A Civil Action (6 page)

The
Woburn Daily Times
reported the closing of Wells G and H two days after the event. As it happened, Anne did not see the story. She’d gone with her family on vacation to New Hampshire. Bruce Young also missed the story. In an attempt to economize, he no longer subscribed to the Woburn newspaper.

But even if they had read it, the significance probably would have been lost on them. The article, written by the newspaper’s City Hall reporter, stated only that “a contaminant” of an unspecified nature had resulted in closing “the long controversial G and H wells.” The story focused on the mayor’s concern about a “severe” water shortage and his announcement of yet another ban on lawn watering and car washing.

A short paragraph at the end of the article assured residents that the city’s water was safe. The
Daily Times
quoted the Woburn city engineer as saying that “the water coming into their homes is potable and there is no fear in drinking it. The problem wells have been out of service since Tuesday afternoon, and will remain out until the problem is solved.”

The city engineer, whose name was Thomas Mernin, lived on Wood Street in east Woburn, a quarter of a mile from Wells G and H. Over the years he had heard plenty of complaints about the water from neighbors and even his own wife, who was upset at the way clothes came out of the wash stained with rust-colored spots. “The water had a taste of chlorine,” Mernin would say at his deposition. “But I never had any problem personally with the chlorine.”

Next door to Mernin on Wood Street lived Richard and Mary Toomey, whose three children often played with Mernin’s children. Richard Toomey was a sheet-metal worker, a large, good-natured man devoted to family life. He’d been brought up a Catholic in the Charlestown area of Boston, but he didn’t come to understand the true value of religion until his first son, Michael, had been struck by a car and killed while picking flowers for his mother at the edge of Wood Street. His second son, Patrick, became an altar boy.

More than once, Richard had talked to his neighbor, the city engineer, about the quality of the water. Richard believed that the water was responsible for rotting out the pipes in his house, which seemed in
constant need of repair. Mernin would bristle a little at the complaints. “We do all the tests that are necessary,” the city engineer would tell Richard. “It’s perfectly potable.”

All three of the Toomey children suffered terribly from skin rashes. Mary had taken them to dermatologists many times over the years. She’d been told there were two general categories of eczema. One type was caused by external irritations—poison oak, parasites, and some chemicals—and the other type by either an inability to tolerate certain foods or nervous reactions, with no apparent external cause. The dermatologists first prescribed lotions for the Toomey children. When that didn’t help, they performed allergy tests and recommended diets free of milk and eggs. The eczema abated at times but never really cleared up. Mary Toomey wondered if the water that rotted out the water pipes in their house was the cause of her children’s skin afflictions.

In June of 1979, a month after the closing of wells G and H, Patrick Toomey fell ill. His illness began with an earache and fatigue and continued throughout the summer. In August a blood test revealed that Patrick had a high white-blood-cell count. His pediatrician suspected leukemia and referred Patrick to Dr. John Truman at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Truman performed a bone marrow biopsy and confirmed the suspicion. Patrick, who was ten years old at the time, had chronic myelocytic leukemia, a particularly lethal form of leukemia. His prognosis was not good. He would almost certainly die. Truman asked Richard and Mary Toomey if they knew of anyone else in their neighborhood with leukemia, and both parents said they did not.

6

Anne Anderson got a call from her friend Carol Gray on the afternoon of September 10, 1979. “Read the newspaper” was all that Carol would say. Anne went out to the front porch and picked up her copy of the
Woburn Daily Times
. On the front page was a five-column banner headline:
LAGOON OF ARSENIC DISCOVERED IN N. WOBURN
. It was a pleasant, sunny day in late summer but Anne was oblivious to the world around her. She read the newspaper as if in a trance. “Everything seemed to stop still for me,” she recalled some years later.

The article, by a young reporter named Charles C. Ryan, told of the discovery in north Woburn that past July of a half-buried lagoon, nearly an acre in size and five feet deep, that was contaminated with arsenic, lead, chromium, and traces of other heavy metals. The lagoon had been uncovered by a construction crew working at the site of the old Merrimack Chemical Company, producer of arsenic-based insecticides and tanning chemicals. The crew had also unearthed several pits containing the rotting remains of animal hides, hair, and slaughterhouse wastes, the legacy of Woburn’s tanneries. “Arsenic in small doses,” the article stated, “is suspected as a cancer-causing agent,” and chromium was a known carcinogen that caused tumors of the lungs and nasal passages when inhaled. It was unclear, stated the article, whether these toxic metals had contaminated Wells G and H, situated a mile to the south. But the article did note that the two wells, which had pumped as much as a million gallons of water a day during the fifteen years since their construction, had already been closed “because they were contaminated by trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent that has been found to be carcinogenic.”

When Reverend Young heard about the
Daily Times
article, he went out at once to buy a copy of the paper. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “everything Anne had been hammering away at seemed plausible, just from one day to the next.” That evening, he decided it was time for him to act. The logical first step, he reasoned, was to find out exactly how many leukemia cases had occurred in the city during the last fifteen years. He had once tried to find this information, but neither the state nor the city kept a record of the incidence of leukemia. Anne had told him of eight cases that she knew of. That did not seem like an excessive amount in a city the size of Woburn. Were there more cases? the minister wondered. How many cases was too many?

The next day he called Anne and told her he had come up with a plan. He would write a letter for publication in the
Daily Times
asking parents who’d had a child diagnosed with leukemia in the last fifteen years to come to a meeting at Trinity Episcopal. Maybe they wouldn’t discover anything they didn’t already know, the minister told Anne. Maybe no one would show up at the meeting. But it was worth a try, he said, and Anne agreed.

On an evening three weeks later, Reverend Young propped open the door to the church meeting hall and arranged several rows of metal folding chairs on the scuffed linoleum floor. Donna Robbins arrived early to help him. The minister went to the door to greet people as they came in. He recognized several parents from the hospital clinics. By seven-thirty, he counted more than thirty people, mostly couples, standing in small groups, talking with one another. The minister waited a few moments longer, and then he stood and introduced himself. He explained why he’d called the meeting. “We want to find out if there is a problem in Woburn, or if there isn’t,” he said. He passed out copies of a questionnaire that a nurse at Massachusetts General had helped him to prepare, and asked that they be returned to him as quickly as possible.

Toward the end of the meeting, people began asking questions, voicing their worries and suspicions. Some people talked about their children, but not everyone who had come had a leukemic child. A few had family members with different sorts of cancers, one had a cat with leukemia, and others had come simply out of a concern about the local environment. The atmosphere felt loose and friendly. Many people joined in the talk. Anne was not one of them. Throughout the meeting she sat quietly with her husband. She had told Reverend Young that she didn’t want her role in this affair mentioned, and he respected her wishes. She did not like speaking before groups of people, and she also feared that others might ridicule her intuition. “I did not make my opinions known,” she explained some years later at her deposition, “because I was living with paranoia, because I saw myself as a housewife without training.”

Reverend Young waited for the questionnaires to be sent back. Several weeks after the meeting he and Anne met in his office at the church. They had information on twelve cases. That still did not seem to Young like a particularly large number over a fifteen-year period, but he did not mention this thought to Anne. He had purchased a street map of the city. Anne read aloud the address of each case, and the minister marked it on the map. Of the twelve cases, eight were located in east Woburn, and six of those were clustered in the Pine Street neighborhood, where perhaps two hundred families lived. Young thought the distribution looked highly unusual, especially when plotted on the map. He told Anne he’d call Dr. Truman the next morning and make
an appointment to show him the map. He asked Anne if she wanted to come with him, but she told the minister he should go alone.

When Reverend Young arrived at the hospital some days later, he found the doctor in his office, about to eat lunch. Truman offered to share his meal, but the minister declined. He began telling Truman about the October 4 meeting. Truman listened politely. Young unfolded the map and placed it on Truman’s desk.

“Here,” explained the minister, finger to the map, “is east Woburn, and here is Anne Anderson’s house. And this is the Zonas’, and right next door are the Nagles. Here are the Kanes, and the Toomeys. Over here are the Carlsons; Donna Robbins, and Barbas, Ryan, Veno …”

Truman abandoned his lunch and looked intently at the map. “This is very interesting,” he murmured as if he were talking to himself.

“We’ve identified twelve cases altogether,” continued the minister. “There may be more. The problem is, I don’t know if twelve is unusual for a fifteen-year period.”

“This is a very striking cluster,” said Truman. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Truman told Young that he knew a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta who had investigated other leukemia clusters. “I think the next step is for me to call him,” Truman said, and he reached for the telephone.

The man whom John Truman called at the Centers for Disease Control was Dr. Clark Heath. He was the world’s foremost expert in leukemia clusters. It was a distinction that Heath himself might not have valued highly, since he was no longer sure that such a thing as a leukemia cluster existed.

Heath had first encountered what seemed to be a cluster in the spring of 1961, as a young doctor in his second year at the CDC. He’d been sent to the town of Niles, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, after a pediatrician there had reported the deaths of four young girls from leukemia within three months. In Niles, Heath methodically combed through death certificates and discovered four additional cases, three girls and one boy. The eight victims had lived within a single parish of Niles, an area slightly more than a square mile in size. All but one of the victims had attended the parish parochial school or had siblings who
did, and the one who did not, a ten-year-old girl, had lived within a block of the school. Heath also discovered three adult leukemia cases in the parish. Two of those adults had children at the school. All the cases had been diagnosed within the last three years.

Heath was a young man then. He began to hope that he might discover in Niles the cause of childhood leukemia. He and a colleague from the University of Chicago studied each leukemia case in great detail, scrutinizing medical records, examining samples of bone marrow and blood, testing the blood of family members, monitoring the levels of background radiation in the homes of the victims and at the parish school and church. They found no evidence of any hereditary factor. Heath felt almost certain that some infectious agent, probably a virus, had caused the disease. Researchers had identified leukemia viruses in animals—in mice and birds—and it seemed reasonable to suspect that such a virus also existed in humans. Moreover, leukemia occurred most frequently in children under six years of age, a time when they were most prone to infectious diseases. In Niles, Heath discovered that a “rheumatic-like illness” had circulated among children at the same general time as the onset of leukemia, and this, he thought, suggested “some infectious process.” But he could not link it with any certitude to the leukemias. After a year of work he was no closer to knowing what had caused the outbreak in Niles than on the day he’d arrived. Back then, he did not doubt that he’d seen a genuine leukemia cluster. In a report published in the
American Journal of Medicine
in 1963, Heath wrote: “The cluster of eight cases of leukemia among children in Niles cannot reasonably be attributed to the effects of random distribution. These cases constitute a clearly defined micro-epidemic.”

Over the years, other leukemia clusters began to surface. Heath went to the small town of Orange, Texas, to investigate three cases that had occurred within nine months. From Douglas, Georgia, came a report of a “leukemia house,” where three residents and a regular visitor had, within ten years, contracted the disease. In Rutherford, New Jersey, six children, four of whom had attended the same elementary school, were diagnosed with leukemia. From Almond, New York, a rural village with a population of two thousand, came reports of four leukemias in less than a year. In all of these places, as in Niles, investigators failed to find a cause, or even a significant lead.

Two decades had now passed since Heath had gone to Niles. He knew more, and was certain of less. “Results have suggested little if any tendency for cases to come in clusters beyond what chance would predict,” he wrote in 1982 in the textbook
Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention
. Others in the field agreed with this position. Some epidemiologists at the CDC, for example, explained apparent leukemia clusters by analogy to the “Texas sharpshooter” effect: a man shoots at the side of a barn and then proceeds to draw targets around the holes. He makes every shot into a bull’s-eye. If an epidemiologist were to draw a circle around, say, the greater Boston area, he would find an incidence of leukemia comparable with the rest of the United States. Draw a circle around Woburn and he’d find a worrisome elevation. Draw a circle around the Pine Street neighborhood and he’d find an alarming cluster. Was it a real cluster? Or was he just drawing bull’s-eyes where he found bullet holes?