A COMPANY TOWN MAKES PEACE WITH POISON
Peck, Keenen
A Company Town Makes Peace with Poison In Midland they say, 'But for Dow we'd be a speck of nothing9 BY KEENEN PECK Herbert Henry Dow had a problem. One of the two workers at 'his newfangled...
...The more pollutants you stick in the Tittabawassee River, the more pollutants you're going to have in Lake Huron...
...The woman lives near a chemical dump and produced her study after losing several valuable horses to strange ailments...
...It's not that the people on the street are laboratory mice—most seem quite willing to take the risks associated with living and working in Chemical City, as some call Midland—but that the area, like the lab, is a controlled environment...
...The author of the report makes no such claim...
...On a drive around Midland, a visitor encounters the Herbert Henry Dow High School, the modern Grace A. Dow Memorial Public Library, and the Dow Gardens, where the smell of pine trees can make one forget the noxious smells often noticed in the plant area...
...One is a middle-aged construction worker at the Midland Nuclear Cogeneration Plant, scheduled to begin its operations along the Tittabawassee in 1985...
...The record so far shows that the average level of dioxin detected within the plant gates was twenty-eight times greater than the level considered dangerous by the Government, while the fish downstream from the plant contained amounts of dioxin two times higher than the "level of concern" set by the Government...
...To a surprising degree, the townspeople blame the press for their real or alleged ills...
...Midlanders, though, aren't holding their breath...
...On another occasion, two men who don't work at Dow are sitting at the Cafe's steamy counter...
...Dioxin is so toxic it is measured in parts per billion, parts per trillion, and even parts per quadrillion...
...How did these residents decide that the community line needed to be bucked...
...If there were something to be concerned about, something would have been done a long time ago," she says...
...He-bert, who was the "tip" I'd received in the Health Hut, is a mother of two and an organizer of the Environmental Congress of Mid-Michigan (ECOMM...
...Dow, meanwhile, appears to be guarding important information about dioxin—information that is slowly coming to light in a court suit against Dow and other companies brought by veterans exposed to Agent Orange...
...A series of murals in the Midland County Courthouse is quite explicit about this: Commissioned by Herbert Dow, they show the development of Midland from an Indian village to a chemical boom town, with a Paul Bunyan-size Herbert Dow straddling the prosperity depicted in the last mural...
...The tour guide didn't bother to mention that some wastes were being forced down "chemical wells," a practice discontinued only this year...
...And that's what it comes down to...
...Or the hands of people who live in Midland...
...And so, it seems, do their livers and kidneys and other vital organs...
...Nervous disorders, reproductive complications, anemia, liver diseases, cancer, and other diseases or disabilities have appeared in laboratory animals exposed to dioxins in various—usually minute— amounts...
...One scientist at the meeting later wrote a memo about Dow's tests on rabbits: "In addition to the skin effect, liver damage is severe, and a no-effect level based on liver response has not yet been established...
...The townspeople have come to identify Dow's interests as their own...
...I am not willing to sacrifice the health of my family for a buck," emphasized Wilson...
...It was commented on in 1976, so that's old news," snaps Dr...
...Van Miller says he stands by the earlier monkey studies...
...Another woman in the store nods in agreement, but later she hands me a slip with a name and phone number on it...
...Thus, when Dow refuses to say where in Midland it detected dioxin, the local residents say they don't need to know...
...Dioxin was found in local soil by Dow in 1978...
...Call her," the woman suggests...
...In 1967, the cost of the twin reactors was put at $350 million...
...Albert was going to leave us," Dow wrote to one of his financial backers in 1891, "but I got him to stay by agreeing to pay for his overalls...
...But a final verdict is not in...
...It was an impressive display of "objective" science...
...In one study at the University of Wisconsin, female rhesus monkeys fed TCCD at fifty parts per trillion developed severe reproductive problems after seven months...
...According to the executive director of the local United Way, Mike Hurley, Midland has produced the "highest per capita giving in the nation" for the last two years...
...And nobody has any ill effects whatsoever...
...The map was put aside and stories were traded about new lumps that had appeared on the bodies of family and friends...
...It is an unwanted contaminant of the so-called phenoxy herbicides, including 2,4,5,-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, which Dow manufactured for domestic use and for use in Agent Orange, the Vietnam war defoliant...
...It would have been obvious and something would have been done...
...the most promising comprehensive study, to be conducted by the EPA, is scheduled to begin in August...
...Dow has proven it by the people that live here...
...Yet Dow itself has known for years of other, more serious effects...
...Midland's 37,000 residents enjoy extensive social services, low taxes, and a high standard of living...
...Winifred Oyen, the county health officer, referring to the high incidence of congenital defects in the early 1970s...
...Fink based his figures on Federal cancer statistics that were broken down by county...
...In 1970, according to Whiteside, the director of Dow's Midland medical department told Government scientists that the early symptoms of chloracne included fatigue, lassitude, depression, and weight loss...
...Not far from the plant gates, on downtown Main Street, the same bland music drones out of speakers, eerily reminiscent of the toxicology lab...
...Dow not only minimizes the risks of dioxin, it contends that the blame for the presence of the substance must be shared by all sources of combustion—incinerators, power plants, charcoal grills...
...A contaminant of herbicides manufactured by Dow until 1979, dioxin is the substance that recently drove residents of Times Beach, Missouri, from their homes...
...And I recall something Palen said: "It's been hard in the past for people to come out and buck the community line...
...They were in the minority then, as now...
...No end is in sight to the dioxin numbers war...
...He concluded his letter to the state health director this way: "It appears that death and injury may indeed be a current consequence of historical toxic substances mismanagement in the area...
...ECOMM members say the Center for Disease Control should investigate Midland...
...On the surface, at least, that is clearly the case...
...So, it might add, does the future of Midland depend on Dow Chemical...
...The campaign peaked three years ago, but one of Allen's former associates, John Van Miller, who is still observing the effects of dioxin on monkeys at Wisconsin, says the company "may have caused enough trouble that we may not be able to publish" the results of recent dioxin investigations...
...Ruth Mathews, who grew up in Midland, joined the opposition after returning to Midland to care for her mother, who died last September of soft-tissue sarcoma, a rare form of cancer which some suspect is linked to dioxin exposure...
...in turn, by the Tittabawassee...
...I can point house to house and there's cancer, diabetes, heart problems," said Linda Kerns of her own neighborhood, which is also close to a chemical dump...
...We were driven past an innovative operation in which waste water was filtered by being dripped over volcanic rock...
...We are not by any means qualified to make any conclusions on health data...
...Designed by Alden Dow and supported in part by the Dow Foundation, the Center provides a steady fare of music and theater and serves as a showcase for the so-called Hall of Ideas, a glitzy multi-media tribute to science and technology...
...He doesn't eat fish from the river—he catches them with one of his twelve rods and throws them back—but says his drinking water from a well eleven miles out of town is safe...
...Zabik found dioxin in carp and sucker at nineteen different locations in Michigan...
...Though that is four times the Food and Drug Administration's "level of concern," Zabik claims a person would have to eat ten pounds of fish per day before reversible symptoms appear and 100 pounds per day before irreversible ailments show up...
...More than two-thirds of Dow's 9,000 employees wear a white collar to work—either on a lab coat or under a sportcoat...
...Still, dissent lives here...
...Still, the ill effects of much smaller dioxin doses have been seen in lab animals...
...It's not a panic situation...
...One, made by Herbert Dow in 1918, was to have the company manufacture phenol...
...Earlier reports had noted the presence of dioxin in soil at the plant and other unspecified locations in Midland...
...They could do something about it if they want to spend the money," he says of Dow and dioxin...
...But its roots remain in Midland, where about 9,000 workers are employed at the corporate headquarters and the sprawling 1,600-acre production complex that long ago replaced the barn...
...They could not predict how long their fight might last, but Wilson volunteered that she had sold her home and was planning to leave the area...
...In the toxicology building, a scientist showed us exposure chambers where white mice were breathing assorted chemicals while canned music played softly in the background...
...The EPA is stirring up a lot of garbage," he says...
...I think there's a certain percentage of people who will never turn against the company," said Hebert...
...A few suspicious cysts were examined and lay medical opinions delivered...
...We're trying to get the state and Federal agencies to start enforcing regulations that are there," added Vince Castellanos, who works for General Motors...
...Dow's track record is good enough for most of the people of Midland...
...Dissent lived one recent spring evening in the basement of Diane Hebert's house on a tree-lined northeast-side street...
...One of the two workers at 'his newfangled bromine plant, Albert Burow, threatened to quit because corrosive chemicals were ruining his overalls...
...But for Dow, we would be a speck of nothing," says Jane Portier, a seventy-four-year-old mother, grandmother, and former Dow worker...
...To back up the company's position that dioxins are "ubiquitous," Hamlin cites a study released this spring by Matthew Za-bik, associate director of Michigan State University's Pesticide Research Center...
...Interpreting statistics is not the only area of disagreement among various factions...
...At the time, though, the company was suppressing damning portions of an EPA report about dioxin...
...Perhaps that is enough to ensure Midland's continuing loyalty to Dow even though rubber suits have supplanted overalls, carcinogens have been found in the workplace—and the media have pronounced that Midland itself may be contaminated by dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known...
...Despite the complications, that turned out to be a profitable venture for Dow Chemical...
...I don't think anyone should be given the right to dump anything...
...This is a community that has an unusually high loading of scientific people, highly educated, affluent people who are probably pretty likely to believe what the research people out at Dow tell them...
...A friend of mine went to Texas," begins a young man between bites of his hamburger at the Train Station, a trendy burger and pasta restaurant, "and someone said, 'You mean you're from Midland and you're not sick?' " His friends at the table laugh and the conversation turns to the relationship between cancer and maraschino cherries...
...They remind a reporter that sarcoma is "old , news"—a phrase invoked again when the topic is birth defects...
...I don't think there's anything that could be said that would change their minds...
...I believe it's a company town that's by and large benefitted from its association with Dow," he answers...
...today, the expected cost is $4.43 billion...
...Reached at the Center, Zabik says he's one scientist who believes combustion can, in fact, produce dioxin, but that he has "no way of evaluating the relative contribution" combustion and phenol-producing industrial plants make to the samples...
...Dow's enterprise was worth $3,000 then and consisted of little more than a barn and a fifteen-volt generator on a muddy plot in Midland, Michigan...
...Last November, Larry Fink, a Lansing environmentalist, informed Michigan health officials of a startling fact: that the "incidence of soft and connective tissue cancers among white females [in Midland County] for the period 1970-1978 is four times the national average, representing a 771 per cent increase over the 1950-1959 rate...
...The press also revealed that a top official of the Environmental Protection Agency had allowed Dow to delete portions of a 1981 report that blamed the company for the presence of TCCD, the most toxic form of dioxin...
...No one knows how dangerous the environment really is in Midland...
...In interviews and public statements, most profess unconcern and many take offense at the implication that a hazard exists...
...To the group, it seemed rather routine...
...Opposition to the atomic plant—which is being built largely to supply Dow with steam—is slowly spreading, thanks to enormous cost overruns...
...n 1981,1 was a member of a group of reporters given a tour of Dow's corporate headquarters, toxicology lab, and industrial complex...
...A week earlier, the Hearst-owned newspaper had criticized the media for depicting Midland as "a company town economically seduced and victimized by an uncaring, manipulative giant that willfully falsifies scientific data and endangers life and health...
...Congress" is a rather grand title for the group...
...A few feet from the Gardens is the 1,538-seat Midland Center for the Arts, the pride of more than one Midlander I met...
...Her two young children are diabetic...
...Midland is a very unusual community in a lot of respects," Palen tells me in his office at the Midland Daily News...
...According to Science magazine, Dow felt so threatened by the study that it worked "overtime" to discredit the data and the authors—a task made easier when one of the Wisconsin researchers, James Allen, was convicted of spending grant money on personal vacations...
...Thanks to Dow Chemical, Midland today is an affluent, comfortable community barely touched by the economic crisis that is crippling the rest of the nation and especially the rest of Michigan...
...According to press accounts, the rate of birth defects in Midland County was at least twice the Michigan average between 1970 and 1974...
...I asked him about dioxin...
...Andrea Wilson, a mother and former biology teacher, explained the organization's goal: "We are asking for a full field investigation [by the Federal Government] to determine whether, in fact, there is a health problem in Midland and the extent of that problem...
...If any pattern can be detected in Midland, it is that a paycheck from Dow softens the holder's perception of the risk...
...The company and the town prosper because Dow's management has made a string of sound business decisions in the past...
...The company stopped making 2,4,5-T in 1979 after the EPA banned most uses of the herbicide...
...It was blown out of proportion," I was told again and again...
...Such attitudes make the environmentalists' uphill battle a steep one...
...I traveled to Midland soon after "the dioxin train rumbled through," as Midland Daily News Editor John Palen put it one afternoon—after the camera crews and reporters had moved on but before the media's dust cloud of bad feelings had settled...
...For Sale" signs do not pepper the quiet residential neighborhoods...
...Another 2,700 area residents work for Dow Corning, a joint venture of those chemical and glass firms...
...I think they've been hurt irreparably...
...These days, the Dow Chemical Company counts its sales in billions and boasts operations in five dozen countries...
...Dow, after all, gives Midland its identity...
...He says Dow sometimes is inept at public relations, but its epidemiological work is highly respected in the scientific community...
...But statistics can't fully reflect the quality of life—or the meaning of "company town...
...I don't think Dow has to prove anything...
...It's not been an easy place to dissent in...
...But some long-term effects of dioxin exposure may not have manifested themselves...
...Their hearts and minds belong to the company...
...The soft-tissue sarcoma that took the life of Ruth Mathews's mother is a key element in the debate over dioxin in Midland...
...The cost of overalls and $1.50 a day wages was the price of loyalty for Albert and his brother Julius, the other worker at the plant...
...What's wrong with that characterization...
...Saginaw Bay is part of Lake Huron, which, he points out, is the source of drinking water for much of eastern Michigan, including Midland...
...I do not see a national emergency," he says...
...When she is asked whether the soft-tissue cancer and birth-defect questions had been resolved—as opposed to being aired—Oyen remarks, "The local medical community has seen no pattern of health problems in town...
...Only a few people know the details of the really hot issues," he said...
...His average sample contained 200 parts per trillion of dioxin...
...His father, he adds, worked at Dow for thirty-seven years and has thirty-two grandchildren...
...He also informed them that heavy exposure to dioxin caused nervous disorders and damage to internal organs...
...A woman in Hemlock had mapped on clear plastic sheets the incidence in her neighborhood of various types of cancer, heart disease, bone disorders, kidney and liver dysfunctions, and other illnesses...
...Hebert said she was putting her house on the market...
...I recognize the name as a local environmentalist, one of the few residents who has publicly expressed her anger—and fear—about the dioxin news...
...We have cancer here, but I don't think it's greater than anywhere else," says Joseph Mann, the part-time mayor who has been a Dow chemist for thirty-five years...
...There, manager Carl Richie beamed that the treated effluent was so safe that trout were raised in it—then caught and cooked at employee fish fries...
...She had grouped similar sicknesses together on individual sheets, and as they were placed on Hebert's coffee table, one on top of the other, certain "hot spots" of disease became apparent...
...A friend wrote me a letter," she breaks in, "and said, T guess people won't be complaining as long as Dow keeps spitting out the paychecks.' There's a lot to that...
...I asked them what their neighbors thought of their efforts...
...Indications of concern are few and subtle: For example, most of the residents I spoke with said they would not eat fish from the Tittabawassee, which meanders through the Dow complex...
...Dioxin is in the brick in your homes," she continues...
...in so doing, they implicitly convey the message that one, five, or seven deaths is an acceptable risk...
...He raises the possibility that some municipal incinerators burn products containing dioxin-contaminated substances...
...Castellanos testified against the licensing of a 152-acre hazardous waste landfill in Midland a few years ago and, though he intended his involvement to end with that, he has been hooked since...
...These cancers claimed the lives of one woman in the 1950s, five in the 1960s, and seven in the period from 1970 to 1978...
...they cannot agree what data need to be obtained, where samples should be taken, or who should do the testing...
...Before it was altered, the draft version of the EPA report stated, "Dow's discharge represented the major source, if not the only source, of TCCD contamination found in the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay in Michigan...
...At the LaSalle Cafe on Main Street, over a less expensive hamburger, I run into a thirty-two-year veteran of Dow...
...This spring, a flurry of news reports indicated that dioxin had been found in the waste matter that Dow releases into the Tit-tabawassee River every day, in catfish placed downstream from the chemical complex, and in carp from Michigan's Saginaw Bay, which is fed by the Saginaw River and, Keenen Peck is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...I can't talk to any of them about this issue," said Mathews...
...We've found dioxin in the mufflers of Detroit automobiles," says Hamlin...
...Eyes rolled, and heads were thrown back...
...Mathews, too, said she would be moving soon...
...Midland's community pillars are quick to mention the actual number of deaths when the topic comes up, leaving the percentage increase unspoken...
...I don't believe they've done anything underhanded at all," she says, referring to the company...
...The effect of dioxin on humans is a matter of intense debate within the scientific community, but as science writer Thomas Whiteside noted in his 1979 book, The Pendulum and the Toxic Cloud, experience with industrial accidents involving dioxin "indicates that the systemic effects of the contaminant are generally delayed and appear over long periods of time, and, furthermore, are hard to predict or to measure accurately...
...The move eventually led to the production of phenoxy herbicides—and dioxin...
...It's nothing new...
...The session began with members examining a map of a three-mile area in rural Hemlock, about twenty-five minutes south of Midland...
...Dow built the community, provides it with jobs, supports its civic causes...
...In 1965, according to a recent New York Times report, Dow convened a meeting with representatives of three other chemical companies to discuss the dangers of dioxin...
...And Palen stresses that he personally knows several Dow scientists and "I don't think they would fudge a number if their life depended on it...
...Dow is so secretive, Hamlin told me, that it doesn't even patent some products for fear that certain information will fall into the hands of competitors...
...Hamlin says the company has since discontinued "fish-tasting sessions after we developed analytical techniques more sophisticated than the human tongue...
...According to the Chamber of Commerce, there are 2,700 acres of parks in Midland, three times the national average for a community its size...
...the EPA says it plans to concentrate on Michigan, and Dick Brzezinski, president of the United Steelworkers local that represents 2,600 Dow employees, says "a cooperative, bilateral study" should be conducted by Dow and the Government...
...For example," Whiteside continued, "who could pinpoint a cause-and-effect relationship involving dioxin if a child of a dioxin-exposed mother should turn out to be just a little bit less alert than the average, a little more prone to memory lapses, a little more 'nervous,' or a little more susceptible to illnesses of various kinds...
...We were shown into the nerve center of the waste water treatment system...
...Dow maintains that the only adverse effect of human exposure to dioxin is chlor-acne, a rash-like eruption on the skin...
...New information is likely to seep out in the regulatory process over a period of years...
...No other explanation other than combustion," says Hamlin...
...I ask Palen...
...In Midland, Mayor Mann says dioxin studies should be national in scope...
...We are standing in the Health Hut, a store on Main Street packed with nuts, vitamins, and yogurt...
...But one woman shakes her head...
...I don't think anything should be dumped in any river," says the other, an employee of the nearby Chemical Bank...
...six people attended the meeting I observed, and they made up almost one-fourth the entire membership...
...The maintenance of this lifestyle depends on the future use of natural resources," intones a voice in one of the Hall's displays...
...Unless it hits them personally," concluded Mathews...
...Dow spokesman Gary Hamlin says the company still possesses a "small" inventory of 2,4,5-T and "there may be a subsidiary around the globe" that continues to manufacture it...
...Whatever the source of the dioxin, Zabik sees no cause for alarm...
...He-bert and Wilson made the choice years ago, when they spoke out against the local utility's nuclear plans for Midland...
...The state has warned against consuming the fish since 1978...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
