Hooker's Other Love Canals
TALLMER, MATT
Hooker's Other Love Canals Chemical dumping as a corporate way of life BY MATTTALLMER If you head south for ninety miles or so from Sacramento, California, you get to Lathrop, a town of about...
...His son Wayne, and Wayne's family, used to live there...
...over a period of years the bones become so brittle they snap under the slightest pressure...
...They went to the company and demanded that Hooker start testing the workers...
...James Truchan, the supervisor of environmental enforcement, showed up at the plant one afternoon...
...Matt Tallmer is a free-lance writer in New York...
...The document, to be filled out by a state official with information provided by the company, listed what wastes were produced by each plant, and where they were being disposed of...
...One Oxy executive wrote to another that if "we stop [dumping] now, we may escape unnoticed...
...Two years later, it became apparent that Hooker's response did not correspond with the facts...
...After several months at home, his headaches, dizziness, and nausea stopped, and he went back to work...
...The water contained dangerous amountsof Mirex, dioxin, and Kepone, one of the most toxic chemicals...
...We have evidence that Hooker officials knew that if DBCP was improperly handled it caused cancer and sterility," said Robert Ciaetti, Barbara Allen's attorney...
...After a brief skirmish in court, Hooker agreed to give them an edited copy of the report...
...One of the pesticides Trout worked with was DBCP, which is suspected of causing cancer, birth defects, and male sterility...
...But even more upsetting to area residents and environmental experts are the reports of water pollution...
...However, I don't feel it would be wise to explain the discrepancy to the state at this time...
...The drums were thrown into an open-air pit, and Hooker officials at the scene made little attempt to cover them with dirt...
...And, says Fred Armagost, the Department of Health doctor has seen an improvement in Wayne's children since they moved away from it...
...In December 1979, Trout started having migraines again...
...In 1977 the Department of Environmental Conservation sent a hazardous waste survey to all chemical companies in the state...
...He needed work...
...An epidemiological study by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union shows unusually high rates of lung, liver, and kidney cancer, leukemia rates almost triple the average, and increased rates of birth defects, spontaneous abortions, misPictured are Fred Armagost's granddaughters, Lisa Jasper, Susan Jasper, and Stephanie Armagost...
...They also cause acro-osteolysis, a degenerative disease of the bones in the hand and fingers...
...his three young children used to do the same...
...Under Hooker, the plant has made polyvinyl chloride, a plastic used in most of the plastic products on the market...
...The state Department of Environmental Conservation reported that there is "likely contamination of the area's groundwaters...
...In December 1975, a tank car on the grounds of Hooker's chemical plant in Niagara Falls exploded, spewing over several miles its toxic payload—chlorine gas, which was used as a chemical warfare agent during World War I. Four Hooker workers died in the accident, and eighty others were hospitalized, including five people who had been in a department store five miles away from the blast...
...Mirex was found at levels of seventy-nine parts per million a few hundred yards away from the site, but on the site itself, the levels were found only in the parts per billion...
...The people would have nowhere to work...
...He found more than 20,000 barrels...
...The document proved the plant couldn't meet our rules," said John Bottcher, assistant counsel for the Department of Environmental Regulation...
...Hooker never told this to the Department...
...The truckloads "smelled bad" and created "problems...
...Hooker told an official from the Department that the Hicksville plant wastes were being shipped to "unknown . . . off-site dumps" in New Jersey...
...But "for economic reasons," Hooker's own report noted, the plant continued to give off 400 pounds of fluoride daily—except when the Department of Environmental Regulation tested the air, when it switched to a cleaner but less profitable chemical mix...
...Residents of the area have known for years that Hooker discharged plant wastes directly into the Suwanee River...
...The company also kept two sets of air emissions test results...
...Many more states would join the ranks, if they took the advice of James Truchan of Michigan, who spent four years investigating Hooker operations at White Lake...
...The Department charged that the Bloody Run Creek dump was "run rather carelessly by Hooker...
...But during his absence, workers at the plant had begun talking among themselves about his cancer and about the illnesses that were affecting many of them...
...Hooker Chemical's corporate reputation was, of course, seriously tarnished by the international media attention focused on Love Canal, the site of an old company waste dump...
...The problem," said former Federal investigator Gary Keyser, "is that they just threw the stuff out into the air and let it rot...
...After he got married, he applied for a job at the local business—Oxy...
...When Hooker refused to answer Grumman's letters, the company sent its evidence against Hooker to the Department of Environmental Conservation...
...That version contained enough evidence to make Hooker and three company executives plead no contest to charges of violating the emissions standards and attempting to cover up the violations...
...dioxin, the most toxic synthetic compound ever made, and 2.4,5-Trichlorophenol...
...In 1953, the city of Niagara Falls had paid Hooker one dollar for the land on which the school was built-land covering the now-famous dump...
...When confronted with these charges...
...Other Oxy memos noted that the dumping had "destroyed the usability of several area wells...
...Another of my concerns," Henkin said, "is that there were no follow-up studies...
...calculate the potential liability...
...People in Lathrop admit that if it weren't for the chemical plant, the town would not appear on the map...
...The tests found Trout and twenty-seven of his fellow workers to be sterile...
...determine the number of potential claims for cancer and sterility...
...Also in Niagara Falls, across town from the Love Canal neighborhood, is a forested area with a bird sanctuary and a creek...
...Love Canal may have been one of Hooker's best-managed operations...
...The girls' mothers lived at Armagost's house during their pregnancies...
...It has all the ingredients of a typical Long Island suburb: one public school, appropriately named Hicksville High, a volunteer fire department, no local police force, no hospital— nothing to distinguish it from the myriad of other Nassau County suburbs that sprang up just after World War II...
...The substance was found to be coming from a landfill in that town, next door to the school...
...Barely a year after the transfer...
...Both pvc and vc cause angiosarcoma of the liver, until recently the rarest form of cancer known...
...Trout began having dizzy spells...
...It was later dismissed with no action taken...
...In 1979, Barbara Allen filed suit against the company charging that her late husband, William, had died as a result of exposure to the pesticide DBCP...
...In 1976, the Environmental Protection Agency took soil samples in and around the dump...
...If that's true...
...The reports which showed the plant operating in compliance with the rules were given to the state investigators...
...A generation later, as leaching wastes began to be linked to miscarriages, birth defects, and other ailments, more than 200 families fled their homes...
...Four years later, he was transferred to the Agriculture Chemical Division, where pesticides were made and stored...
...11 "Assume that 50 percent of the normal rate for those exposed may file claims...
...Also the normal cancer rate for the type of tumor DBCP is suspected of causing...
...Or Wayne Armagost...
...But long, hard looks won't help Michael Trout...
...The school board sold it to a private developer who built houses on top of the chemical barrels...
...As a result, large quantities of chemicals have leached off the site, contaminating the surrounding area and the creek...
...Attorney James Brady to look into charges that Hooker officials had covered up the dumpings for more than twenty years...
...The discrepancy concerned the disposal of "Oxy's" wastes...
...Because of the creek's deep red clay base, it is known as Bloody Run Creek...
...Before Hooker took it over, the plant was used to make rubber during the war...
...Hooker's Other Love Canals Chemical dumping as a corporate way of life BY MATTTALLMER If you head south for ninety miles or so from Sacramento, California, you get to Lathrop, a town of about 2,000 people—too small to have its own newspaper...
...His children all suffer from similarly mysterious symptoms...
...In February 1976, Trout underwent an operation to remove the tumors...
...This 1980 picnic at the Armagost homestead brought family members together, but doctors now tell them not to repeat the event...
...The EPA's safe level of Mirex is 0.9 parts per billion...
...Trout had no proof, and did not know how to begin to get it, so he let the matter drop...
...Officials requested a copy of the report and Hooker refused...
...Five of the workers have since died...
...There is only one landfill in Brentwood, and no traces of vc-related chemicals have been found in it...
...But they all kept working at the plant...
...The barrels contained vc, pvc, vc resin, and TMA, a chemical which causes inflammation of the lungs and short-circuits the body's immunological system...
...Hooker denied that charge in court papers, but a year after the suit was filed The New York Times printed an article showing that chemical workers were, indeed, coming down with the same type of tumor...
...Hooker is the only producer of vc in any form on Long Island, and Nassau County health chief Dr...
...When we caught one of the big boys—the DuPonts or Dows—doing it, they cleaned it up, paid for health studies, and provided money to study the pollution effects...
...Or William Allen...
...At times, he simply could not breathe properly...
...a pesticide used in making Agent Orange, the Vietnam defoliant...
...Despite such warnings, there are no official plans to move residents away...
...Tools found in the pits were so "hot" from radiation that they were taken to a high-level dump site for reburial...
...What Lathrop does have is a chemical plant operated by the Occidental Chemical Company...
...Hooker was well aware of acro-osteolysis and its causes...
...We believe Grumman workers have been drinking contaminated water for years," said Donald Middleton, the head of the Long Island office of the State Department of Environmental Conservation, "contaminated because of Hooker's dumping...
...At the last count, there were more than 80,000 tons of chemical wastes there...
...Hooker had no permit to dump on Long Island...
...Hooker, in turn, is a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum...
...More recently, reports have surfaced suggesting that workers at the Niagara Falls plant have been regularly exposed to dioxin...
...Fifty miles west of Jacksonville, Florida, Hooker runs a phosphate processing plant in the town of White Springs...
...Two years after the dump was discovered, the state of Michigan took the company to court...
...He took the company to court and got it to pay for the wasteland it had created...
...Wells near the dump site were "contaminated to the point of being poisonous to animals and possibly to humans," one memo noted...
...The officials had long suspected that something was wrong at the plant because scores of dead fish would wash up after Hooker had "disposed of" chemicals...
...In 1978, Wayne Armagost lost his job because he had "chronic breathing problems...
...They are wrong...
...Grumman officials discovered the contamination in 1973 and first went to Hooker and asked that the company clean up its mess...
...The twenty-eight workers filed suit against Hooker and Oxy, charging that their sterility had been caused by the chemicals they worked with and, in some cases, made...
...All the cases were settled out of court, for amounts ranging from $7,000 to $250,000, after a physician hired by Hooker wound up backing the contractors' claims...
...Today, two Grumman wells have been closed because traces of vc or pvc have been found in them...
...As a boy Wayne swam and fished in the creek...
...The memo, on Hooker stationery, lists six mathematical steps to determine whether risk to the company is low enough...
...Trout began his term at Oxy by cleaning up the barrels and drums that day-shift workers would leave lying around the plant...
...Truchan says now "our concerns are with clean-up...
...Love Canal got its name from civil engineer William T. Love, who dreamed of building a canal around nearby Niagara Falls in the late 1880s...
...In 1978, the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation began receiving reports of possible air and water emissions violations by Hooker...
...The doctor found that Trout had brain cancer...
...The state has been looking into that...
...At the other end of New York state, just sixty miles east of New York City and five stops away on the Long Island Railroad, is the town of Hicksville...
...The entire family has been through a battery of medical tests, but none of the examinations has pinpointed the cause of their illnesses...
...One Congressional staff member who has investigated chemical waste disposal, but did not want his name used, said, "Hooker is one of the handful of companies that do this again and again...
...Memos released by the Congressional subcommittee indicated Hooker's uncertainty about where its own wastes were going...
...in iy/3, tne operators ot tne Bethpage dump refused to take any more barrels and drums from Hooker...
...All we can do is sit back and watch the cancers develop...
...The truth was that Oxy had been burying the wastes behind the plant since 1953...
...When Hooker officials publicly denied responsibility, the state slapped Hooker with a fine of more than $500,000...
...He knew what it was...
...Except the chemical plant...
...He went to his family doctors but they could find nothing wrong...
...one EPA official said, "then the residents have been drinking that crap for years...
...Marta Trout is not the only widow of an Oxy worker to file suit...
...Hooker executives merely said that they had "a few—maybe twenty or thirty" barrels behind the plant...
...In June 1979, a House subcommittee investigating hazardous waste disposal released a Hooker memo which reported that from 1946 until 1968 "any and all solid wastes in drums" from the Hicksville plant were shipped to an old municipal landfill in the nearby town of Syosset, in clear violation of Article 27...
...But in April 1980, vc monomer was found in a school in Hauppauge, two miles from Brentwood...
...The entire project was a fiasco for the company: As of 1978 there were 478,300 pounds of what Hooker memos called "major current environmental pollution" at the dump...
...Hooker fights you every step of the way...
...The others were hidden in company files...
...According to confidential notes of the meeting, "A representative of Hooker stated inasmuch as Hooker was the only producer of vc in the area, the company would accept responsibility for vc in the Grumman wells...
...After that dump was shut down, the wastes were shipped to another municipal dump in Bethpage, to the southeast of Hicksville...
...The assessment report also informed state officials that "it was necessary to retest the plant five or six times" to get a test showing compliance...
...Mirex, a pesticide linked to cancer and sterility...
...Hooker began dumping chemicals into a ditch on the banks of Bloody Run Creek...
...Family members would get rashes after swimming...
...Three summers ago, state officials warned area residents against drinking the water or eating fish from White Lake...
...Hooker just took the stuff and dumped it wherever the hell they damn well pleased," Truchan said...
...Most people assume that Love Canal is the only place where Hooker left its dirty footprints...
...The chemical firm was also aware of a New York State law, Article 27 of the Environmental Conservation Law, which forbids the dumping of hazardous wastes without a permit...
...the soil of Love Canal, part of clean-up and relocation efforts that have already cost $95 million...
...Grace ('Granny') Huebner lived at Love Canal, where she made a living selling cacti she raised at home...
...Hooker dumped a variety of chemicals into the pit, including benzene, which has been called the most powerful carcinogen known...
...like almost all of Armagost's grandchildren, the three have had severe chronic respiratory problems...
...Fred Armagost began telling state officials in the early 1960s that the creek behind his home was a hazard...
...carriages, and stillbirths among the workers' families...
...Back in Lathrop, California, a document surfaced two years ago that sheds new light on the Occidental Chemical Company's operations in that little town...
...It was the only business in town...
...The states of Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio are now investigating Hooker or Oxy operations...
...Then he began to feel nauseated, and then came migraine headaches...
...through the Chemical Manufacturers Association, it helped sponsor the 1973 research at the University of Michigan which pinpointed the disease...
...In June 1979, the Department found that Hooker had written a facility assessment report on the White Springs plant three months earlier...
...Finally, one doctor sent him the ninety miles north to see a specialist in Sacramento...
...The agencies are looking into charges that Hooker conducted an open-air dumping operation, similar to the one at Bloody Run Creek and possibly with the same results...
...Area residents say they have increased rates of birth defects, cancer, sterility, heart attacks, convulsions, and nerve damage...
...In June 1980, a Federal grand jury was empaneled by U.S...
...Trout went to a company official and told him of his cancer, and his suspicion that it nLike a malignant growth, a waste holding tank rises from was caused by chemicals...
...The plant is on the banks of the Suwanee River, which environmental officials believed was one of the last unpolluted rivers in the United States...
...Now they believed they knew what the trouble was: Hooker, the former employe said, was taking barrels of chemical waste and dumping them on vacant company property behind the plant...
...Niagara Falls, New York, like Lathrop, California, is a small town that has provided several episodes in the long history of mishaps at Hooker facilities...
...The company provided no warning to the workers, no protective equipment, nothing...
...Two workers died in a I960 accident that exposed them to another toxic gas...
...There, in addition to the chemicals and wastes dumped at Syosset, the company dumped DMF, a highly toxic acid, and "various other organic residues...
...They said the firm shipped the wastes to a "private (?) landfill in Brentwood...
...their bathing suits were impossible to clean...
...Four hundred students were moved out of the Ninety-ninth Street Elementary School in 1978, when the results of the first Love Canal health studies came in...
...Starting in the early 1950s, just after the dump at Love Canal closed...
...The legal limit on fluoride emissions into the air amounts to thirty-four pounds per day at White Springs...
...The memo concluded that there was no "signifiant risk due to exposures at the planned levels...
...Workers had been sprayed with liquid wastes, and once a truck left a half-mile trail of wastes along a public street...
...Another Hooker employe at Lathrop has also filed suit, charging that his son's birth defects were caused by DBCP...
...Any state which has a Hooker plant in it had better take a damn good, long, hard look at that plant," Truchan said...
...Oxy and Hooker now face fines of $25,000 per day, per violation...
...Hooker also sent to the Bethpage landfill drums that were too damaged to be resold...
...Among them: ^"Determine the normal temporary or permanent sterility rate in the general population...
...Oxy had told California authorities the wastes were being "processed" and shipped, by truck, around the country...
...After an operation to remove this cancer, he died on December 15, at the age of twenty-eight...
...In 1953 Hooker turned the land over to the local school board...
...Department of Environmental Regulation investigators have subpoenaed and received the edited portions of the assessment report, in an attempt to "shed some light" on the discharges...
...The only job open was on the night shift, but Trout took it...
...I really don't feel comfortable signing this," he wrote...
...In 1974, 140 private contractors hired to build an addition to a Hooker plant in the state sued the company, charging that exposures to chlorine have left them impotent, sterile, and without the senses of taste and smell...
...In addition...
...The document was a memo from a safety engineer to his boss...
...The doctors are continually hollering at them to stay out of here,' Fred Armagost says...
...What risk there was, one Hooker document noted, boiled down to "the potential economic impact of litigation by people who might claim to be affected...
...When polyvinyl chloride (pvc) is made, the process produces waste forms of pvc, vinyl chloride (vc), and vc monomer— a carcinogenic gas...
...Shortly after Michael Trout died and the lawsuits started at Lathrop, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DBCP in forty-eight states—all but Alaska and Hawaii...
...But it was not until last year that state and Federal investigators began looking at the plant's operations...
...The executive told Trout he had to prove it in order to get the company to do anything...
...They have no regard for anything but getting rid of their wastes, and they don't care where they put it or what they do with it...
...Then came the nausea and the dizzy spells...
...As in most rural areas, the Niagara Falls residents get their drinking water from underground wells, which tap the groundwater supply in the aquifers...
...Michael Trout lived in Lathrop for most of his life...
...But that did not stop Hooker officials from writing a two-page memo discussing the possibility of re-entering the DBCP market, should the ban be lifted...
...David Harris blamed the presence of the chemical in the school on the company—a charge that Hooker denies...
...For years no one listened, but now, he says, the EPA believes some 470 nearby homes may be affected...
...A suggestion to build a plasticizer recovery plant at Hicksville was rejected as "not economically attractive," and an idea to build an incinerator was turned down because "the capital costs would be high...
...The company settled out of court and agreed to pay for clean-up (estimated at close to $20 million) and pay more than $1 million in penalties...
...Occidental posted a $2 million guarantee on the clean-up in case Hooker did not fulfill its obligations...
...The company dumped DDT, DEF (another deadly pesticide), DBCP, uranium, and radium in its own back yard...
...Several years ago, Huebner noticed that she developed rashes whenever she worked with the plants in her back yard-and that a tarlike chemical was bubbling up through the soil there...
...They believe they are suffering because of Bloody Run Creek...
...In March 1980, his widow, Marta Trout, filed a $4.5 million wrongful death suit against Oxy and Hooker...
...In 1977, a former employe at Hooker's White Lake, Michigan, plant started talking to state environmental officials...
...That was in 1970...
...f "Estimate the probable average judgment or settlement which would result from a claim...
...Hooker executives had been "less than cooperative" about cleaning it up, the state charged...
...Oxy, as the company is called, is owned by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Company of Buffalo, New York...
...In tiny Taft, Louisiana, Hooker has another chemical plant...
...I am charging," she said, "that he died as a result of chemical exposures...
...So far, the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Company and the Occidental Chemical Company have been hauled into court in Florida, Michigan, California, and New York (in a civil, not criminal, prosecution...
...The Bethpage landfill is virtually next door to Grumman Aerospace's huge plant...
...Many farmers in the surrounding communities have complained for years that the smoke belching from the plant's stacks was killing their crops and livestock...
...Just off its banks stands the two-level, wood frame house of Fred Armagost...
...Dumping has not been the least of Louisiana's chemical problems...
...In 1979, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued a report on toxic wastes in New York State...
...Since 1947, Hooker has operated a facility on New South Road in Hicksville...
...But there] are definitely some problems down there...
...Indians who once lived on its banks believed it ran with blood, not water...
...The plan fell through after a depression cut off all of Love's money, and in the late 1930s the site was sold to Hooker, which used the abandoned canal as a dump site for hundreds of tons of chemicals and chemical wastes...
...Now they aren't sure...
...That type of tumor is showing up in chemical workers throughout the country...
...But the Armagosts, and a pediatrician from the New York State Department of Health, think they know what caused them...
...One state investigator conceded that '"we really don't know what all the facts are...
...Robert Henkin, a Georgetown University specialist in taste and smell, said he was worried about the builders' possible exposure to a cancer-causing agent...
...The Department quickly hauled Hooker officials into a private meeting, so that executives of the chemical firm could explain the situation...
...The company wanted to know what was wrong with them, so they could settle the case, but they showed no concern by simply following up on these men, to see what the long-term effects were...
...One neighbor told Federal investigators that his dog had died after drinking well water, and that he had become quite sick...
...Water samples taken by both the EPA and the state show dangerously high levels of Mirex, benzene, and 2,4,5-Tri-chlorophenol...
...Yet Oxy went right on dumping, until state authorities caught up with the company two years ago...
...Before the apparent dumping began at Bethpage and Hauppauge, two in-house solutions to the growing pollution problem were turned down...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
