Poison Spring (9 page)
Authors: E. G. Vallianatos
In 1978, eight women from the small western Oregon town of Alsea sent a letter to the EPA documenting a frightening series of miscarriages—all of which had occurred shortly after the spring herbicide spraying season. The women wanted to know if there was a connection between their spontaneous abortions and the weed killers that timber companies had been spraying in the forests surrounding their homes.
The EPA administrator, Douglas Costle, found the letter disquieting. He sent it to Steven Jellinek, the agency’s top toxics official, who asked staff scientists to look into the connection between the spraying of these herbicides and the incidence of women giving birth to children without brains or with fatal brain defects.
The results of the study were damning. EPA investigators found highly toxic compounds known as dioxins in the sediment of a local creek in Alsea, and they discovered that these poisons were seeping into the bodies of the people of Alsea, with devastating results: women living near a highway that had been sprayed with herbicides were having miscarriages at nearly triple the normal rate.
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Over the next few years, what started as a local health scare would turn into a seismic environmental moment that indelibly revealed the troubling relationship between the EPA and the chemical industry. It would show just how vulnerable the American public can be when its environmental watchdogs are compromised by powerful businesses. And it would shine a strong light on a chemical compound that by the late 1970s the American public was becoming all too familiar with: Agent Orange.
Agent Orange is best known as the acutely toxic defoliant used by the United States as a chemical weapon during the Vietnam War. The compound was a fifty-fifty mixture of two widely used herbicides: 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (known as 2,4,5-T) and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (or 2,4-D). Both of these compounds had been used domestically for years as agricultural weed killers.
The trouble with these chemicals had to do with unintended consequences—in this case, the inadvertent creation of dangerous chemical by-products. The term “dioxin” is actually a generic word for a group of more than two hundred powerful contaminants: 75 are chlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (CDDs) and 135 are chlorinated dibenzofurans (CDFs). It’s important to understand that no company intentionally manufactures dioxins. They are an industrial by-product arising during the production of compounds like pesticides. When you make 2,4,5-T, for example, you also get a lethal compound called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (or 2378-TCDD).
Although these sprays were certified as harmless to humans both by their American manufacturers (Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and Hooker Chemicals) and by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they were nonetheless contaminated by TCDD-dioxin, which turned out to be one of the most acutely toxic molecules known to man. Its widespread effects in the Vietnam War—not only on the Vietnamese but also on our own soldiers—vividly illustrate what might be called “dioxin’s revenge.”
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The United States, ignoring the international 1925 accords against chemical warfare, had sprayed the forests of Vietnam with dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange in order to destroy the jungles that gave cover to the movements of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army. But using these dangerous compounds also meant that America was waging war on nature itself.
The United States sprayed millions of gallons of herbicides over the forests and rice fields of Vietnam. The result: a huge swath of forest and countryside, 4.5 million acres, became a wasteland of barren and deadly soil and poisonous water. No one knows exactly how much Agent Orange the U.S. Air Force dumped over Vietnam and Laos between 1962 and 1971, but in 1987 the Air Force estimated it had sprayed 17.4 million gallons. Close to 5 million Vietnamese were exposed to this horror; four hundred thousand died or were maimed, and half a million children were born with birth defects. Death would remain lurking in the land for decades to come.
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There was no secret about the horrendous effects of this chemical on man and nature. Only months after this weaponized toxin was introduced, both Vietnamese and American soldiers showed signs of dioxin’s insults to the body: fluid-filled cysts on the skin, and particularly on the face. But time would bring far worse problems: soldiers and airmen who had sprayed Agent Orange from aircraft or been exposed to it on the ground began to exhibit symptoms of everything from persistent numbness, dizziness, and memory loss to depression, violent rages, and suicidal tendencies. Many of these soldiers ultimately died of cancer. After the war, thousands of veterans would testify that they suffered neurological problems, impotence, miscarriages, and deformed babies.
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Yet it would take years for the U.S. government to acknowledge that our veterans had experienced debilitating symptoms of dioxin poisoning. Congressman Bob Eckhardt, Democrat of Texas, accused the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) of dragging its feet in researching and studying the problems of veterans. And Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, scolded the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to take up the veterans’ Agent Orange complaints.
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After years of denial, the government was finally forced to respond to mounting clinical evidence of the impact of this chemical time bomb, even in those who had been exposed to only trace amounts of the compound. There were no Purple Hearts awarded to those gravely injured by dioxin, but their wounds were real––and they never healed. The suffering inflicted on the people of Vietnam, North and South, combatant and noncombatant alike, was, for many years, an unacknowledged legacy of shame inherited by our country.
What the women in Alsea, Oregon, were learning, to their horror, was that the same chemicals that were causing such trouble among Vietnam vets were now entering their own bodies as well.
In March 1979, after the Alsea study revealed a link between the herbicides and miscarriages, the EPA published “an emergency suspension” restricting most of the uses of 2,4,5-T (a major constituent of Agent Orange) and Silvex, an herbicide similar to 2,4,5-T. Two months later, despite industry pressure to do nothing, the agency canceled most uses of both 2,4,5-T and Silvex.
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This should have been a fairly straightforward decision. After all, the EPA was simply moving to ban a chemical that had been shown to have terrible effects on soldiers abroad and pregnant women at home. Yet the effort to ban 2,4,5-T had dramatic consequences for EPA employees trying to do their job. Sales of 2,4,5-T and other dioxin-laced pesticides were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the EPA’s discovery of the dangers of these compounds threatened some very big businesses. The chemical companies that made these pesticides wanted payback.
Dow Chemical tried to “silence us,” Hale Vandermer, an EPA investigator, explained to me. “It immediately launched a campaign of disinformation to discredit our epidemiological study, ridiculing us in the scientific community.”
Inside the EPA, the scientists responsible for the Oregon study were “dead,” Vandermer said. Senior EPA officials began “demolition right in our branch.” Scientists involved in the Alsea investigation saw their careers, or at least their effectiveness, come to a premature end. They were relegated to administrative positions in which, the EPA reckoned, they would never again do work that might harm the interests of the chemical industry.
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The Oregon study taught EPA staffers like Vandermer a bitter lesson about the ruthlessness of industry executives and their apologists and enablers inside the EPA. The dioxin study “destroyed our epidemiological program,” Vandermer said.
The agency’s epidemiology team was a network of physicians and toxicologists in some of the country’s leading medical schools doing original research on pesticides and public health. In the early 1970s we had been spending some $15 million per year, and at this time, in 1983, “we barely had the program doing anything, with a little more than $1 million a year,” Vandermer said.
According to Vandermer, “The beauty of that network was that for a modest sum we had the field capability for both monitoring and investigation of a problem. Immediately after an accident, for instance, our medical advisers would be on the scene asking questions, collecting data, offering aid. But more than that, our epidemiological program built a tradition of training, research and education in agricultural medicine and public health. Our investigators published hundreds of articles in a number of scientific journals. They solved many problems, and, fundamentally, they forced the medical and scientific establishments to wake up to the real public health dangers of pesticides.”
Hale Vandermer was right. The discovery that one of mankind’s most toxic substances had been used in the very backyards of pregnant women did not become a shining example of the kind of public health protection the EPA had been founded to provide. It became, for the agency, a kiss of death.
And that was just the beginning.
On March 22, 1980, a woman named Lorraine Carter from the town of Mineral, Washington, sent a handwritten letter to Edwin Johnson, essentially repeating the plea of the Alsea women of Oregon.
“The communities of Elbe, Mineral, and Ashford, Washington are experiencing some unexplained health problems, and we would like the E.P.A. to undertake an epidemiological study of the area,” Carter wrote. “We first became concerned because of an unusually high miscarriage rate in the town of Ashford (population 450). Ten women became pregnant from late July to early October. Eight of these women miscarried from late October to March.”
A month later, April 22, 1980, Carter and ten other women from Mineral, Elbe, and Ashford sent a more detailed letter to Doug Costle, the EPA administrator. They said that from January 1979 to March 11, 1980, thirteen pregnancies ended with ten miscarriages, “with a cluster of nine miscarriages within a 6 month span.” And it wasn’t just people who were suffering: “[T]here are numerous reports of goats, cattle, and sheep that have become barren; rabbits, cats and dogs giving birth to deformed young, or having persistent recent histories of miscarriages, dead tropical fish, dead bee hives, etc., and reports of deformed wildlife, and a notable decrease of birds and squirrels, and gardens that have mysteriously withered and died.”
The story had a familiar ring. This time the culprit wasn’t 2,4,5-T, but its twin, the other half of Agent Orange—a compound known as 2,4-D. Lorraine Carter reported that her community had been sprayed by 2,4-D and “a variety of other herbicides.” She told Costle she knew from the experience of those in other communities that these chemicals could cause miscarriages.
Indeed, inside the EPA, the dangers of 2,4-D were becoming increasingly worrisome. “Private citizens and environmental organizations from numerous locations throughout the country are expressing their thoughts and fears that miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) and birth defects in their communities are occurring in alarming numbers because of 2,4-D exposure,” an internal EPA memo noted. An EPA response officer cited examples of 2,4-D tragedies in the Swan Valley, Montana; Broken Bow, Oklahoma; Trego, Wisconsin; Ashford, Washington; and several locations in Oregon. He also made a case for undertaking a variety of studies for a better understanding of the impact of 2,4-D.
But nothing happened, largely because by this time the EPA was ensnared in yet another battle with Dow Chemical. And as had been the case with the battle over 2,4,5-T, there were both lives and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
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The Five Rivers Deception
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n July 1979, just two months after the banning of 2,4,5-T and just before the women from Mineral voiced their own worries about 2,4-D, three more Oregon women began complaining of spontaneous miscarriages and other medical effects from being contaminated by toxic herbicides.
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In July 1979, the EPA received a letter from five women, including Melyce Connelly, who lived in the Five Rivers village, not far from Alsea, in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest. The women begged the EPA administrator to ensure that two herbicides, 2,4-D and picloram, “cease to be sprayed until their safety has been unequivocally established, and that the miscarriages and the health of the population be studied immediately.”
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The women had a right to expect prompt and trustworthy answers to their questions. What they got was years of bungling and ineptitude.
In essence, Edwin Johnson, the director of EPA’s pesticide programs, asked his staff to repeat in Five Rivers what it had done in Alsea: test for dioxin contamination in samples taken from water and sediment as well as from humans and animals. Johnson’s assistants asked the Epidemiological Studies Program of Colorado State University—which was funded by EPA—to carry out the Five Rivers study.
On November 2, 1979, Johnson wrote a letter to Melyce Connelly assuring her that the water and sediment samples from the Five Rivers area “are being analyzed for 2,4-D, picloram, 2,4,5-T, Silvex, and dioxin.” In addition, he promised Connelly that she would “receive the results of these analyses directly, as soon as they are available.”
The EPA, however, did no such thing. Connelly received nothing from him or his staff. In fact, the investigation seemed designed to fail. Jim Weaver, the congressman from Oregon representing the women of Five Rivers, would later describe the Five Rivers study as “a morass of misinformation.”
