5
CLEANING UP
How Solvents and Contaminated Groundwater Spread the Disease
The benefit of the doubt should go to the people, not the chemical.
—Retired Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger1
IN 1988, DANNY FROMM WAS A TYPICAL SOUTHERN CALIFORNIAN teenager who enjoyed working on cars, especially his red 1972 Chevy Nova with a black top. He paid $1,300 for it, money he had saved from working as a gas station attendant at the local Unocal 76. Fromm and his buddies replaced the car’s engine, which made it “really awesome and really fast,” he recalled. The car gave the seventeen-year-old the freedom that he craved. Freedom to do what he wanted, when he wanted. Freedom that he no longer has.
Straight out of high school, Fromm began working in the aerospace industry, cleaning circuit boards with the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). Never warned of any risk or provided with protective gear, he inhaled the sweet-smelling chemical and exposed his skin to it for eight hours a day over the course of a decade.
When Fromm was thirty-five, he noticed that his right pinky kept twitching. “Stress,” his first doctor said and recommended a little wine. His second doctor gave him a much different diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease.
After Fromm started levodopa, his symptoms did improve. But after five years, he developed involuntary movements of his head, neck, and trunk, a common side effect of the medication. To control these movements and improve his Parkinson’s, he underwent a surgery called deep brain stimulation. As the name suggests, wire electrodes were inserted into his brain and connected to a battery-powered stimulator positioned just under the skin in his chest. The surgery alleviated some of his symptoms, including his tremor, but it was far from a cure.
Fromm is now forty-eight and lives in Idaho with his wife and six-year-old son, Logan. He also has two older sons who live nearby with their mother. In the morning, Fromm has trouble walking. He has what he calls a “hard-core shuffle.” So he takes his medication immediately after he wakes up, and he does leg exercises to relieve his leg stiffness. He is then able to get out of bed, shower, and dress without assistance.
Each morning, he makes Logan’s lunch and takes him to school. By the time Logan comes home, Fromm’s shuffling has usually returned. Sometimes he feels embarrassed for himself and for his son. Some days are better than others, though. On a good day, he can play with Logan, mow the lawn, and even walk on trails near his home. But Fromm says the effects of his medications are hit-or-miss. Many days his mobility is severely limited.
He and his son spend a lot of time together. Occasionally, Logan will mimic Fromm’s walk, even his shuffle, in a good-natured way. His son rarely speaks of the disease, though. Fromm says, “I better have a good relationship with Logan. He is going to take care of me when I am older.”
Fromm regrets every day that he stayed at his aerospace job, working with trichloroethylene (sometimes called “tri” or “trike”). While the solvent has not been proven definitively to cause Parkinson’s, those who are exposed to it at work are six times more likely to develop the disease than those who are not.2 “If you’re working with it,” Fromm says, “quit your damn job and get away from it.”
But you do not have to have had a job cleaning circuit boards to have been exposed to the dangerous chemical. Almost all of us have been.
Trichloroethylene was introduced as a chemical in the 1920s. It soon found many commercial and consumer applications, from flushing rocket engines to cleaning carpets.3 Because TCE readily evaporates and can be inhaled, it was also used as an anesthetic in surgery and childbirth.4 Due to its toxicity, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the use of TCE as an anesthetic in 1977.5 In the 1990s, the first published reports linked the chemical to Parkinson’s.6
Today, TCE is still used to degrease metal and as a spot-cleaning agent in dry cleaning. It is also an ingredient in many common household products, including paint removers, glue, stain removers, carpet cleaners, and gun cleaners.7 The estimated annual use of TCE in the United States is 250 million pounds.8
WIDESPREAD EXPOSURE
Though Fromm was allowed to work without any protection, TCE’s harms were already known in industry.9 As far back as 1932, Dr. Carey McCord, a medical advisor for Chrysler Corporation in Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was titled the “Toxicity of Trichloroethylene” (Figure 1).10
McCord began his letter, “Promotional activities, seeking the extension of industrial uses of trichloroethylene, frequently fail to disclose the toxic nature of this chemical and the practical dangers that may attend its use.” He went on, “In industry, trichloroethylene may enter the body through the breathing of vapors or through the skin.” McCord detailed the lethal effects of different concentrations of TCE from inhalation and skin absorption, based on studies done on rabbits. He concluded, “Any manufacturer contemplating the use of trichloroethylene may find in it many desirable qualities. Too, in the absence of closed systems of operation, he may find in this solvent the source of disaster for exposed workmen.”11
Decades later, that disaster arrived at a small plant in Berea, Kentucky. Workers there dipped their arms into a vat of TCE to clean small metal parts without wearing any protective gear. Two men who did this work, breathing in the solvent’s vapors over the course of twenty-five years, developed Parkinson’s. A third worker, who sat at a workstation adjacent to the TCE vat, was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s. With her bare hands, she received parts that the first two workers had cleaned with TCE.12
At a doctor’s appointment, one of the men mentioned that his co-workers had also developed Parkinson’s.13 Because of existing concerns about the toxic effects of TCE on the nervous system, the doctor and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky decided to investigate.14 They mailed a questionnaire to 134 former workers of the plant; 65 responded. Of these, an astounding 68%—forty-four of them—reported at least one symptom of parkinsonism. In addition, the researchers examined thirteen respondents who did not report any symptoms and found that the speed of their hand movements was “significantly slower” than normal.15 The investigators concluded that those employees who worked closest to TCE were most likely to develop signs of the disease.
The researchers then decided to see if they could replicate what happened to the plant’s employees in laboratory animals. They fed TCE to rats for six weeks, and the effect was dramatic. The animals lost almost half of their dopamine-producing nerve cells in the substantia nigras of their brains.16
And yet, from 1981 to 1991, the production of TCE increased one thousand fold.17 It was nearly ubiquitous in American industry in the second half of the twentieth century.18 A National Institutes of Health–funded epidemiological study that linked work exposure to TCE to Parkinson’s concluded that the “potential public health implications are substantial.”19
While US production has decreased from its peak, millions of pounds of TCE continue to be released into the environment annually. It can be found in the air, the soil, food, and human breast milk.20
COVERING UP A CATASTROPHE
Occupational exposure to TCE extends to those in the military. Perhaps the worst example occurred at the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Since 1941, the base, named for a World War I marine general, has trained and maintained combat-ready marines to be “the world’s best war fighters.”21 It currently has a population of 170,000, including those on active duty, retirees, dependents, and civilians.
For over two decades, from 1953 to 1987, the residents of Camp Lejeune drank and bathed in toxic water.22 During that time, more than 70 chemicals, including TCE and a similar solvent used by dry cleaners called perchloroethylene (PCE)—also linked to Parkinson’s—poisoned the base and its water supply.23 The marine base needed clean metal parts for all its tanks, airplanes, and amphibious vehicles, and TCE was the answer.24
Officers also needed spotless uniforms. ABC One-Hour Cleaners, located near the base, cleaned many of them. It also, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “improperly disposed” of its waste.25 The dry cleaner was not alone in its sloppy practices. On-base spills and leaks from underground storage tanks also contributed to the mess.26 The result was the discovery of approximately one ton of waste in the soil and groundwater at the base.27 The concentration of chemicals, including TCE and PCE, in the drinking water was 240 to 3,400 times the level permitted by safety standards.28
From 1980 to 1984, the Marine Corps leadership received numerous warnings about the water’s contamination.29 Despite the multiple notices, it failed to act.30 The contaminated wells on the base remained open, exposing residents every time they drank water, bathed, swam, cooked, or cleaned. In 2010 a US House of Representatives Oversight Subcommittee found, “For thirty years, Marines and their dependents serving at Camp LeJeune were exposed to toxic chemicals in their drinking water. It took the [US Marine Corps] more than four years to shut down drinking water wells they knew to be contaminated with toxic chemicals and another 24 years and an act of Congress to force them to inform veterans about this contamination of potential health problems. For two decades the U.S. Marine Corps prevented full disclosure regarding the true extent of contamination at Camp Lejeune.”31 As many as 1 million individuals ended up coming into contact with the toxins on the base.32 According to a 2005 National Academy of Sciences panel, it was “the largest human exposure to [trichloroethylene] from drinking water in this nation’s history.”33
Because TCE readily evaporates into air, the drinking water was not the only hazard. Vapors from the solvent can migrate through the soil and into nearby buildings, affecting the indoor air quality.34 Some of the Camp Lejeune barracks were found to be polluted.35
Lori Lou Freshwater, an investigative journalist, has written extensively about the contamination of Camp Lejeune.36 Her family was also one of its victims. As a child, Freshwater lived with her family on the base from 1980 to 1983 during the peak contamination. There, she wrote, “my entire childhood was consumed by tragedy. The chemical contamination can be linked to the deaths of my two baby brothers… and to my mom’s own difficult final years, when she was dying from two types of leukemia.”37 Today, Freshwater says, “a lot of people have no awareness that Parkinson’s disease can come from these environmental exposures.”
The denials and delays among the upper echelons of the Marine Corps only increased the health risks to the Lejeune population. A local cemetery is filled with scores of babies, infants, and children who died due to the contamination.38 According to one news report, “Hundreds of mothers suffered miscarriages or gave birth to stillborn babies or infants with birth defects.… An unknown number, but likely thousands, have developed cancers… and Parkinson’s disease after living on the base.”39
In 2017, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) added Parkinson’s to the conditions considered to be “presumptively” due to time spent at Camp Lejeune.40 The VA said that its “review resulted in the recognition that liver cancer and Parkinson’s disease… are conditions for which there is strong evidence of a causal relationship and evidence that the condition may be caused by exposure to contaminants.”41
TOXIC VALLEY
Silicon Valley is home to Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and other technology titans. It is also home to more EPA Superfund sites than any place in the country (Figure 2).42
In the 1960s and 1970s, Silicon Valley’s legendary semiconductor companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, used TCE to clean silicon chips.43 The soil and groundwater are now tainted with the chemical, which evaporates into the air.44
This contamination was typical of the era. In the 1970s, thousands of toxic waste dumps were polluting the air, land, and water of cities and towns throughout the country. In response, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in 1980, which created a cleanup program that became known as “Superfund.”45 The act allowed the EPA to designate sites for cleanup and forced the parties—often companies—responsible for the contamination to either do the work themselves or reimburse the government for the cost of doing so.46