A Civil Action.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Between 1964 and 1979, residents in Woburn, Massachusetts, an industrial suburb north of Boston, complained that their tap water had developed a nasty taste, a strong, bleach-like odor, and a peculiar rust color. During the same period, 20 Woburn residents developed leukemia. Most of the victims were children. In one neighborhood, East Woburn, the incidence of leukemia was seven times the normal rate. "If I stand on my front porch," observed the mother of one boy who later died of leukemia, "I can see all these houses where children with leukemia live."

The families of the sick suspected that what doctors viewed as a puzzling statistical "cluster" was really a leukemia epidemic caused by the city's foul drinking water. Eventually, officials discovered that two of the city's public wells were contaminated with trichloroethylene and other industrial chemicals, the apparent sources of which were a nearby tannery and a nearby manufacturing plant. The two wells were shut down, and the leukemia rate dropped back down to normal.

To a public that's been fed a steady diet of environmental horror stories during the past 20 years, this narrative may sound commonplace, but it isn't. Because of considerable uncertainties in enviromnental epidemiology, the number of instances in which the dumping of toxic wastes can be linked, even informally, to horrible sickness and death are few. (Indeed, the most famous toxic waste dump of all, Love Canal in western New York, has yet to yield clear evidence of elevated cancer levels 16 years after its discovery.) It's even rarer that a link between exposure to specific toxic wastes and cancer is affirmned--however tentatively--by an august body like the National Academy of Sciences. But the NAS, in a 1991 report, found such a link in its review of the Woburn leukemia cases.

The families of Woburn were the victims of an injustice whose consequences were unmistakably tragic. But if one accepts their unhappy plight as a given, the families were, by the logic of modern tort law, quite lucky. They knew (as much as anyone can) that industrial pollutants had killed their children, and they knew (as much as anyone can) which factories those industrial pollutants had come from. Rather than drown in helplessness, they could turn their grief to righteous anger against a clear societal wrong and, specifically, against Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace, the deep-pocket corporations that owned the tannery and the manufacturing plant...