Poison Spring (10 page)

The EPA “assured the residents of the Five Rivers area that they would ‘receive the results of these analyses,’ ” Weaver’s letter said. “Nearly four years later, not one resident has been notified, and the study remains unfinished.”
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Weaver told William Ruckelshaus, the former Nixon appointee who had returned from industry to run EPA again under Reagan, that he shared the Oregon women’s “frustration and anger,” and he demanded that the EPA hand over all documents related to the Five Rivers study. “Many Americans feel they can no longer trust the agency’s credibility or forthrightness,” Weaver said.

What happened next would hardly reassure Weaver, his constituents, or anyone else.

As promised, experts from Colorado State University collected their samples from the environment, the animals, and the women in the Five Rivers region and sent them to an EPA laboratory at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The samples included drinking water sediment and tissues from a mouse, cat, shrew, bird, and a “baby born without a brain.”
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The samples then traveled from Mississippi to Professor Michael Gross at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. But Gross analyzed the samples only for dioxin, because no one from EPA asked him to also examine the samples for 2,4,5-T, 2,4-D, Silvex, and picloram, as the EPA had promised the women of Five Rivers. Still, he reported, some of the samples had dioxin levels ranging from 160 to 5,800 parts per trillion.

Dr. Gross then sent the results of his work to the EPA’s dioxin coordinator in Washington, D.C., but it apparently went no further. This was an extraordinary lapse, considering the toxicity of dioxin and what was at stake for these women and their families. Meanwhile, Dr. Gross had to answer questions about dioxins in a lawsuit brought against EPA, so he released the results of his analyses.
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Then something strange happened. An ABC News investigation discovered that some samples contaminated with dioxin, which had been sent to the EPA lab in Mississippi, had somehow become mixed up with samples from another site in Michigan. How could this have happened? How had the samples been misidentified?

One version of how the samples reached their destination comes from a senior EPA official. According to Homer Hall, deputy director, Benefits and Use Division, Office of Pesticide Programs, EPA, Colorado State University scientists sent sediment samples from Oregon and sludge samples from Region V to Dr. Mike Gross at the University of Nebraska for analysis. The attorney for the plaintiff alleged that “this was all a part of an EPA coverup.”
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If the mix-up was frightening for citizens and embarrassing to the EPA, it could hardly be seen as an isolated example of bureaucratic mismanagement. The truth was, the EPA had made its mind up about 2,4-D before the Five Rivers disaster study had even been concluded. The EPA had evidence showing dioxin contamination in Oregon for three years, but they refused to release it because of the study’s certain effects on the regulatory fate of 2,4,5-T. With 2,4-D, there was too much at stake. Not because of threats to human health, but—once again—because of threats to industry profits.
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In episodes of finger pointing, recrimination, or blundering, bureaucracies always resort to official inquiries, and in this case the EPA conducted two in-house investigations. The Office of Pesticide Programs produced a report declaring itself innocent of all error and blaming the confusion over the samples on no one in particular. “The confusion of the samples from Five Rivers with those from Region V seems to have been a clerical error committed by the Nebraska laboratory,” an EPA report said. “While there was no actual mix-up in the identity of the samples themselves but only in the reporting of the results, this error is another lapse [in the investigation by the EPA.]”
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The Office of the Inspector General, drawing on an early version of the report of the Office of Pesticide Programs, also somehow found very little wrong with the way the Five Rivers study had been done. “It appears that (a) the samples were never analyzed for herbicides; (b) the TCDD [dioxin] analysis of the samples was incomplete; and (c) the people of Five Rivers had never been advised of the available results” despite repeated legal efforts to get them, an EPA report said. The regional office apparently never received the results of the analysis of its samples, and the mislabeling of the Region V samples as samples from Oregon “seemed to be a clerical error in an EPA cooperative laboratory; there was no actual mixup of the samples.”
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Once again, the constant shuffling of the EPA bureaucracy appeared to be at the root of the problem. John C. Martin, the EPA’s inspector general, pointed out that the reorganization upheaval of 1976–1980 contributed to EPA’s “failure” to adequately complete the Alsea Study or respond to the Five Rivers incident. But in a way, those reorganizations were not a failure, but a success: they succeeded in demoralizing, demoting, and removing the very people trying to carry out the EPA’s mission.

Once again, it seemed that every time someone outside the EPA warned about the dangerous effects of an enormously popular pesticide, EPA regulators would rush to defend it. Bad data was coming to the EPA not merely from the Five Rivers case, but also from the battle with Dow over 2,4,5-T and, almost simultaneously, from the Colorado organophosphate study. In a furious move, senior managers responded precisely the way industry would have wanted them to: they broke up the Health Effects Branch. It was a classic case of shooting the messenger: the Health Effects Branch was “reorganized” out of existence, replaced by an ineffective alternative, the Field Studies and Special Projects Section, designed to pacify industry (and especially Dow Chemical). By the time the Health Effects Branch was abolished, around 1982, it had twenty-five staff members. By 1986, its replacement had six staff members. The same decline struck another effective organization, the Special Pesticides Review Division, which investigated hazardous pesticides. In 1981, when Reagan came to power, it had one hundred scientists and support staff, and by late 1986, its staff numbered twelve. The Reagan administration knew how to demolish the effective parts of the EPA.

“Reorganization” is usually a messy process. Some win and others lose. But the Reagan administration made reorganization a weapon. Those who had the misfortune to report on the Five Rivers case were, in the logic of EPA politicians, losers. The EPA simply could not handle such drama. Key scientists were exiled to greener pastures, far from the centers of power where real decisions get made. Vandermer learned the price of bringing senior managers bad news: retribution is swift and severe. He was sent to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which shipped him to Egypt, where for two years he evaluated pesticides in an AID-funded project. Jack Griffith, the chief of the Alsea investigation, found himself moved to the University of Miami, where the EPA was funding an epidemiology program.

“I suggested that, if we ignore the findings of the Colorado farmworker study [see chapter 6], which showed the brain damage effects of neurotoxic pesticides, we are likely to have more and more people with less and less intelligence,” Vandermer said. “For that they stripped me of my duties for two years. They also gave me an unsatisfactory rating for my job, which is the closest thing to being fired.”

Vandermer was furious. He was about to file a formal grievance when one day he was offered a deal: if he dropped his grievance, the EPA would pay his salary at another government agency or university of his choice.
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Vandermer accepted the deal.

Despite industry’s claims, the truth about 2,4-D’s toxicity is well known, and it has been for a long time. On September 26, 1983, S. M. Jalal, a professor of biology at the University of North Dakota, wrote a note to Edwin Johnson, the director of the EPA’s pesticides office. Jalal said he was “surprised” to learn that 2,4-D, an unusually common lawn care product, did in fact contain TCDD dioxins. An EPA study released a couple of years before Jalal’s note had concluded that the TCDD dioxin is a “likely” human carcinogen and may be “the most toxic chemical ever known to man,” with awesome degenerative power that could cripple, cause cancer, and kill experimental animals at “exceedingly low doses.”
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Yet as always, relentless industry pressure took place behind closed doors—or through congressional phone calls. Once again, the EPA began parroting industry, claiming (without citing proof ) that there was no evidence that 2,4-D had
any
dioxin contaminant. Chemical companies began releasing reports claiming that 2,4-D was not only harmless, it helped reduce hunger; they cited USDA studies claiming that banning 2,4-D would drive up costs to growers and would thus make food more expensive for consumers.
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Invoking the USDA to defend industrial pesticides was hardly a surprising move. The USDA has a long history of releasing studies favorable to the industrial status quo. By the late 1990s, after the chemical industry’s sustained rhetorical exaggeration in defense of 2,4-D, the EPA had managed to restrict only some of its uses. Today, 2,4-D remains one of the most common herbicides in the United States. It is still in the farmer’s shed and the suburban homeowner’s garage.
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By the time of the Alsea Creek and Five Rivers fiascoes, the EPA was reeling from its mismanagement of toxic pesticides. It wasn’t just the miscarriages in Oregon or the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam soldiers; it wasn’t just the results of a Colorado neurological study that revealed that organophosphate pesticides were very bad for people’s health; nor was it the poisoned drinking water discovered on Long Island or the shocking revelations of fake science for hire (both of which I will discuss later). But in combination, these overlapping crises caused tremendous unrest within EPA, especially as the Carter era evolved into the far more disruptive administration of Ronald Reagan following the election of 1980. The news from the Five Rivers neighborhood, coming to the EPA in 1979 while the agency was still in disarray because of the Alsea study, almost broke the camel’s back.
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Both the Alsea and Five Rivers studies became environmental battlefields, especially because the Reagan administration had just arrived in Washington, and Reagan’s political appointees at the EPA wanted nothing to do with the suffering women of Oregon. The mission of Reagan’s EPA was the protection of the industry, including Dow Chemical. This was hardly surprising, since the chemical industry had its fingerprints all over Reagan’s election and (later) his appointments to the EPA. Reagan came to power with a commitment to silence or abolish any government activity that might cause trouble for business. His primary environmental goal came straight from industry: relieve companies of all “regulatory restraint.”

Purging troubling science and scientists

Reagan’s choice to run the EPA, Anne Gorsuch, was—from this point of view—the perfect choice. Her first action was to decimate the EPA’s law enforcement attorneys. Gorsuch’s deputy, John W. Hernandez, soon compromised the EPA’s own scientists studying dioxins. Hernandez arrived at the EPA after a stint as dean of civil engineering at New Mexico State University. For most of 1981, 1982, and early 1983, when Hernandez was finally asked to resign, he put the power and prestige of his office at the service of Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm and 2,4,5-T and a company that was used to getting its way inside the EPA.

In 1979, before Hernandez arrived in Washington, the EPA had concluded that the heavy dioxin contamination of the Tittabawassee River and Saginaw Bay in Michigan was the direct result of an influx of wastewater from Dow Chemical’s Midland works, a 1,900-acre manufacturing plant. EPA charged that Dow was the most significant source, if not the only source, for that dioxin pollution.
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As others at the EPA had done before him, Hernandez was interested in making Dow look good. He took the highly unusual step of giving the company a copy of an internal dioxin report prepared by Dr. J. Milton Clark, a scientist working for the agency’s Region V out of Chicago. This report explained the risks that dioxins and furans (highly toxic dioxin-like chemicals) posed to wildlife and humans in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, where the Dow plant was located. The report emphasized the extraordinary low levels of TCDD, in parts per trillion, that killed or caused cancer in wildlife. Clark later said it was “entirely inappropriate for Hernandez to let Dow comment directly on the draft report.”
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More than anybody else on the EPA’s staff in Chicago, Valdas V. Adamkus, the acting regional administrator, was responsible for the dioxin report. He staked his reputation and political survival on its findings. “The toxicological calculations indicated a substantial cancer risk from the consumption of contaminated fish,” Adamkus reported to David Kee, director of the Air and Hazardous Materials Division at EPA headquarters in Washington. Yet amazingly, Washington’s EPA staff, while not disputing the study’s conclusions, suggested his conclusions be removed “in order not to alarm an overly sensitive public.”
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Hernandez was clearly aware of the findings of the dioxin report, and his decision to hand an internal EPA report to Dow was both inappropriate and irresponsible. Adamkus would later testify under oath that he was “disturbed, almost destroyed” that Hernandez would give the report to Dow Chemical—which, of course, was quite pleased with Hernandez’s decision. Dow now had a chance to censor the report, and it did—demanding in telephone conversations with senior EPA officials, including David Kee, that the EPA delete from the report all references to Agent Orange and the dioxin pollution of the Tittabawassee River and Saginaw Bay. It also demanded that nothing be said about the EPA’s Alsea study, or that dioxins cause cancer and birth defects, or that it was hazardous to eat fish from the Great Lakes.
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