Waiting for an Army to Die (23 page)

From 1965 until 1970, when the spraying of Agent Orange was suspended in Vietnam, the US military covered approximately five million acres of Vietnam with herbicides. During those same years, ranchers, farmers, and the Forest Service sprayed 4.1 million acres of the American countryside
annually
with 2,4,5-T. The Forest Service alone sprayed more than 430,000 acres of national forest every year with 2,4,5-T in an attempt to kill broadleaved plants that might block sunlight from pine and other coniferous saplings. Ranchers used 2,4,5-T to destroy anything that might interfere with livestock grazing, while rice growers sprayed it on about one hundred thousand acres, primarily in Arkansas and Mississippi, to kill parasite weeds like arrowhead, gooseweed, and ducksalad. In 1970, the USDA announced a set of limited restrictions on the use of 2,4,5-T; however, although the ban affected only about 20 percent of all 2,4,5-T used in the United States, Dow Chemical went to court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from further regulations until more testing was done.
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Until 1979, when the EPA’s temporary and limited suspension order (which excluded rangelands and rice plantations) was issued, 2,4,5-T had been the most widely used herbicide in the country.

When the National Forest Service first sprayed Bob McKusick’s land, he had no idea that herbicides could be harmful: “The first time was in 1968. The kids were little, and we were out on the clay deposit in Kellner Canyon with two dogs, just standing there on my properly. A helicopter came across—and we’re in plain sight—and we tried to wave it off but the spray drifted down on top of us. I had no reason to believe it was harmful because the Forest Service said it was completely harmless to birds and animals and humans and it just worked on brush. But it caused a rash, and my dog, Coyote, got pneumonia and almost died. A few months later he did die. I notified the Forest Service that we’d been sprayed, but I didn’t know the stuff was bad.”
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One year later a forest ranger phoned McKusick, who at the time was a professional potter and was fortunate enough to have found a piece of land that included clay deposits, telling him to put pie tins at each corner of his clay deposits to mark the area so it would not be sprayed. But, says McKusick, “they sprayed my clay deposit too.” All of the complaining neighbors were sprayed, including a woman named Billy Shoecraft, who compiled more than a hundred files on chemical poisons before she died of cancer. For three consecutive days the Forest Service sprayed, and, explains McKusick, “We all got bleeding ears; in fact we had bleeding from all body orifices. There’s this disease called IHS—internal hemorrhaging syndrome. In Vietnam 1,300 war dogs got it and the government said it wasn’t because they were spraying with Agent Orange. The dogs got a virus, they said, and had to be destroyed. Well, after the 1969 spraying, we had IHS and I can’t tell you how many horses and cows had it.”

Animals in the canyon began dying, giving birth to deformed offspring, lying paralyzed on the ground. Some even forgot how to breed. Before the spraying, McKusick recalls, there were no problems, no deformities or miscarriages. But in 1969, “60 to 70 percent of our goats were born deformed, and we’ve had heavy deformities ever since.”

McKusick, who has had a series of heart attacks during the fourteen years since the spraying, adds, “I can’t prove any of this was caused by the spray, but all I can say is that before the spray I was healthy as a horse. The doctor told me I would never have heart trouble. And our family did not have a history of illness …”

The McKusicks and other families living in the spray zone attempted to find help in their struggle to get the Forest Service to stop the spraying, but to no avail. “We went to everyone we could think of and nobody would help us. We went to Senator Barry Goldwater and he couldn’t be bothered … We asked Governor Jack Williams for help and he laughed. Representative Sam Steiger was the only exception. He tried to help, but he simply didn’t have the weight to stop it …

“When they first sprayed, the Forest Service said the stuff would
disappear in twenty-four hours. Then they changed their story and said it would be gone in three days, and then in thirty days … In [over fourteen] years, not one family here has dared to use their own well water.”

The McKusicks sued Dow Chemical and, after nearly a decade of legal delays, agreed to settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. But money, says McKusick, can never compensate for so many years of insecurity and hardship. “It’s very easy for somebody who has not had his family and himself sick for twelve years, his animals dying around him, and people laughing at him and criticizing him and never helping to say you should have gone and fought it for another three months and then when you won it and they appealed you could wait another ten or eleven years to get back in court and then they’d appeal it again and you could wait another ten or eleven years—just where in the hell does anybody think we’re going to get the strength to do it?

“We settled because of what life we have left and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. My wife has had things removed from her; I’ve had growths removed from me; friends have had growths. I’ve had heart problems; three or four times I’ve collapsed. Of course, a lot of people have died.

“The only good thing we’ve got going for us is, I don’t know if they’ll spray it somewhere else, but I know they won’t come back here.”

Like Vietnam veterans Paul Reutershan, Charles Owen, and Ed Juteau, Billie Shoecraft died believing her cancer was the result of having been exposed to herbicides. Like other Americans who have sued Dow Chemical, the McKusicks grew tired of waiting for their day in court, settling as others have for an undisclosed sum of money from a company that insists there is still no evidence that 2,4,5-T harms humans. While publicly defending its product against “chemical witch hunters,” Dow has quietly paid off those who seemed to have a solid case against 2,4,5-T, thus managing to avoid the possibility of an embarrassing day in court.

For the McKusicks the battle against toxic herbicides may be
over, but for Americans living near power lines, railroad rights-of-way, national forests, or private timber companies, the continued spraying of herbicides is both disturbing and frightening. Their fears are often based on far more then what Dow has called “anecdotal evidence.” For example, many residents of the Alsea region in Oregon, which includes Siuslaw National Forest, are aware that dioxin was discovered in eight of thirty-two wildlife samples taken from the forest, in the breast milk of one out of six woman living within the Siuslaw, and in “extremely high levels” in the garden soil of a young woman who had experienced four spontaneous abortions in three years while living adjacent to the National Forest. And they have read about seventeen tree planters working on Bureau of Land Management land that had been sprayed eleven months earlier with both 2,4-D and Silvex becoming ill with symptoms of herbicide poisoning, and an eight-year-old girl who contracted a rare blood disease, and whose tap water contained the same herbicides doctors discovered in her blood.
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And of course they remember being told that when sprayed from helicopters herbicides are harmless to humans and animals because “they biodegrade so rapidly that by the time they hit the ground they are perfectly innocuous.”

On April 11, 1978 a high school teacher by the name of Bonnie Hill, along with seven women residing in the Alsea region, sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency suggesting that until herbicides were proven safe, their use in the State of Oregon be stopped. The eight women had experienced a total of eleven miscarriages, all but one occurring during the spring (peak) spraying season, and nine of the miscarriages occurring in the first trimester of pregnancy. The one woman who experienced a miscarriage in the fall lived in an area that had been sprayed in the fall of that year. In their letter the women declared: “Even the latest Forest Service Environmental Impact Statement admits that ‘All chemicals are capable of causing toxic effects upon the developing embryo … Chemicals can become available to the embryo in spite of the mother’s excretion and metabolism capabilities.’ ” Copies of the letter were also mailed to Oregon legislators, agencies and
companies using herbicides, the editorial pages of major Oregon newspapers, and other health and environmental agencies the women felt might be sympathetic.

The letter was the result of a grass-roots research effort by Mrs. Hill, which began when she read about the findings of Dr. James Allen at the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Wilbur McNulty at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. In their research with primates Allen and McNulty discovered that rhesus monkeys fed minute doses of TCDD frequently miscarried, often in the first trimester of pregnancy. Hill, whose home is completely surrounded by land managed by the BLM, had experienced a miscarriage in the spring of 1975, and when she discovered that Silvex and 2,4-D had been sprayed not far from her home just a month before she lost her baby, she decided it was time to find out if other women in the Alsea region had experienced similar problems.

“I just started asking around,” Hill explains, “and every time I found out about a spontaneous abortion it had occurred in the spring. That’s what was so unusual. Up until recently I didn’t find out about any miscarriages that had happened at any other time of the year.

We are standing beside a counter in the home-economics room of the high school where Hill teaches, and as we talk she mixes the ingredients for a dessert she plans to take to a retirement dinner that evening. Apologizing for having to make the dessert, Hill offers her young daughter a graham cracker, and continues. “I think I was fairly cautious about it in the beginning, but the evidence just seemed to build over a period of about a year and a half. Every once in a while I found out about another miscarriage, and when I found out about the eleventh, I started asking some rather serious questions about the possibility of a correlation between springtime spraying and miscarriages in the vicinity surrounding or very near the spray zones.”

Hill began calling agencies and private industries that owned land in the Alsea area to inquire about when and where they had applied herbicides. “I did tell them immediately about my concern. I didn’t try to hide anything. I just explained that I had discovered
that several miscarriages had occurred in the spring, and that I was trying to find out just where and when they might have sprayed. I wanted to go back for a number of years, and I do remember one man at a private company expressing great surprise that any kind of health problem might be associated with herbicides. But later he was very open about giving me information, something I didn’t find everyone quite so willing to do. Another company gave me different kinds of information at different times, and in fact there were quite a few discrepancies in the information they gave me. But I think in general that the recordkeeping on the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of herbicide spraying has been nothing short of deplorable when you consider the possible health implications of these substances. Even Oregon State University, which has long been an outspoken proponent of herbicide spraying, has stated that the recordkeeping of the actual spraying is terrible.

“One of the problems is determining just who owns the land. If you look at a map of this area it’s really a checkerboard pattern, with someone owning a few acres here, and someone else owning a few acres there, so if we saw somebody spraying with a helicopter out there right now”—pointing to one of the snowcapped mountains that appear to be just a short walk from Alsea’s high school—“it would take us a long time to determine just who owned that land. Sometimes if someone is spraying even just across the hill from where you live, you still might not know just who owns that land.

“So there are really no natural barriers between the houses and the land being sprayed, and it’s almost impossible to avoid drift from the spraying. In fact the Bureau of Land Management did a study in the Coos Bay area under very controlled circumstances, observing all the current required buffer zones along the streams, and they found that
70 percent of the time
the herbicide was entering the water. And the EPA has documented drift up to twenty-two miles. But most studies were done on flat land under pretty controlled circumstances of wind and weather, and herbicide users based their conclusions on these studies. But when you consider the actual conditions on the coast of Oregon, where there are
mountains and hills and air currents running in and out of those hills, it’s just really unpredictable. And being twenty miles from the coast as the crow flies, our area has equally unpredictable precipitation patterns. They will be sure that we’re going to have a nice day, and yet eight hours later it’s raining. They’re supposed to have a clear weather sign for twenty-four hours once they have decided to spray, but Oregon’s weather is notorious for its unpredictability, especially in the spring, which of course is the peak season for herbicide spraying.”

By establishing a “buffer zone” between areas to be sprayed and sources of water, the Forest Service and other proponents of herbicides have been able to rationalize the use of substances contaminated with dioxin. Theoretically this zone will keep herbicides and herbicide contaminants from entering the drinking water or food chain, but in reality the Oregon coastal area has been a herbicidal free-fire zone for a number of years. Theoretical buffer zones, explains Hill, do not prevent area residents from being exposed directly to herbicides. “Right after we sent our letter to the EPA an environmental group in Portland tried to get the buffer zones increased, but 75 percent of the State Board of Forestry is composed of timbermen, so needless to say the proposition failed. And just because the EPA temporarily suspended certain uses of Silvex and 2,4,5-T doesn’t mean the spraying of herbicides hasn’t continued. Just this year, for example, a woman was at her house one afternoon and there’s a helicopter spraying across, just about a quarter of a mile from her house. And she had all of her windows open because it was a beautiful day, although quite windy, and all of a sudden she smells something and she knows it’s a herbicide. So she gets on the phone and she tries to find out who it is that’s spraying, but she can’t find out. And she makes several telephone calls, and all of a sudden it’s five o’clock and all of the offices are closed. She calls the Forest Service and they can’t help her, even though all the helicopters use the same helipad,
all of them
.