Department, the deputy commissioner is the man
19:10who once supervised cluster investigations, including Woburn,
19:14for the Centers for Disease Control, Glyn Caldwell.
19:18We have found very little over the years, and my feeling is most of the time
19:23we will not be able to pin a particular cause and effect event to a leukemia cluster.
19:31And so I think the communities find that very dissatisfying.
19:35We do too, and it is one of the major frustrations
19:38of doing leukemia studies for the last 20 years.
19:41It's hard to have much faith and confidence in any study
19:44that they themselves don't have faith and confidence in.
19:47And going in, you know, we just didn't have a good feeling because of that,
19:51and we didn't expect to find anything because they didn't expect to find anything,
19:55and nothing was found.
19:57Here in the Midwest, a rare case illustrates the essential evidence needed
20:02before environmentally caused disease can really be pinned down.
20:06Evidence that usually is not available and was not in Woburn.
20:11John Allstead is a victim of arsenic poisoning.
20:17You feel that, John?
20:21Yeah, I think I can feel some movement.
20:23You think so? Just barely, huh? Okay.
20:25Arsenic destroys nerve fibers, first affecting the extremities,
20:30known technically as a peripheral neuropathy.
20:33John Allstead was fortunate that Dr. Ivers, the neurologist here,
20:37realized arsenic was involved before the next step, brain damage, had begun.
20:42Does it keep getting stronger as it comes up?
20:44Mm-hmm.
20:45Okay.
20:46Is it normal now?
20:48I can feel you on my...
20:50You can feel about the same. Okay.
20:52John Allstead lives in Purim, Minnesota.
20:55He was a foreman at Bob Hammer's construction company
20:58when they built their new headquarters here.
21:00This is where we put the well down over here.
21:03This was done in 1971 when we built the complex.
21:09We couldn't get city water at that time, so we had to put the well down.
21:12This well is down approximately 31 feet.
21:15As you can see, I documented that well up here on the wall at that time.
21:19Every day, Bob Hammer's employees, including brother-in-law John Allstead,
21:24took coolers filled with a clear, attractive groundwater out to their job sites.
21:31My supervisors in the field were drinking this,
21:35and 10 minutes later, they'd go back out in the woods and throw up.
21:39And I was drinking it here in the shop and, you know, in our coffee.
21:44And the same thing was happening to me.
21:46And, of course, when you get the cramps, what do you do?
21:50You go get another drink of water.
21:52At the end of May, I finally went to the doctor.
21:54I just couldn't take it any longer.
21:56And he said, Go back home. You got the flu.
21:58And this went on for another couple of weeks, and it didn't get any better.
22:03I went back to him again. He said, Well, you still got the flu, or something's wrong.
22:07So he was sitting there talking, and I was telling him my feet were tingling and cold.
22:12It felt like they were always like they were cold and halfway to sleep.
22:15And he reached down, and he pulled some hair on the lower part of my legs down here,
22:19and I didn't know he pulled them.
22:21And then he called Fargo, and he talked to Dr. Ivers,
22:24and within three days, I was in St. Luke's Hospital.
22:27So it looked to me like he had a peripheral neuropathy,
22:30and one of the type of things that we always are concerned about in this
22:35is some type of a poisoning with heavy metals.
22:37Then we started finally pinpointing it down that I always had this water cooler,
22:42and I drank that same water every day except for Saturdays and Sundays.
22:46Mondays mornings, I usually felt pretty fair.
22:49By Monday afternoon, I started getting sick again.
22:51And just by eliminations, that's the way we figured it out.
22:55When he was given a chance to know what was going on and to start figuring it out,
22:58he just gave me an excellent story.
23:01So he was an environmental epidemiologist in this situation.
23:11Because arsenic persists in the body,
23:14samples from the victims could be run through the standard test for its presence.
23:22And sure enough, this telltale pink color provided the confirmation.
23:27Analysis of the well water told the same story.
23:30Arsenic at 400 times the allowable level.
23:33So where was it coming from?
23:36In the 20s and 30s, throughout the Midwest,
23:39arsenic insecticide had been used to fight the great grasshopper plagues.
23:43It turned out Bob Hammers had had the misfortune to sink his well
23:47right through the site of an old forgotten poison bait mixing station.
23:54Recently, the arsenic was dug out and trucked away,
23:57leaving the victims with one slim consolation.
24:00At least they fully understand what happened.
24:03They had known symptoms of arsenic poisoning.
24:08There was arsenic present in the victims' bodies.
24:14There were high levels of arsenic in the soil and well water.
24:19And there was a solid link between the contaminated water and the affected people.
24:27So it's not surprising that in Woburn,
24:30no link was established between the contaminated well water and leukemia.
24:36The chemical contaminants do not persist in the body,
24:39making detection after the wells were closed impossible.
24:43The water distribution pattern,
24:45and therefore possible contact with contaminated water, was not known.
24:51And the cause of leukemia, in any case, is a mystery.
24:58This is the Silressum chemical plant in Lowell, Massachusetts,
25:02before it was cleaned up in 1978.
25:05Today, the area has been covered over.
25:08But when it was in operation, the plant released numerous chemicals into the air,
25:12often the same kind as were found in Woburn's water.
25:17Nearby residents were convinced these wind-blown poisons had somehow damaged their health,
25:22and in 1983 there began a remarkable effort to investigate.
25:28The study was to be based around a large-scale survey.
25:31Since the analysis would be statistical,
25:34anything which might bias the results, like inaccurate residency lists, had to be minimized.
25:40Statistical methods, quite different from the black-and-white approach of the Woburn investigation,
25:45or of PIRM, need special techniques.
25:48If the person were convicted for a second drunk-driving offense,
25:54how severe would the penalties be, generally speaking?
25:58Very severe? Somewhat? A little? Or not at all?
26:01Trained and impartial interviewers at the University of Massachusetts Center for Survey Research
26:06were to gather the data.
26:09To ensure that correct procedures are used,
26:12the interviewers' techniques are constantly monitored by a supervisor.
26:17The SILRESM questionnaire, 38 pages long, asked a wide variety of questions
26:23about health, diet, family history, occupation, and so on.
26:28No.
26:29Have you ever had a job which exposed you to pesticides or herbicides?
26:33No.
26:34How about the things that irritate your eyes or nose?
26:37No.
26:40People who could not be reached by phone were tracked down at home.
26:43For reliable results in surveys, it's essential for response rates to be high.
26:50And built into the survey were some key questions on what the subject believed.
26:54Have you ever had a health problem that you believe was caused by the air in your neighborhood?
27:03It gives you a sicky feeling, yes.
27:06This could be a crucial source of error called recall bias.
27:10At Boston University Medical School, the designer of the study, David Ozanoff, explains.
27:15If you live near a waste site and you have a headache,
27:18one of the first things you're likely to think of is,
27:21it's that waste site again that's causing my headache.
27:24You may be right about that. That may be very true.
27:27The net result is that people who have that belief
27:32remember that they had a headache much better than somebody else
27:35for whom a headache is just another minor event in life.
27:38Have you ever felt ill or had a health problem
27:42that you believe was caused by the air in your neighborhood?
27:45No.
27:46No?
27:47I'd like to begin with some questions.
27:48By concentrating on those who believe that living near a waste site did not affect their health,
27:53Ozanoff could produce an unbiased conclusion.
27:57Okay.
27:58Even people who thought that the air in their neighborhood around the waste site was perfectly fine,
28:02that it didn't make them sick, and that it was great air to breathe,
28:05and that when they got up in the morning,
28:07the best thing in the world for their health was to go out and take a deep breath of good old Lowell air,
28:12even those people had more health complaints.
28:15And they had health complaints in a very specific pattern.
28:18The closer they were to the waste site,
28:20the more likely they were to complain of a very specific set of self-reported symptoms.
28:26This comparative kind of result,
28:29more likely to have persistent colds or wheezing or heart palpitations,
28:33is essentially a statistical conclusion.
28:36It's not black or white, like the Purim arsenic investigation or Woburn.
28:41It's often the only way of dealing with complex toxic waste health studies,
28:46and the Harvard School of Public Health devised just such a study for Woburn
28:50with highly controversial results.
28:53Ann Anderson was involved,
28:56although it was a terrible time for her,
28:58just after her son Jimmy died in 1981.
29:02She and Bruce Young were invited to give one of a series of informal talks
29:06that the school arranges on unusual public health problems.
29:11It happened that two experts in medical statistics were in the audience that day,
29:15Steve Lagakos.
29:17There was this sense of concern
29:21that all of their questions hadn't really been answered.
29:25And Marvin Zelen.
29:26And out of that meeting,
29:29we hatched what was commonly referred to as the Woburn study.
29:37The idea was to turn Woburn from the usual mixture of parades,
29:41shops, families, life and death,
29:44into a community of numbers, of health statistics.
29:48If bad town water had in fact triggered childhood leukemia,
29:51then the Harvard researchers thought,
29:54it surely must have caused other problems,
29:56which good statistics ought to be able to detect.
30:00Zelen and Lagakos decided to avoid the complication of adult disease,
30:05which can take years to develop,
30:07and investigate, as well as leukemia,
30:10the outcomes of Woburn's pregnancies,
30:12everything from miscarriages to birth defects.
30:18The problem was that a huge survey would be needed.
30:22And here the researchers turned to Ann Anderson's FACE group for help.
30:27FACE organized a team of 300 volunteers
30:30to administer a long health questionnaire by phone to over 8,000 households.
30:36The next task was to find the amount of water from wells G and H
30:40that each household had received through the city's pipe system.
30:43The researchers combined city pumping records
30:46with an analysis done by state engineers to produce this map.
30:52East Woburn received the highest proportion of G and H's contaminated water,
30:57reducing gradually to the west of town,
30:59which received none.
31:02Ann Anderson lives in East Woburn,
31:04well inside the area that got most bad water.
31:08The results, which came some three years later,
31:11were couched in the same more likely-to statistical language as the SILRESM study.
31:16Nevertheless, the message was clear.
31:19Marvin Zelen.
31:20The results we found were that some of the congenital abnormalities
31:24and some childhood disorders were positively associated
31:29with access to water from wells G and H.
31:33And essentially, the more water residences had from these wells,
31:41the greater the risk of getting these particular adverse health events.
31:47With regard to leukemia, again,
31:51children who had more access to the water were at higher risk.
31:57In fact, what we found is that children with leukemia
32:01had twice as much water from the wells as one would expect from living in the town.
32:07It's good and it's not good.
32:09It's the confirmation that you're looking for, but you don't really want it
32:13because what's been difficult to live with
32:16becomes increasingly difficult to live with.
32:19You have Harvard telling you that it's all true,
32:23and you wish it wasn't.
32:25You don't want it to be true.
32:27Many people didn't believe it was true.
32:30There was a storm of criticism, notably from a senior Harvard colleague
32:34who has declined to be interviewed,
32:36and from an expert panel commissioned by the American Industrial Health Council,
32:40a chemical industry group.
32:42NOVA provided a copy of the panel's review to the Harvard researchers,
32:46who then responded to the panel's chairman.
32:49The chairman has since declined to be interviewed
32:51on the ground she needs time to digest Harvard's response.
32:55NOVA asked Zelen and Lagakos to reply to the most frequent criticisms.
33:01First, the survey was biased,
33:03either deliberately by the face-volunteer interviewers
33:06or by recall bias of respondents who believed
33:09that living near wells G and H caused problems.
33:14The thinking might be that an interviewer who wanted to bias this study
33:18would over-report things in the east,
33:20figuring that that's probably where the wells were pumping,
33:22and under-report things in the west.
33:24Well, fortunately, for nine of the 23 years of the study period,
33:31the wells were not pumping in east Woburn.
33:33So we were able to compare disease rates in east Woburn
33:37with those in west Woburn for those nine years
33:40when there was no wells pumping,
33:42and there were no differences between east and west.
33:45Now, if this bias occurred, it would have caused east to look worse than west.
33:50A second criticism is that leukemia has continued.
33:54There have been three new cases in Woburn
33:56in children conceived after the wells were closed.
33:59But close examination shows all three cases live outside the area
34:04whichever received any contaminated water.
34:08East Woburn has no new cases so far.
34:13To get a direct idea of whether the wells may or may not have been implicated,
34:18it would make sense to look at disease rates in east Woburn.
34:22It would make no sense, no more sense to look at west Woburn
34:25than it would be to look at another town.
34:27And so far, there have been, amongst children born since 1980,
34:31based on the latest information we have,
34:33there have been no new cases of leukemia.
34:35That's only partially reassuring
34:37because there's been very little follow-up,
34:39and chronic effects you need to follow up longer.
34:42So that evidence is consistent with what you would expect to see,
34:46it seems to me, if the wells had been partially responsible.
34:51The next criticism, perhaps the most fundamental,
34:54is simply that the chemicals found in the water
34:56have never before been associated with childhood leukemia.
35:00Although true, Harvard says it misses the point.
35:04Marvin Zellin.
35:07That an observational study, like what we conducted,
35:12cannot show cause and effect.
35:15We can only show association.
35:18And one way of viewing our results
35:21is it's in the same spirit as the lung cancer and cigarette smoking.
35:26If you go back over the history,
35:29there was a strong association discovered
35:32between lung cancer and cigarette smoking,
35:36and only many years later were they able
35:40to formulate scientific hypotheses
35:44and investigate them about cause and effect.
35:48This is one of the country's main facilities
35:51where cause and effect are investigated.
35:54It's the National Toxicology Program in North Carolina,
35:57which recently reported new and controversial results
36:00relating to leukemia.
36:03Here the effects of many different chemicals on laboratory animals
36:07are studied under rigorously controlled conditions.
36:15There's chemical-free sterile bedding,
36:21ultra-clean water bottles,
36:25high-purity feed.
36:29A typical study will expose a hundred animals
36:32by inhalation, injection, or feeding
36:35to a single chemical for two years,
36:38during which the health of each individual animal
36:41is meticulously tracked.
36:46As the study proceeds,
36:49organs like this liver from sample animals are examined.
36:55After sectioning and staining,
36:58this sample reveals an obvious tumor.
37:01By these methods, both trichloroethylene
37:04and tetrachloroethylene have been shown to cause cancer.
37:08Director of Testing, Gene McConnell.
37:11The effects of trichloroethylene in mice
37:14are that we do see tumors in the liver.
37:17The liver is a very important organ
37:21In mice, we do see tumors in the liver.
37:24In rats, with trichloroethylene,
37:27we have not seen any sort of tumorogenic response.
37:30The tetrachloroethylene studies, again,
37:33we saw liver tumors in mice,
37:36and we saw leukemias in the rats.
37:40This new rat leukemia result has been criticized
37:43because the strain of laboratory animal used
37:46has a high natural rate anyway.
37:49In general, the relevance of animal studies to people
37:52is often challenged, but for McConnell,
37:55they serve a vital warning function.
37:58Not all chemicals produce cancer in animals,
38:01as someone might suspect, and in fact,
38:04of those chemicals that even we are suspicious of,
38:07less than half produce cancer in animals.
38:10Therefore, if one does find a chemical
38:13that produces a carcinogenic response in animals,
38:17I think one has to take that result seriously
38:20and suspect that it does have the potential
38:23of causing a toxic effect in people.
38:29That might be disputed here at the U.S. Centers
38:32for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia,
38:35where leukemia clusters studies are based.
38:38A leading staff toxicologist here, Renata Kimbrough,
38:41recently reviewed the results of studies of solvents
38:45like tri- and tetrachloroethylene
38:48when used in industrial settings.
38:51In many studies, nothing was really found,
38:54and so together with the fact
38:57that there are thousands of people
39:00that work in industry
39:03where these solvents are used
39:06and we haven't really been able
39:09to observe any effects,
39:12I am wondering how significant the animal studies are.
39:17Another concern is that levels of environmental contamination
39:20are usually much lower than industrial levels.
39:25And the concentrations that have been measured in water
39:28have been 10,000 to 50,000 times less
39:33than what the workers are exposed to.
39:36So there's a tremendous difference in the exposure,
39:39and we haven't really seen
39:42any very significant health effects in workers.
39:47The truth is that we know very little,
39:50the scientific community knows very little,
39:53about the health effects of a combination of chemicals
40:00at low doses, perhaps protracted exposures.
40:03The effects of those on humans, we just don't know.
40:07I just don't believe that the trichloroethylenes
40:10or tetrachloroethylenes or whatever was in drinking water
40:13caused the leukemias.
40:16And simply because these chemicals
40:19are everywhere in the environment,
40:22and there are areas in the United States
40:25that have had much higher levels
40:28for long periods of time,
40:31and we don't have any leukemia clusters.
40:34So in one area and not in another,
40:37that to me just really doesn't make any sense.
40:40I had a pathology professor who used to say,
40:43when you hear hoofbeats, you don't think of zebras.
40:46And we're hearing hoofbeats up in Woburn,
40:49and all the explanations to account for it, as far as I'm concerned,
40:52are people who say maybe it's not horses but zebras.
40:55Well, I think we know what the zebras are and what the horses are,
40:58and I think the horses are contamination of well water in that community.
41:02At present, science cannot, with absolute certainty,
41:05either confirm or deny a connection
41:08between Woburn's leukemia and the contaminated wells.
41:11But that's exactly the question
41:14that a trial jury will be asked to decide.
41:17The Superfund Toxic Waste Cleanup Bill
41:20does not compensate those who believe their health has been damaged.
41:23People must file a lawsuit for themselves,
41:26and in Woburn, one was filed in early 1982
41:30by Ann Anderson and 7 other families,
41:33among them Donna Robbins.
41:36Donna lost her boy Robbie to leukemia in 1981 when he was 9.
41:42There's a devastation, initially,
41:47being told that you've got a child with leukemia.
41:50It's worse when they relapse,
41:53and then you know there's no hope of them really surviving it.
41:57And, of course, you know, losing that child...
42:08I don't know how to put it in words.
42:11It's just a lot of pain.
42:16You know, all the torture and everything that they go through,
42:19you know, the therapy and the sickness,
42:22the side effects,
42:26there's just so much involved with it, you know,
42:29and you've got hope.
42:33Going through that whole thing, you know,
42:36there's a little ray of hope that, well,
42:39maybe you'll be lucky and he'll survive it.
42:42And when you defeat it in the end,
42:45it just makes you wonder what it's all about.
42:49Life dealt harshly with Robbie.
42:52Before his leukemia was diagnosed in 1976,
42:55a hip operation had gone wrong,
42:58leading to a medical malpractice suit.
43:01Donna's lawyer in that case
43:04spoke to other parents at meetings at Bruce Young's church.
43:07The Woburn lawsuit is the result.
43:10You could call it revenge in its own way, you know.
43:13But it's...
43:16It wasn't necessary for our children to die
43:19because of them being neglectful
43:22and dumping their...
43:26waste in the backyard.
43:33Downtown Boston on a Saturday morning.
43:36At work is Jan Schlichtman, also a malpractice lawyer,
43:39who took over the plaintiff family's suit
43:42from the original attorney.
43:45Since this is a contingency case,
43:48he stands to gain substantially if successful.
43:51Woburn is the best known in a rapidly expanding new field,
43:54toxic tort cases.
43:57These cases, unfortunately,
44:00are the laboratory.
44:03Unfortunately, it's people who lived in East Woburn
44:06who were the rats and the mice.
44:09And what happened to them and the injuries that they have
44:13are going to demonstrate that, in fact, there is a connection
44:16between the chronic low-level exposure
44:19and very serious health problems.
44:22The possible sources of contamination,
44:25as opposed to the health effects,
44:28is an easier question to pursue.
44:31Work by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
44:34began in 1980 with the analysis of test wells
44:37and it's continued since.
44:40Tests are carried on into the aquifer
44:43beneath the Aberjona River,
44:46one of about 200 placed in the area so far.
44:56An aquifer is actually a series of sand and gravel layers
44:59between the surface and the underlying bedrock.
45:02Here they're about 100 feet thick.
45:10They're associated with groundwater,
45:13which are the supplies which wells G and H drew upon.
45:16The groundwater flows roughly north to south
45:19in the same direction as the river,
45:22but much more slowly, about a foot a year.
45:25The EPA found that both tri- and tetrachloroethylene
45:28were widespread in the groundwater,
45:31but the highest levels formed an obvious patch
45:34less than a mile long surrounding wells G and H.
45:38Upstream, the cryovac division of W.R. Grace and Unifirst,
45:41a contract uniform supplier.
45:44Across the river was the Riley Tannery
45:47and an associated strip of woodland,
45:50both then owned by Beatrice Foods.
45:53The plaintiff families did not just rely on the EPA.
45:56There was also a friend of Al's
45:59who provided the information for a home-drawn description
46:02of the W.R. Grace site.
46:07He told me they used trichloroethylene up there
46:10and I knew it wasn't a very good material.
46:13They used paint solvents, lacquer solvents,
46:16and they disposed of it out in the back area
46:19on a dumping ground area.
46:24The cryovac division of W.R. Grace
46:27makes vacuum packaging machinery for the food industry.
46:32This is one of their products under test.
46:37It's essentially a small metalworking operation
46:40which uses the usual cutting and cooling fluids
46:43and industrial solvents,
46:46many containing tri- and tetrachloroethylene.
46:49The company soon had to acknowledge what had been going on,
46:52as Bill Cheeseman, their lawyer, recounts.
46:55Grace reported to EPA in 1982
46:58that it had poured
47:0110 to 15 drums of old paint
47:04and paint thinners and the like
47:07into a hole in back of the plant
47:10that had been dug in connection with some construction activity.
47:13These were the standard size 55-gallon drums,
47:16although we don't know whether they were all full
47:19or partially full at the time.
47:22Subsequently, a few months later,
47:25we learned after further investigation
47:28that a few actual drums may have been placed
47:31into a hole in that area,
47:34and we arranged with EPA in 1983
47:37to excavate those drums,
47:40and we did find six drums in the ground at that point.
47:43Again, we can't tell from the remains of the drums
47:46whether they were empty.
47:49It appears that they may have been.
47:52In addition, we reported to EPA in 1982
47:55that occasional small amounts of old paint
47:58and paint thinners and the like
48:01had been disposed of on the ground from time to time,
48:04perhaps as early as the early 1960s
48:07and from time to time for several years after that.
48:12Engineers acting for Grace,
48:15the plaintiff families, and the EPA
48:18cooperated to excavate the dump area at the back of the plant.
48:22This videotape was shot by the plaintiffs
48:25after use in court.
48:36They found paint sludge from drums
48:39and solvent contamination in the soil.
48:42Analysis of groundwater samples from the site
48:45have since shown trichloroethylene levels
48:48up to 6,000 parts per billion.
48:51The government's proposed new drinking water standard
48:54has been approved.
49:05Across the river, the tannery
49:08and the nearby strip of woodland it owned
49:11were also investigated.
49:16It was immediately clear
49:19that the woodland had been used as a dump site,
49:22but the exact location is not yet known.
49:25It was clear here also that the site was heavily contaminated.
49:31Groundwater samples taken from these wells
49:34showed levels of trichloroethylene contamination
49:37on the order of 230,000 parts per billion.
49:41Right at our feet,
49:44we took a soil sample
49:47from this sandy material
49:50and 24 inches down,
49:53the material was analyzed at the lab
49:56and came up with 54,000 parts per billion
49:59tetrachloroethylene
50:02and approximately 32,000 parts per billion trichloroethylene.
50:05Lab analyses from Well 78
50:08taken just this spring
50:11showed levels of trichloroethylene
50:14in the groundwater
50:17at 280,000 parts per billion.
50:20Well G is within approximately 600 feet
50:23of this location.
50:26For Unifirst, the picture is unclear.
50:29Tetrachloroethylene used for dry cleaning
50:32was once stored here,
50:35and the groundwater close to the site
50:38is contaminated with the solvent.
50:41But where it came from and how much reached the wells
50:44was a trial settlement with the plaintiffs
50:47for a reported $1 million.
50:50Who is responsible for the contamination of the wells,
50:53as opposed to their own sites,
50:56will be pursued both in the trial and by the EPA.
50:59This is Grace's position.
51:02Our calculations suggest that the most that Grace
51:05could have been responsible for,
51:08if its material has reached the wells at all,
51:11The site where the wells drew their water from
51:14was tested in late fall of 1985.
51:17Here, a reopened Well H
51:20is drawing up water from the ground.
51:26The water is then piped away
51:29and discharged outside the study area.
51:37Both G and H
51:40have gone up to their former pumping levels
51:43supervised by government scientists.
51:46400 gallons a minute.
51:49Okay.
51:52Okay, it's staying at about 400 gallons per minute.
51:55All over the area,
51:58underground water levels are recorded,
52:01and they will be for the next 30 days
52:04as the pumping effect spreads throughout the aquifer.
52:07Across the river,
52:10test wells on the tannery woodland site were monitored too.
52:13Although NOVA was not allowed on the site,
52:16government sources later said that water levels here
52:19did show a response to pumping.
52:22The test confirmed that wells G and H
52:25draw their water from upstream as expected.
52:28Because water levels on the woodland site showed an effect,
52:31G and H could in theory draw from there as well,
52:34but work must be completed before that's settled.
52:40Up to a tenth of the nation's groundwater supplies
52:43may be contaminated,
52:46so studies like these are becoming quite common.
52:49Once work is completed,
52:52the underground flow patterns in this aquifer will be understood,
52:55and the sources of the contaminants will be reasonably clear.
52:58That's in contrast to the medical side,
53:01as yet unknown.
53:04Because the Harvard study shows only statistical correlations,
53:07not cause and effect,
53:10that presents the plaintiffs with problems,
53:13as their legal advisor, Tony Roisman, explains.
53:16If cases had to depend upon epidemiologic studies
53:19like the Harvard ones in order to prevail,
53:22first because of the cost,
53:25there would be far fewer cases that could prevail.
53:28I think in terms of the average juror
53:31listening to an epidemiologic study as the basis for causation,
53:34they're going to be troubled by the fact
53:37that the author of the study is going to talk about correlations
53:40and not causation.
53:44So they're busy searching for hard physical evidence
53:47which could link directly to the well contaminants.
53:50Since trichloroethylene is a well-known cause of irregular heartbeats,
53:53for example,
53:56there are ongoing tests to see if they show any.
53:59And sophisticated blood analyses are being used
54:02to see if the plaintiffs' immune systems show any direct effects.
54:05Neither study is yet complete.
54:08And no one knows if they will shed any light
54:11on perhaps the most important questions for the people of Woburn.
54:14What caused the leukemia, and is the threat over?
54:17With leukemia still a mystery disease,
54:20science cannot yet provide the answers.
54:23But the laws soon will,
54:26because science and law have different standards.
54:29Tony Roisman.
54:32We're not attempting to prove to a scientific certainty causation.
54:35Scientists have a different theory of causation.
54:38It's much closer to the criminal liability standard
54:41beyond any reasonable doubt.
54:44Our job is to establish causation at a moment in time.
54:47At this moment in time, we ask the jury,
54:50take the available information in front of you
54:53and answer the question, what caused these injuries?
54:56That's a more probable than not standard.
54:5951% is what's required.
55:02And those kinds of judgments that scientists make
55:05are fine when the scientists are in their own sphere.
55:08When we're in the legal realm where we need answers,
55:11you can't tell the people of the country,
55:14much less the people in Woburn.
55:17We don't know to a scientific certainty
55:20beyond all reasonable doubt exactly what did this.
55:23And another 50 years' worth of exposures
55:26will produce enough bodies for us to be certain.
55:29That's not an answer.
55:32The law is more humane than that.
55:35And the law says we've got to answer the question now.
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