The story behind the stories

By CHARLES C. RYAN

The two Superfund sites in Woburn (Industri-Plex 128 and G & H Wells), a high rate of several cancers, and a cluster of childhood leukemia provided the factual basis for the book A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr, which became the movie A Civil Action, starring John Travolta and Robert Duval. But before the book, and before the movie, there were a number of efforts by citizens, journalists, and several politicians that combined to make Woburn a very unique case.

Anne Anderson is the central figure, no matter how the pie is sliced -- not attorney Jan Schilchtmann, who has reinvented himself in the wake of the book and film. The real story is the story of several people in the city of Woburn. First there was Anne Anderson who would not give up until she learned why her son, Jimmy, had become sick and eventually died from childhood leukemia.

As things became difficult, her pastor, The Rev. Bruce Young, became her mentor and supporter as the pair sought answers to the troubling number of childhood leukemia cases that seemed to be occurring among Woburn children.

My involvement began in the Spring of 1979. And that is a tale in itself. And that's what this piece is about.

From May 1979 until the end of June 1995, when I left the Daily Times Chronicle to become Applications Manager at Essex County Newspapers, I must have written several thousand stories about the city's hazardous waste problems. The stories presented on this web site represent just a tiny handful of the key early stories.

Before all this began, I already had a full-time job covering the police on weekends, the Woburn School Committee, and a variety of other boards and agencies. Once the lagoon of arsenic story was published on September 10, 1979, it caused an increasing number of public meetings to take place. City Council meetings, meetings held by the various state and federal agencies involved, meetings by the Citizens Advisory Committee. Sometimes there were two or three meetings each week. All very long, all very technical. All difficult to write about.

Because everything was so complicated, so technical, so potentially frightening, I adopted a policy of making my stories as comprehensive as possible. I did this because I knew there was no other place the city's residents would be able to read and understand the details of the events which were taking place. The Boston newspapers and TV stations came in on a regular basis, but rarely provided enough detail to really understand what was going on. For me, that was the responsibility of The Daily Times, to inform the public. To provide enough details so members of the public could understand enough to react to the situation in a rational manner.

The story about the lagoon of arsenic took nearly two months to research the chemical information, check facts, and re-research again in terms of potential health effects. The search for information about the 55 barrels of uranium ore dumped in North Woburn also took a month to research -- all while I still did my normal reporting duties. Thus, when the first story broke about the lagoon of arsenic and a Channel 7 reporter came to Woburn and happily pronounced that Woburn had the largest hazardous waste site in the country, I was dismayed, since I had done all the research on the site and hadn't been able to determine just where Woburn ranked. (The EPA eventually ranked the Industri-Plex site 9th in the country in terms of size and complexity.) The TV stations, except for Channel 5 and the 1986 WGBH NOVA piece "Toxic Trials," continued to do sloppy work on the story. More recently American Justice did a well-researched and comprehensive story on the issue.

I had an unusual background for a reporter. I had originally been a physics major when I enrolled at Boston College in 1964. Later I changed my major to English, but kept up my interest in science, taking a number of courses that later played a key role.

An even more important ingredient was how I spent my summer vacations: I drilled water wells for the D. L. Maher Co. The D. L. Maher Co. was the firm which drilled some of the first test wells in the Aberjona River aquifer where G and H wells were later installed. Denis L. Maher told Woburn city officials after the tests that they shouldn't use the water in East Woburn. But in 1963 G well was installed.

Later in 1967 H well was installed and I visited the site during the time the pump test was being run on the new municipal well along with John O'Donnell. I was one of the first people in the city of Woburn to drink from H well.

Twelve years later, on May 7, 1979, that summer work paid off in an unusual way. Sometime the previous weekend a midnight dumper had deposited 184 55-gallon drums on a vacant MBTA lot in North Woburn. (The MBTA is the successor to the MTA that Charlie rode on in the well-known Kingston Trio song.)

There was an entry in the police log that weekend. Monday morning, May 7, I made a number of phone calls and wrote the story about the incident. After I had finished writing the story, I travelled to the site and spoke with several of the officials who were inspecting the barrels, including Richard Chalpin, the regional director of the state's DEQE (Department of Environmental Quality Engineering).

Talking about the dumping, I pointed out to Chalpin that the Aberjona River ran nearby and less than a mile downstream were two municipal wells. I asked if he was thinking of testing the wells. He said yes.

In one of those serendipity kind of events, it turned out that the state had just acquired a new testing device, a gas chromatograph which analyzed the spectral lines of each chemical, allowing the state to test for organic chemicals down to parts per million and parts per billion.

This was new technology. The very first use was on G and H wells. Fewer than two weeks later G and H wells were closed. Woburn Mayor Thomas M. Higgins gave a press release to City Hall reporter William Sullivan about the closing.

There were no details other than there were unspecified contaminants in the wells. That might have been the end of it, but later that summer in early July a City Hall employee called me and said I should find out what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were doing in North Woburn on the Industri-Plex 128 property. Quite a bit, it turned out.

(See Lagoon of Arsenic Found in North Woburn.)

(After I completed all of the research on the lagoon of arsenic story, I called Mayor Thomas M. Higgins. I informed him about what I had discovered and asked for his comments. His response was: "Don't publish it. All you'll do is frighten people." He was right, in one sense, it did frighten people. But he was wrong about the rest of it. I explained to him that as a journalist, I had an obligation to inform the public, and that the people in the city had a right to know about the problem they were facing. That argument didn't sway him.)

After college, I had entered the Peace Corps in 1968 and travelled to India in February 1969 where I spent two years drilling water wells for local villages and training an indiginous crew how to operate the RC 312. (The name stands for Reverse Circulation drilling rig. It could drill a hole 12-inches in diameter up to 300 feet deep, a depth we occasionally exceeded.)

The unique background in well drilling, hydrogeology, and rudimentary courses in biology and chemistry, math and physics, provided a basis no other reporter had.

I did not know all the scientific terms I encountered in those early days, nor all the science, but I understood the basics and was able to get up to speed in a relatively short period of time.

The most difficult part of the story was walking a fine line between respecting the privacy and dignity of the leukemia victims and their families, while still attempting to convey their stories to the public.

The next most difficult thing was finding a context for the discoveries. What did the presence of all of these chemicals mean? How poisonous was the lagoon of arsenic? How deadly were the pools of chromium? Just how nasty was trichloroethylene and the dozens of other chlorinated hydrocarbons eventually found in the ground water? And, finally, what was causing the illnesses, the leukemias? The only known causes of leukemia at the time were radiation (See Low-grade uranium ore dumped in North Woburn) and benzene? (See 65 Chemicals Found in Subsurface Water.)

By the time the trial in federal court rolled around in 1986, I had become the newspaper's managing editor. A seminar I had attended on management skills early on suggested that you should take what you do well and give it so somebody else to do. I assigned the story to Dan Kennedy. He covered the bulk of the trial, though I did go in and cover it several times when Dan took some time off for various reasons.

There is another factor which helped, and hurt my coverage of the events in Woburn. My father, Charles E. "Lucky" Ryan, had been well-known and well-liked by nearly everyone in Woburn. He operated one of the first appliance stores in the city, and most people back then bought their first TV from Lucky.

He was very active civically. He helped rejuvenate the Chamber of Commerce, he was a member, and later Grand Knight, of the Knights of Columbus, a member of the Woburn Rotary, and was a driving force behind the formation of the Woburn Redevelopment Authority, which established one of the first, and most successful urban renewal programs in the state. And, he was a co-founder, along with the same Denis L. Maher mentioned above, of the Woburn Boys Club, which is now the Woburn Boys and Girls Club. He died in 1971.

When I started working for the newspaper in 1971, most of the powers that be believed I would pick up where he left off.

I did, but not quite the way they expected. I had seen the world, I had gone through debates about the Vietnam War, supported efforts for racial equality.

When I came back to my home town, it was to see it through "new" eyes. The comfortable place I had grown up in didn't look quite the same.

One of the very first stories I wrote had a headline which went something like this: "There is no Welcome Wagon for the city's Hispanic population."

Woburn had a number of greenhouses and farms, and it had a growing population of Hispanics who, instead of migrating back and forth just during the work seasons, stayed and started to raise families.

For the most part they were living in substandard buildings in which most people wouldn't house animals -- and they were paying much higher rents than regular apartments. I was appalled to find these conditions in my home town. I was equally appalled to discover that the latent racism I had protested during my college years was alive and well in Woburn. It wasn't right.

I started writing. I toured most of the buildings, had photos taken, and interviewed the residents with the help of Herman Hernandez (my Spanish wasn't up to speed).

And I tackled the Woburn Housing Authority, which was theoretically supposed to provide housing for people living in poverty. But the Housing Authority units were filled with the relatives of most of the city's good old boys and elderly -- no Hispanics, hardly any minorities at all. A lawyer by the name of Al Curran was the director of the authority, but he was rarely there. He had a law practice to run.

Mayor Edward F. Gill took offense when I wrote that first story. Al Curran took offense when I started writing about the Housing Authority. The Board of Health took offense when I made it evident that it wasn't doing its job.

I have offended mayors of the city and other public officials ever since, whenever they weren't doing their jobs.

It appeared that there are two different views, on the part of some, as to what those jobs were.

Some of the officials felt they had been elected or appointed to positions of power and respect, and that members of the public owed them obsequence.

I had the view (and still do) that all public officials, appointed or elected, are servants of the public. They work for me and you. And they have a responsibility to fulfull the requirements and duties of their jobs, and we have an obligation to hold them accountable, and to make sure they live up to those requirements and duties.

That antiquated idea keeps getting me into trouble. I am not now, and never have been, one to respect titles. We are all equal. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence, and reinforced in the Constitution of the United States.

But that doesn't mean that you don't get heat when you speak out. Trust me, you do.

When I began writing about the hazardous wastes in Woburn, that heat was turned up several notches.

The "publicity" about the polluted wells and the elevated levels of some cancers and leukemias, had given Woburn a "bad name," I was told repeatedly.

Logically, it didn't make sense, because the wells that were contaminated, and were the primary avenue of possible exposure to the majority of the pollutants in the city, had been closed in May 1979.

But no one can seriously accuse human beings of being logical.

The newspaper received calls nearly every day from people who were thinking about buying a home in Woburn. They were all worried about the "bad water."

"Is it safe to drink the water?" they'd ask.

"Yes. Where do you live now?" I'd ask. The answer would be Chelsea, Malden, Cambridge, etc.

And I'd tell them that East Woburn was on the same MDC water supply they were drinking in their home town."

But the fears didn't go away.

Real estate prices dropped significantly. A number of projects planned to build new houses were in jeopardy. Gene English, a member of the City Council and a contractor stopped me at City Hall one day and pointed all this out, pleading that I stop writing the stories, that it was causing severe financial hardships (for him). I sympathized, but told him I couldn't stop reporting the facts as they were uncovered; that the people had a right to know what was happening in their city. And that the problem would never be corrected unless it was first identified.

Gene English, Mayor Thomas M. Higgins, and a number of other key city officials and powers that be, were members of the Woburn Lions Club. They were all Woburn residents and professed to love the city. The standing joke at the time was that City Hall was run by the Lion's Club. And for them, I was public enemy number one, along with Anne Anderson and the Rev. Bruce Young.

Once, at a social event, a member of the Woburn Redevelopment Authority (and the Lion's Club) came up to me and remarked: "Your father must be turning over in his grave because of what you are doing to his city." My response was: "I guess you didn't know my father very well." My father cared about people, not property. That particular official was later indicted and convicted for soliciting a bribe. Some time later, the Lion's Club dedicated its annual Halloween Parade to the same individual. The Lion's Club did a lot of good in the city, and still does. But like the mayor, it had a few blind spots. Someday it may take a great step forward in maturity and dedicate that parade to Anne Anderson and The Rev. Bruce Young, but I'm not holding my breath.

Paul L. Haggerty, the publisher of The Daily Times, and Jim Haggerty, the editor, were continually pressured by friends, officials and acquaintances to get me to stop reporting on the city's hazardous wastes.

I knew this because, almost like clockwork, Jim would come back from a Rotary meeting, or Paul would come back from some other event, and suggest we tone down the coverage, that we put it inside and not on the front page. Many other members of the Haggerty family and other employees at the newspaper expressed similar sentiments. They thought Anne Anderson was nuts, and that I was just doing it for the noteriety (as if I needed any).

But, to their credit, Jim and most of the others had enough newspaper background in their blood that they never outright told me to stop. Also, to their credit, as more and more information piled up, most of them changed their mind and accepted the fact that the city had a genuine problem.

Nonetheless, the pressure was there -- all the time.

Even recently, when all of the old stories have been re-energized as a result of the book's success and the release of the movie, Jim still gets pressure to stop putting "bad publicity" about the city in the newspaper.

My biggest disappointment, after all the studies, after millions of dollars have been spent examining the city and its health problems, is that we still do not have a clear answer as to exactly what chemical combination, or synergistic reaction caused the cluster of childhood leukemia. The water, yes. But what was it in the water that caused the illnesses? (See: They are not Statistics.)