Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  Consider, for example, the case of Eve and Vern DeRock, who were living on a farm in an Oregon valley sprayed by International Paper Company in March 1977. One week after the spraying, fifteen of the DeRock’s experimental cows aborted their calves. But like so many people who believed that “killing off a few weeds” would never do anyone harm, the DeRocks dismissed the miscarriages as “bad luck” and tried to re-breed their heifers. Out of fifty-four, only six conceived and the DeRocks, totally unaware that TCDD could be stored in beef fat, wound up butchering a few cows for their own use and selling the rest. The following spring when the surviving cows gave birth, five of their offspring were born with gross deformities and died within four days. Soon the DeRocks began experiencing stomach pains, loss of strength, and “summer colds” that seemed to resist ordinary treatment. Following a fire in an area of their farm that had been treated with herbicides just a few weeks earlier, Vern collapsed. And after a series of tests, doctors performed exploratory surgery on Eve, only to discover chronic liver failure, sending her home with the expectation that she would die as soon as her liver stopped functioning.4

  But through all this the DeRocks did not stop eating the beef and butter they had stored in their freezer. No one from the company that was spraying herbicides or a state or federal health agency appeared to explain to them how dioxin gets into the food chain and consequently into the human body. More than a year after their land had been sprayed and their lives disrupted, if not ruined, the DeRocks happened to see a documentary on Vietnam veterans that explained the health effects of Agent Orange. The documentary also described the research of Vietnamese doctors who have linked Agent Orange to liver cancer in their own country, and the very next day the DeRocks stopped eating the meat and butter they had stored. Their health began to improve, but they have not been compensated for their suffering and, they realize, the Vietnamization of Oregon continues. Even after the emotional and financial hardships the DeRocks have endured, they cannot be sure that the helicopters will not return—there is no law to prevent them from doing so.

  Bonnie Hill has heard this story, and many others. But, she sighs, “after all that’s gone on, it would still be virtually impossible to prove in a court of law that you had been exposed and then, even worse, that what happened afterwards was the result of that exposure. That’s one thing that happened with the miscarriages. Dow just dredged up every possible factor that could influence a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion. Well, of course there are a lot of things that can cause miscarriages, but I really resent their insinuations—it’s been a little more than that, actually—that this is a great area for growing marijuana, and it’s because we don’t want our marijuana plantations killed off that we’re against spraying. Someone has also spread the rumor that our miscarriages are because we are ‘remnants of the sixties flower children’ who overindulge in drugs. I’ve lived here for eleven years, and I can assure you that opponents of herbicide spraying come from all walks of life. Some of them even work for the timber industry, and there are absolutely no marijuana plantations in the Alsea area. That’s one ploy that just won’t work—not here, anyway.”

  Dow has also challenged the EPA’s decision to place a limited suspension order on domestic use of 2,4,5-T,[24] arguing that the Alsea study was not comprehensive enough to merit the EPA’s conclusions.

  “One of the problems we have had all along,” Hill explains, “is that the media has always given people the impression that the EPA’s study was based on only nine women living in the Alsea area, when in fact the EPA actually covered a sixteen-hundred-square-mile area, and of course years of research into the effects of 2,4,5-T influenced their decision as well. I don’t mean to disparage the media altogether, because we received international coverage and it was rather surprising, even a bit overwhelming, because people came from New Zealand, England, Germany, and Australia to talk with us, and this of course increased people’s awareness of this problem. Our main criticism of the EPA study is that they only examined hospital records, rather than talking with more of the people who lived in this area, because very few spontaneous abortions are treated in hospitals these days. They are almost all treated in doctor’s offices, or people don’t go to the doctor at all; it’s just something that happens in their homes. Out of the first eleven spontaneous abortions that we found out about, only two had been treated in hospitals, and that’s a fairly representational figure—all the rest being treated in doctor’s offices—so if the EPA really wanted to get a true feeling of what was going on here they should have gone to doctors’ offices, which is something we pressed for from the very beginning. So actually, in spite of our good feelings about the suspension order, we still feel that no one has really taken a thorough look at just what had been going on here.”

  Prior to the EPA’s Emergency Suspension Order, 2,4,5-T was undergoing scrutiny through a process called RPAR, or “Rebuttable Presumption Against Registration.” Having decided that on the basis of its evidence there were serious questions involved in the continued domestic use of 2,4,5-T, the EPA had announced that it was considering canceling registration for this product, but would give the manufacturer the opportunity to present arguments for keeping the herbicide on the market. The Emergency Suspension Order superseded RPAR and the two hearings were merged into one, which was to be divided into two sections—first, the risks involved in, and second, the benefits derived from using 2,4,5-T.

  During the second section of the EPA’s hearings, Dow Chemical was joined by fifty-four corporations and trade associations, including the National Cattlemen’s Association, the National Forest Products Association, and the American Farm Bureau in opposing the EPA’s possible cancellation of 2,4,5-T. The US Department of Agriculture also intervened with information that supported Dow’s position. Intervening on behalf of affected citizens were the Environmental Defense Fund and the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP), an organization with fifty member groups in five northwestern states. Following arguments in favor of and against the continued registration of 2,4,5-T, an administrative law judge was to make a recommendation to the EPA’s administrator, whose decision would be subject to a lengthily appeals process. But in March 1981, before testimony had been completed, the EPA agreed with Dow’s request to suspend the hearings and negotiate a settlement behind closed doors.

  “Our reaction to the news was one of anger,” wrote the NCAP staff in their quarterly magazine, NCAP News. “To so compromise a public process as to render it meaningless is an outrage to all citizens. Instead of an orderly public airing of the risks and benefits of 2,4,5-T and a decision by an administrative law judge, we have gotten the backroom deal. The closed-door negotiations have short-circuited the orderly hearing process, stifled the disclosure of essential information, and effectively excluded citizen representation.”5

  “I think they knew that no one really had any information on the benefits of T, either economic or otherwise,” laughs Hill, “but no matter which way things go, Dow pretty much wins because the EPA will be closed down before long anyway. The Reagan administration didn’t even appoint an administrator for the agency until four months after the president took office, and their funding has been cut by 40 percent this year; yet they were always under funded. And it’s ironic that at a time when the EPA seems to be needed more than ever, some of the best people are leaving because they are unable to deal with the frustration of working for an administrator and an administration whose idea of regulating the environment is that you should pretty much let industry do whatever it wishes.”

  As I listen to Bonnie Hill it becomes increasingly clear that she has not come to these mountains to be a weekend woodswoman, stapling NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING signs to the trees on her acreage so the rednecks won’t ravage the wildlife. Nor has she chosen a life style that will enable her to return to her parents’ suburban home and, while the bathtub fills with steaming water, rail against the parasitical and platitudinous quality of urban-s
uburban life. She does not like what some of the people who work for the BLM, Forest Service, or private timber companies are doing to the land, but she does not hate the men who are doing it. Having lived not just on but in the land for over a decade, she realizes that the ice-clear streams, the trees, centuries old and draped in layers of lichen, the elk and the deer and the trout can get along without human begins; but she cannot imagine her family getting along without the land. What seems to upset and bewilder her the most is why everyone doesn’t love the forests as much as she and her neighbors do—a question that has perplexed Native Americans for more than two hundred years. The answer, as she has heard more than one professor of Ag-Economics say, “is of course complex.”

  Although even the most fervent opponents of 2,4,5-T would concede that Dow has managed to reduce the amount of TCDD in this herbicide, no one is quite certain just how much 2,4,5-T is currently being sprayed on rangelands and rice plantations, or even how much of this herbicide is actually manufactured each year. The amount produced is considered a trade secret, but even if one were able to determine the exact number of gallons produced, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover with any precision just where and in what quantities 2,4,5-T is being used. Neither the EPA nor the states in which herbicides are used have the financial resources or manpower to spot-check even a small percentage of the helicopters that douse our national forests, rangelands, and rice plantations with defoliants. Moreover, there is little if any environmental testing for residues of TCDD that might find their way into the water, soil, and food chain following the application of herbicides contaminated with dioxin.

  Speaking of the difficulties involved in such testing, Dr. Arthur H. Westing, chairman of the Science Department at Hampshire College and a man whom Dow considers one of the “fifty-nine top world experts in dioxin,” explains that “In the whole world there are only about six or eight laboratories that have the capabilities of measuring dioxin at the levels of concern, and I think four of these labs are here in this country. There’s one in Wisconsin, there’s one at Harvard, Nebraska, Beltsville, and possibly Du Pont can do it; so there’s four or five labs. There’s one lab in Switzerland and one in Sweden, and those are the only labs in the whole world where you can do the kind of dioxin analysis that needs to be done in order to examine the levels of concern. But we’re talking about a theoretical capability that, however, doesn’t exist. For example, consider Canada, a developed country, a rich country with a large forestry industry that uses, or did use, a lot of 2,4,5-T, yet they could not test for dioxin. There was no laboratory in the country where they could see whether a problem was building up in the environment. On the other hand, it’s not so difficult, although it is still difficult, to do the testing on the actual 2,4,5-T. Probably thirty or forty labs can do that around the country. You’re talking about parts of tenths of hundreds of parts per million of a chemical, that is dioxin in this case, and so where the problem lies is that if Dow goes perking along and says, ‘We’re making the stuff and it’s safe,’ you have to take their word for it. But I shouldn’t pick out Dow, I mean any company. You just have to take their word for it because you and I couldn’t test for it. I was in Vermont and I discovered that neither the Vermont Department of Health nor the University of Vermont had the capability of checking whether or not the shipments of 2,4,5-T coming in were safe. No one in the entire state has this capability. Now you can tool up for that, but it hasn’t been done.

  “But to go back to the question of environmental testing, that now costs $750 to $1,000 a sample if you have it done by contract. For instance, you could ship it to the University of Nebraska and they’ll do it for you, but obviously you can’t do that very often. So the problem is not that you might not be able to reduce the content of dioxin in a herbicide so it might be a conceivably safe level, but that you must take the chemical companies’ word that the shipments will come through safe. And secondly, you can’t continually test to see whether there is a buildup in one place or another, because beyond the safe manufacture of chemicals there has to be some assurance that they will be safely used. In other words, even if the applicators are told that they shouldn’t spray into a stream or reservoir, who’s really going to find out whether they do it or not? Because who’s out there in the woods watching them every day?

  “And then, of course, what about accidents? In Missouri, for example, someone in totally good faith got rid of wastes that had dioxin in them, and then the people who were paid to get rid of the waste, rather than doing it in a proper way, simply dumped it along the wayside. Nobody can really test for it readily without a lot of money and expertise, so how do we really know whether or not Vermont Yankee [a nuclear power station], which is just up the road from here, releases an unsafe level of radiation one day? They aren’t going to tell anybody about it. They do or they don’t, but you don’t know if they do or they don’t. And it’s the same with dioxin, and it’s a nasty thing.”

  The Missouri incident to which Dr. Westing refers occurred in 1971 at three horse arenas in eastern Missouri that had been sprayed with waste oil containing approximately 328 parts per million dioxin. The oil came from a plant that produced 2,4,5-T for use in Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and later made hexachlorophene. Shortly before the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, which leased the plant, went out of business, it hired a waste hauler to remove eighteen thousand gallons of contaminated oil. The hauler, who later signed an affidavit declaring he was unaware that the oil contained dioxin, sprayed five thousand gallons of his cargo on the three horse arenas to keep down dust.

  According to Thomas Whiteside, of the eighty-five horses exercised in the arenas, fifty-eight horses became ill and forty-three died.[25] At least twenty-six pregnant mares aborted, and foals exposed in utero died at birth or soon after. Six of the foals were born with birth deformities. In addition to the horses, hundreds of rodents, birds, cats, and dogs died, ten people reported rashes, headaches, and diarrhea, and two children were hospitalized, one of them with an inflamed kidney and internal bleeding. Twelve years later the children are still ill and have been warned by doctors that they “face an increased risk of cancer and birth defects.”6

  On October 1982, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that significant levels of dioxin have been found in fourteen sites in Missouri, and that eleven more sites in that state may contain dangerous amounts of dioxin. The EPA also said that approximately forty-eight pounds of dioxin contained in the waste oil from Northeastern Pharmaceutical are missing. Investigators have found dioxin in fish caught up to eighty miles downstream from the plant, and dangerous levels of dioxin have been discovered in a residential area where soil removed from the three horse arenas was deposited in 1973.

  Most disturbing about the Missouri incident is that the company responsible for disposing of the toxic waste did so without attempting to find out what effect the chemicals might have on the environment, a practice so widespread in the United States that at least one state, New York, has trained an armed task force to prevent the continued dumping of toxic wastes into its landfills, lakes, rivers, and forests. Shortly before the first members of the task force completed their training, dioxin had been discovered in striped bass caught in the Hudson River, and in forty-five fish samples taken from Lake Ontario.

  Can the Environmental Protection Agency, inadequately funded and understaffed, really protect the American environment from the deluge of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxic substances that, their manufacturers argue, are necessary if we are to “maintain economic growth and a high standard of living”? There is reason to believe that it cannot. In 1972, with the passage of the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act (FEPCA), Congress provided the EPA with a legal basis by which it could “duly process all new pesticide registration applications and pesticide residue tolerance petitions,” as well as review and, “only if compatible with human and environmental health,” register some of the approximately
fifty thousand pesticides previously registered over the past thirty years. Congress set October 1976 as the deadline for the completion of this Herculean task.

  Under FEPCA, the EPA was responsible for determining whether pesticides registered would “perform their intended function without unreasonable adverse effects” on human health and the environment.

  In addition to more conventional toxicity data, pesticide companies were required under FEPCA to show: 1) animal testing data, indicating whether their products could cause birth defects, tumors, and interference with reproductive capacity or other harmful chronic effects and 2) data on the effects of exposure to fish, mammals and birds. If the administrator of the EPA determines through a risk/benefit analysis of a certain pesticide that it causes “unreasonable adverse effects” he or she may “restrict, suspend, or cancel the use of the pesticide.”7

  Faced with a monumental task and a minimum of human power to accomplish it, the EPA began devising shortcuts for reviewing data, one of which was the organization of products of a similar chemical structure into “batches.” Thus the EPA managed to cut down the number of products it reviewed from the fifty thousand that are actually on the market to the fourteen hundred active ingredients in those products—a practice that failed to consider either the possible consequences of combining these ingredients in one product or the toxic properties of what scientists have called “inert” ingredients. Short of qualified staff that could evaluate complicated data on the effects of a particular substance on laboratory animals, the EPA’s task force resorted to a cursory examination of data that had been submitted to the agency by manufacturers in support of reregistration of their products. Although manufacturers often failed to include any chronic toxicity testing in their “research conclusions,” the EPA staff routinely decided the safety of a product on the basis of the manufacturer’s “research.” This “cooperation” continued in spite of the fact that “in virtually every instance, independent pathologists diagnosed many more cancerous and precancerous tumors in the test animals than did the original manufacturer’s laboratory pathologists.”8