Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  “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.2 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 mos
t 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.

  “She calls the State Board of Forestry, which is supposed to have the permits for everybody, and they can’t help her. She calls a few private companies, and she can’t find out. Everybody’s closed over the weekend, and finally it’s Monday afternoon when she finds out the name of the company that has sprayed. Meanwhile, she has become very sick and her children are very sick. Her nose and throat were burning, her eyes were irritated, and her son was vomiting.”

  Four days later, on a Tuesday morning, the company responsible for the spraying sent someone to take blood and urine samples, which, when tested for residues of herbicides, turned out negative.

  “But this is meaningless,” says Hill, who has delegated the dessert-making to her teenage daughter and, having poured us each a second cup of coffee, is seated across from me at a table in the home-economics room. “There’s a doctor in Coos Bay who has worked for some time with people who’ve been exposed to herbicides, and he points out that just because they don’t find traces in your blood or urine doesn’t mean it isn’t someplace else in your body. For example, dioxin is stored in fat tissue. And even if the herbicide has passed through your body there’s no proof that it hasn’t done some damage in passage. An X-ray also passes through your body, but it can do some damage as it travels through. But of course this is all hearsay, you know. In a court of law it would be just that—hearsay.”

  One of the most fascinating and incriminating aspects of the history of herbicide use is that whether reports have come from Vietnamese peasants, Oregon housewives, Arizona potters, or mothers living near the Long Island Rail Road, complaints about the effects of 2,4,5-T on humans and animals have been remarkably similar.

  In Minnesota, a homesteader who had searched for five years to find land that had not been sprayed with chemicals fired a shotgun at a Forest Service Helicopter. But according to columnist Jack Anderson:

  It returned the next day and thoroughly sprayed the forest adjoining the land. Subsequent testing of his water supply by Minnesota health authorities showed traces of herbicide containing dioxin.

  Within a few days of the spraying, his family suffered headaches, nausea, dizziness and diarrhea…

  Another horror story is told by Neddie Freedlund, a farm wife in Wisconsin. After a neighbor sprayed his land with 2,4,5-T, she reports her entire family was seized with intense bellyaches, fever and sleeplessness.

  Her baby began screaming in agony and pulling his hair until bald spots appeared. She subsequently has suffered three miscarriages although she had previously borne six healthy children.

  Freedlund also claims that similar maladies affected her barnyard. There was a dramatic decline in the quantity and quality of the milk produced by two cows. Her pigs gave birth to piglets that were either abnormally large or small. Rabbits had premature and deformed offspring.3

  In his paper “The Effects of Herbicides in South Vietnam,” Dr. Gerald C. Hickey—who was affiliated with Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program when the paper was published by the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council—describes the effects of defoliants on Vietnamese highlanders. The highlanders’ descriptions of the effects of herbicides on their land, animals, and their own health are in many cases similar to those of Americans who have been exposed to herbicides.

  There was a definite pattern in the perceptions regarding the effects of the herbicides on those residing in or near the sprayed zones. The most common symptoms reported were abdominal pains and diarrhea. Informants from Long Djon also reported that in addition to these symptoms, the villagers complained of experiencing a stinging sensation in their nasal passages just after the spray drifted into the settlement. Many developed coughs that lasted more than a month. At Dak Rosa, according to some residents, many villagers went into the swiddens following the spraying, and in addition to the common symptoms noted above, these people broke out with skin rashes that lasted many weeks. Dak Tang Plun residents also reported widespread skin rashes, cramps, diarrhea, and fevers. A Plei Ro-O informant reported these same symptoms, noting that some villagers coughed blood.

  Polei Krong informants stated that the villagers suffered these same ailments, that the skin rashes looked “like they had been burned, with small blisters all over the red areas.” Dak Siang informants noted that after some of the villagers drank from the stream which was in the sprayed area, they became ill with abdominal pains and diarrhea that lasted for days. They also reported that some villagers had eaten bamboo shoots from the sprayed area, after which they became dizzy “like you feel when you have drunk too much from the wine jar,” and this was followed by vomiting. Polei Krong residents, according to one informant, fell ill with abdominal pains, diarrhea, vomiting, and fever within one day after the spraying…

  A difficult area of inquiry concerned possible deaths due to the herbicides. Sickness and death are common occurrences in highland villages, and infant mortality is particularly high. Some of the informants expressed the opinion that there was an unusually high number of deaths, particularly among children, following the spraying. However, they were very cautious in concluding that the spraying affected childbirth.

  Informants from Long Djon had reported a stinging in the nasal passages just after the spray drifted over the settlement, and this was followed by villagers being afflicted with coughs. They added that more children than adults were afflicted, and that “many children died.” The victims developed skin rashes, and those with rashes that did not clear up died. One elderly lady noted that she knew of one stillborn case following the spraying, but she could not say whether it was due to the herbicide (she, like other informants, always pointed out that stillbirths were not unusual in their villagers). At Dak Rosa informants attributed the outbreak of skin rashes to the fact that many villagers went into the swiddens following the spraying. Th
ey also noted that some women carried their small children on their back in the fields, and they brushed against leaves containing the “medicine” that had been sprayed. Some of these children subsequently developed bad rashes all over their bodies. They looked, the informants said, “like insect bites,” and all the victims died. One informant knew of three such deaths. Another informant reported knowing of five stillbirths after the mothers, during pregnancy, had worked in the sprayed swiddens. The informants felt that there was an unusually high number of such deaths following the spraying.

  Most of the informants interviewed reported widespread deaths among their domestic animals following the spraying. The Long Djon informants noted that since they were refugees they had few animals, but most of their chickens and pigs died shortly after the spraying, and the Dak Rosa villagers reported the same thing. Informants from Dak Tang Plun said that all of their chickens, most of their pigs, and some of their cattle died, and the young man from Plei Ro-O reported the same thing, specifying that this occurred within four or five days after the spraying. He also noted that villagers found a number of dead wild animals, particularly wild boar, in the nearby forests. Polei Krong informants also pointed out they found dead wild boar in the forest. They, too, saw all of their chickens, pigs, dogs, and small cattle die, although big cattle survived. Both the Polei Kleng and the Plei Jar Tum villagers said that their pigs, dogs, and chickens died, and the latter added that they also lost cattle. Plei Ngol Drong informants reported that all of the pigs, chickens, dogs, goats, (they noted that goats are “very strong”), and cattle died…

  Although some of these reports may sound highly exaggerated, Dr. Hickey and others have pointed out that before the US sprayed their villages and farmlands, the highlanders of Vietnam had never been exposed to synthetic drugs or chemicals, and it is conceivable that their susceptibility to herbicides was much greater than that of people living in highly industrialized nations where even tests on young children have demonstrated that their bodies contain residues of synthetic substances. Some areas of Vietnam were also sprayed repeatedly with Agent Orange containing levels of TCDD hundreds of time higher than the dioxin content of 2,4,5-T now in use in the United States. Yet even after Dow had “refined” its production process to reduce the content of dioxin in 2,4,5-T, the effects of this herbicide on animals and humans have been extremely toxic, although without a national effort to determine just how many people have become ill, died, lost their farm animals, and left their land because of herbicide spraying, the full extent of the problem may never be known.