Past and present residents of Woburn, Mass. assembled in Barnum Hall last night to share their health experiences of living in the town after local companies dumped toxic chemicals into local water supplies, leading to a rise of leukemia cases.
The serious chemical dumping is speculated to have begun in the mid-1960s and the first reports of residents becoming afflicted and dying from leukemia emerged in the 1970s.
Moderated by civil and environmental engineering professor David Gute, the panel of speakers included former Woburn reverend Bruce Young, civil and environmental engineering professor John Durant and founding member of the Aberjona Study Coalition, Michael Raymond.
"You can look at the past but it may still be pretty close to where you are now," Young said. Young received a great deal of attention for his role in setting up the 1986 civil suit against the targeted Woburn companies responsible for the toxic dumping.
"It means so much to see young faces who are interested in what's happened in Woburn and what's happening now," he said.
Young spoke of his experiences, which were included into author Jonathan Harr's book, "A Civil Action," published in 1995, and later made into a movie of the same name in 1998. "Read the book," he said. "It's like the Bible - the book is pretty good but the movies aren't so much."
"Part of my responsibility as a parish priest is to minister to the people, to be there full time," Young said. He said that, along with leukemia victim Jimmy Anderson's mother Anne, he asked all cancer-affected Woburn families to meet and discuss their experiences.
Young then mapped out the affected houses with pins. "When we got through it, the map told us a story," he said. "All the pins were around [Anderson's] house."
"Woburn was blessed in taking gut feeling and turning it into something we could analyze," Young said. "We had a responsible local media and political response was very important ... We had people contact us from as far away as Israel - that's the power of the media."
"There's copious personal, oral and professional data tied up in Woburn," Gute said. Along with Gute, Durant and Raymond also gave their accounts of the cleanup of cancer-causing chemicals dumped in the Woburn area, where toxins continue to infect the local water supply.
Durant, who began researching Woburn as a graduate student in 1986, focused on the details and qualities of the local Aberjona Watershed on the Aberjona River - the local water supplier to Woburn and surrounding areas.
"A lot of work has been done to investigate chemical contaminant problems," Durant said. "At the [Woburn] industrial sites, chemical manufacturing has been going on for a couple hundred years, going back to the Civil War."
According to Durant, the watershed currently contains pollutants like ammonia. "There are some legacy problems that have not been addressed," he said. "Arsenic is tenfold higher than would be expected."
Raymond said he is also working to better the watershed's quality, but not from the research side, as he represents a group of citizens from all towns that border the Aberjona Watershed.
"The only thing the people that border the Aberjona River want to know is, 'Is it safe?'" Raymond said. "And in reviewing our comments, the [Environmental Protection Agency] is issuing a draft of remediation."
The large audience, which included both Tufts students and residents from surrounding communities, posed several questions regarding local water quality, particularly the Mystic Watershed, which extends into both Medford and Somerville.
Durant attempted to address the concerns. "The problem with Mystic Lake is not arsenic or ammonia, but it's sewage," he said. "I would swim there, but not after a rainstorm."
The panel was sponsored by the University College of Citizenship and Public Service, the civil and environmental engineering department and Water Watch.
