by Edie Clark
copyright 2002 All rights reserved.
It's the water. That's what Anne Anderson said in 1972 after her three-year-old son Jimmy was diagnosed with leukemia. Not such a ludicrous thought in Woburn, Massachusetts, a city of 35,000 people 12 miles north of Boston, where the water smelled like rotten eggs and ate holes in the plumbing so fast that plumbers couldn't keep up with all the pipes they had to replace; where water ate away the insides of dishwashers and turned brown and scummy like a witch's evil brew when it boiled. But cancer? No one thought it was *that* bad. The board of health, whose water test then consisted of a simple screening for water-borne bacteria such as fecal coliform, said it was safe. This was before you could end a water crisis by going to the grocery store and buying bottled water. There was no such thing. It was before any of the environmental agencies such as the EPA or the DEP existed, and it was six years before Love Canal, an unmistakable environmental watershed in this country. It was two years after the original Earth Day, whose message of impending environmental crisis for the most part stayed sequestered among the counterculture, of which Anne Anderson was hardly a member.
Anne and her husband Charles, a computer systems analyst, lived in East Woburn in a house where they moved soon after their marriage in 1961. Since then, they had brought three children into the world--Jimmy being the youngest--and their lives had completely sidestepped the roiling activism of the sixties. There was nothing, really, in Anne's background that could explain her insistence that the water had made her son sick. Nothing except the fact that she was stubborn and always wanted to know the reason for things.
To go back to that time is a long way for Anne now. She comes home from her job in the courthouse. She is a tall woman with a red tint in her short hair and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes, the color of a mourning dove, show hurt. She starts to peel potatoes and cut up peppers for supper for her son Chuck, who will be home soon. She runs the peppers under the faucet. The water no longer comes from the wells just a few blocks away, the wells that made Jimmy sick. It now comes from Quabbin Reservoir, the source of water for much of greater Boston. She watches the water spray over the vegetables and tries to think back, back 18 years to when she first thought it was the water. She puts the colander on the counter and dries her hands on a towel and sits down at the table in the softly lit kitchen and starts to tell her story.
It was just a simple equation she was making, all those years ago, as she went into Boston, in and out, in and out, sitting in the hospital waiting room while Jimmy had his treatments. Sitting there with her, she'd notice, were neighbors from Woburn. She didn't really know them, but she had seen them taking out the garbage, had passed them pushing their carts down the aisle at the corner grocery store. And her hairdresser had told her about two other children who had leukemia. And they lived right near her. "These kids, none of them were in school yet. It had to be something that they shared. The only thing I could think of was the water or the air," she says. "And the water was so bad. It had to be the water."
It was farfetched back in the early 1970's. Her doctor paid no attention to her ideas. She talked with parents of other leukemic children and they shook their heads. Not even her husband agreed with her theory. "He thought I was a crazy lady," she says. (Seven months before Jimmy died, Charles moved to Canada, overfull with the tragedy of Jimmy's suffering, overfull with Anne's obsession about the water.)
She took a bottle of water to city hall and demanded it be tested, on the spot. If it had been tested, and if the tests used had been able to detect such things, they would have found the liquid in the jar to contain perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, and chloroform, all known carcinogens, in quantities many times higher than acceptable levels. But the city officials refused and sent her home with her jar of fetid brown water, all of her anger and fears bottled up inside. Did they know what it was like, she thought, to watch a son not grow up but instead grow thin and frail and bald? Did they know what it was like to see him hitched to tubes and bottles and machines? Did they know what it was like to go for a walk with him and have him get too tired to walk back and plead with her to wait until it got dark so the other children wouldn't see her carrying him home? This is how the years went by, seven years, in fact. And every year there were more children sick, more children who died. And she wouldn't let go. She wanted to find a reason. The Reverend Bruce Young was her only ally in this chilling war.
They are both a good deal older than they were then, he with his graying hair combed over the top of his head to hid the thinning spot. His office in the rectory of Trinity Episcopal Church is cluttered and full of the busy work of the church. On top of his desk are two Rolodexes, one of them for the church and the other, which is bursting with cards, their edges gray and soft from the work of his fingers, for the fight, the fight about the water. But that Rolodex came after. For a long time, he didn't believe. He speaks in an even, deliberate voice, except when he remembers the day that Jimmy died, when they called him out of the middle of the Sunday service, and then his eyes cloud with tears. "He was 12 years old when he died and never weighted more than 50 pounds," he recalls in a hoarse whisper.
The minister was the one who drove Anne and Jimmy to and from the hospital in Boston. As they drove, Anne would talk. She seemed obsessed with this idea about the water. Because he was a man of God, he listened compassionately. He would nod and feign agreement, only to placate her. After all, her son was dying and she needed to find a reason. "She was an injured mother," he says now. "And the world has to learn to deal with injured mothers."
That is how he saw her. To most everyone else, she was a hysterical mother, and to some she was just plain crazy.
Really more to put a stop to this obsession than anything else, the minister devised a plan. "I felt that if there were facts, she would listen to facts. So I suggested that she and I do a study." He expected to find nothing, that their study would disprove her theory and put an end to the talk. With the help of the nurses at Jimmy's doctor's office, he and Anne drew up a questionnaire. They took out an ad in the newspaper, calling a meeting to be held at the church in October of 1979. "We advertised just for people with children with leukemia, and about 40 people showed up."
Not all of them had children with leukemia. Some had other health problems they wanted to talk about. Someone from Senator Kennedy's office showed up. While they were in the meeting, their cars, parked outside the church were ticketed or towed away. "This was the first sign that we were rattling some cages that didn't want to be rattled," the minister says. "It was harassment." At the meeting they passed out the questionnaire. They spent the next few weeks sorting the information into categories.
When they had most of the information compiled, Anne and the minister got out a map and some push pins. Anne got down on the rectory floor and laid out the map. He called out the quadrants in which these leukemic children lived. G5, he kept saying, and Anne, kneeling over the map, pressed in the pins. G5 was also where Anne and Charles Anderson lived. When they were done, they found 14 children with leukemia within the same section of town, eight of them in the Anderson's neighborhood. And some said that they know of others, who to this day do not want to have their tribulations publicized. So there were more, perhaps, than what the push pins showed.
Mr. Young didn't know if this was unusual. So he took it to someone who might, Jimmy's doctor, John Truman, a man who had often heard, and dismissed, Anne's theories about the water. Mr. Young took him to lunch, and during lunch he showed Dr. Truman the map. "He didn't wait to finish his lunch. He looked at the map, with all the cases in one neighborhood, and he got up and called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta," the minister recalls.
For Woburn, 1979 was a turning point. In the spring and summer before Anne and the minister made these discoveries, a construction crew working near the two municipal wells that provided water to Anne Anderson's neighborhood found some abandoned barrels of chemicals. The same chemicals, most especially the deadly trichloroethylene, were found in the water and the wells were closed in May of 1979. This gave Anne new energy. She had rarely felt like giving up, but once she was ready to quit. "I'd had it. I can remember weeks would go by and I'd get only a few hours of sleep. I can remember setting my alarm to get ten minutes' sleep. But I was driving home, and I went by the cemetery. I turned around, and I went back, to the new section where the children are. I knew they shouldn't be there. I got what I needed."
Another discovery was made in the summer of 1979. An enormous 300-acre toxic-waste dump, stagnant lagoons filled with arsenic and chloroform and literally hundreds of other chemicals whirled together in a slurry, was uncovered during the excavation for an expanding industrial park. The soil was found to be saturated with arsenic to a depth of 15 feet. By now the siren of Love Canal had sounded. In the summer of 1978, on the nightly news, all of us had witnessed families removed from their homes built atop buried canals of toxic waste. There was a new awareness of what it meant to mix our water and our soil with chemicals. The belief that we could stash waste products on vacant lots and bury them and be done with them came to a sudden, stunning halt.
It was too late for Jimmy Anderson. He died in January of 1981, and nine days later a study was released that essentially vindicated Anne Anderson and her nine-year crusade. The study had been done by the Harvard School of Public Health, and it found that there was indeed reason to believe that the water in Woburn was making Jimmy Anderson and the other children sick, reason to believe that the water was causing a new kind of epidemic, new because up until then boards of health and the Centers for Disease Control had concentrated mostly on infectious diseases, which cancer was not considered to be. The other irony was that the chemicals that had infiltrated the water and had been linked to the leukemia cluster were odorless, tasteless, and colorless. So all the signs that had led Anne to suspect the water--ugly smell and horrible taste, the incredibly corrosive qualities--were, remarkably, blameless. "I was right, even though I was wrong!" Anne says in a rare moment of mirth.
Anne Anderson, along with seven other families from her neighborhood who either had a child suffering from leukemia or one who had died from leukemia (there were several families who decided not to join them), filed suit, in 1982, against two of their other neighbors: the giant W.R. Grace (a New York-based chemical company and one of America's largest corporations) whose Cryovac division was just a few blocks from the Anderson's house, and Beatrice Foods, which was cross-lots to them. The illegal dump site found right near the polluted wells had been traced to Grace and possibly to Beatrice. The lawsuit took almost five years. The trial itself was nine months long, one of the longest in Massachusetts history, and numbingly technical, with lengthy testimony from chemists and hydrogeologists. The process is still not over. In 1986 the families settled with W.R. Grace for 8 million. They are still pressing their case against Beatrice Foods. The trial was a land mark because it was the first to establish a link between chemicals in the water and illness and death and the first to establish legal liability for such harm. The money distributed went to defray the enormous legal costs incurred over the long years. It did not, of course, bring back Jimmy anderson or the others who died.
Anne has resumed what could be called a normal life. She still lives in the house where the water changed the course of what might otherwise have been a storybook tale of an American family. She keeps her phone unlisted and goes about a quiet, necessarily private life. She's made Jimmy's old room into a room for her first grandchild when he comes to visit. She no longer works at FACE (For a Cleaner Environment), a watchdog group that she founded in 1979, but she stays in touch with it was it continues to track unusual instance of illnesses or other effects of industry on the local environment.
Not everyone in Woburn considers Anne a hero. Many abhorred her campaign because they felt it jeopardized their property values. Both W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods have closed their Woburn divisions and their plants sit empty, the fences pad- locked. Every once in a while, Anne still gets hate mail, mostly from people who feel that she cost them their jobs, but it doesn't bother her anymore. She can't forget the long years of caring for Jimmy, of the excruciating trails he faced. She can't forget the year she went to the funerals of four children in her neighborhood. And it burns, still, to recall all the ones who called her crazy when she knew she was right.
"I know it's different now than what we had to go through. At least now there is an awareness of this type of issue when there wasn't then, but I would say you still very much have to establish your own problem. Nobody's going to do it for you. If you know something is wrong, take it to the authorities and then be tenacious. You really have to hang in there. You can't let them say that it doesn't exist when it does, and you know it does. You have to stay on top of them and keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Unfortunately."
And the specter of Jimmy's life haunts her. What was it for? she asks. "I know that this has made a difference. That much I know. I just can't reconcile what's happened to him. It didn't make a difference for Jimmy. It didn't help his pain or his suffering; it doesn't ease my pain. I know that the world is a better place because all this was uncovered. People have been made to change, industries operate differently now, and there's all this awareness that there never was before, and it's because we spoke out, we didn't give up. But I've asked every minister that I know, and I still can't get the answer that satisfies me. Tell me, just how did this make a difference for Jimmy? What good did this do for Jimmy?"
In spite of all the publicity about the water in Woburn, perhaps it has not spread far enough. In Bloomfield, Connecticut, a town of 20,000 north of Hartford, Kirsten Cooke has tried to attract attention to all the cancer she knows about on Maple Edge Drive, the quiet tree-lined suburban lane where she grew up. She has never heard of the Woburn case, but she was alarmed to find that her mother, her brother, the lady across the street, another next door, and seven others in that neighborhood of 25 houses have cancer or have died from it. It's the water she says. But nobody listens. Not yet.
