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By Sonja Biorn-Hansen*
The movie "Erin Brockovich" is based on a true story, the David-and-Goliath variety. The protagonist is a tough, scrappy piece of eye candy who overcomes enormous odds (including but not limited to: no formal education and sarcastic co-workers) to bring a large, evil corporation to its knees. In the end, hundreds of victims of poisoned wells and their lawyers get the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history....$333 million. Erin Brockovich, to her astonishment, also walks away a multi-millionnaire. Oh, and she gets to keep the cute guy too.
I really enjoyed the movie. I especially liked the part where the cute guy shows up just in time to watch her kids (I too am a single mom) and fix the plumbing, right when her workload is really starting to ramp up. I also liked seeing the evil corporation, PG&E, get its comeuppance because I used to work there and didn't like it. By the way, PG&E is a publicly-owned utility company. That means the $333 million was ultimately paid for by ratepayers. And because PG&E was a legal monopoly, the ratepayers had no choice as to who they bought their gas and electricity from.
"Erin Brockovich" was a box office hit. The fact that Erin was ably played by none less than Julia Roberts probably had something do with this, but I think there was another reason as well. I think the movie satisfied the need of many people to believe that environmental problems (in this case, contaminated groundwater) can by and large be traced to the evil doings of large corporations, and that if we only had a few more Erin Brockoviches to go around, we would overcome pollution for sure.
As entertainment, Erin Brockovich is great. As a paradigm for dealing with environmental problems, it has its limitations.
Like Erin Brockovich, I have also spent time analyzing toxics data. The data that she acquired (with the help of her... winsome smile) involved well water. "My" data came from the Columbia Slough, a waterway that runs through Portland, Oregon. I didn't have to do anything to get it. I work for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), and the city of Portland gave it to us. They had collected most of it, with the strong encouragement of local environmental groups it is only fair to add. A cluster of five or ten staff and managers from both DEQ and the city helped me analyze it from 1996-1997.
With a little research, Erin Brockovich soon knew what the problem was: chromium. Lots of it. Enough to send hundreds of people to the hospital with cancer and other maladies. And what did the data on Columbia Slough show? That is harder to say. I wouldn't drink the stuff if you paid me, but even after analyzing the data for a year and a half, I'd be hard-pressed to say what might happen if I did.
I'll try anyway. The water in the Columbia Slough got tested for about 160 different chemicals. Tests were run on sediment and fish tissue samples as well. In the end, about 80 different chemicals were found. The chemical that seemed to pose the biggest problem was lead. It showed up in about a quarter of the 200 or so water column samples tested. About half the time it was detected, it exceeded Oregon's water quality standard for the protection of aquatic life. The highest amount detected was one half the EPA action level for lead in drinking water... The same level found in the tap water at my house. In other words, if lead and human health were the only considerations, I'd be better off drinking water from the Slough than water from my own tap (I now drink filtered water, thank you very much). They aren't. I'll talk about the other things that showed up.
The other chemicals that showed up the most often were: PCBs, DDT, DDE (a metabolite, or breakdown product of DDT) and Dieldrin. Lead probably got there from being used as an additive to gasoline in the bad old days. PCBs have been banned for awhile now, but they were once widely used and they are mighty persistent, so it isn't surprising they showed up in the Slough. DDT and Dieldrin are both pesticides, now banned for sale in the U.S. In other words, everything we found in the Columbia Slough at levels that violated some sort of standard was what environmental professional-types call a "legacy condition". The Slough was clearly contaminated. What we could do about it was less clear.
We also decided to call dioxin a problem, even though the data we had was a bit sketchy. Dioxin itself is tricky. It comes in about 73 different forms, and the worst kind ranks as about the nastiest substance ever discovered. Perhaps because of all the different forms that exist (called congeners), it is very expensive to test for. We only had 7 test results to go by, and for various reasons, the three that happened to show the presence of dioxin were all suspect. So... why didn't we just bite the bullet and run some more tests? Well, it would simply have confirmed what we already knew. Dioxin is everywhere, albeit in low concentrations. It comes from sources as varied and diffuse as pesticide manufacturing plants and backyard garbage burning. A good rule-of-thumb for limiting your own production of and exposure to dioxin (as well as a bunch of other nasties): avoid burning plastic.
Erin Brockovich didn't just know what the problem was; she also knew who the victims were: people whose drinking water had been contaminated. With the Columbia Slough, it wasn't so clear. The Columbia Slough is not used as a source of drinking water. It mostly functions as a drainage way for stormwater. There may be some people who fish there, but probably not too many on account of the signs in 8 different languages warning people not to. As for non-human species, the Slough is what ecologists call "a highly simplified system". Much of it resembles a large, silty-bottomed ditch, and toxics aside, it is not terribly attractive to wildlife. About the only fish you will find there are carp. What happens to that water-and-silt mixture after it leaves the Slough? It flows into the Willamette, the largest river in Oregon. About a minute after that, the Willamette joins the Columbia, the most voluminous river in the country after the Mississippi.
The bad guys in "Erin Brockovich" were PG&E. In the Slough, once again it wasn't so clear. There was an abandoned landfill, but it is now capped and the damage it is capable of has mostly already happened. There used to be combined storm/sanitary sewers discharging to the Slough, but by the time I got involved, these were already being eliminated. At one time, there were probably lots of industries discharging to the Slough, but by the mid-90s, there were virtually none. Those that remained certainly did not discharge the chemicals we identified as being of concern. The main source of toxics into the Slough appeared to be stormwater runoff. There are things that can be done to improve the quality of stormwater. They are expensive, bothersome and thankless.
I have a confession to make: I have Erin Brockovich envy. I did then and I do now, and not just because I don't look so good in a bustier. I would love, for once, to work on a project where it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were, and where I knew for sure that what I was doing would help solve the problem.
One of the things that bothered me when I worked on the Slough data was the problem of what to make of all those things that were detected, but not at high enough levels to be an obvious concern. An example: trichloroethene. It was found in 46 out of 360 samples. That's a 12% detection rate. But the maximum detected value was only 10 micrograms per liter. The standard is 21,900 micrograms/liter, or more than 2000 times that.
There were 75 chemicals in the Slough like trichloroethene. They showed up regularly but only at very low levels, or they showed at higher levels but only once in a great while. Or, most annoying, they never showed up, but the detection limits the laboratories were able to achieve were higher than the standards for the chemicals. How did that happen? Think of it this way: it is easier to taste a drop of lemon juice in a glass of water than in a bowl of stew. The Columbia Slough was more like a stew. The detection limits for samples from the Slough were correspondingly higher as a result.
This phenomenon gets a bit sobering when one considers the possibility of additive and synergistic effects. The meaning of "additive effects" is hopefully self-evident. Synergistic effects are easiest to explain by way of example. A person who has spent several years of his life working in a factory that makes asbestos is at risk for developing asbestosis, a lung disease. A person who does the same work and also smokes, has many times the risk of developing the same disease. Cigarette smoke and asbestos fibers work synergistically to mess with lungs.
I and the people I worked with had no idea how to account for such effects; we simply knew that they happen. That is all anyone really knows.
The sense that we might be missing something plagued me when I was working on the Slough. Correction: it still does. Perhaps because of my own experience with a certain chemical that was once viewed as safe, helpful even, and that turned out not to be. The chemical is called DES, short for diethylstilbesterol. In the late 50s and early 60s, it was prescribed to women to reduce the incidence of miscarriage. It didn't. Instead it turned out to be an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that mimics a hormone and does mischief in the process. A woman whose mother took DES while pregnant is likely to have an odd-looking cervix, and she is at higher risk for developing cervical cancer. I've never been diagnosed with cancer, but my cervix has been subjected to many insults (lasers, acid, etc.) in various efforts to burn, freeze or otherwise excise cells that a couple of doctors didn't like. To date the cure has been a lot worse than the disease, which has yet to show up. That doesn't mean it won't. For now I get to come to grips with the painful legacy of all those treatments (it is no longer clear to me they were ever necessary), and hope that this is all I will have to deal with.
When I analyzed data on the Slough, I was simultaneously haunted by the fear that we might overlook something, as well as by the fear that we might overreact. There are lots of ways to spend public funds besides scraping up somewhat contaminated mud and shipping it to a hazardous waste landfill.
My general approach to dealing with the uncertainty inherent in the data collected on the Columbia Slough could be summarized as "Let the Reader Decide". My final report was... detailed. Besides talking about the Five Nastiest Things, much space was devoted to "chemicals of special interest". That was the term DEQ and city staff came up with to refer to the 75 chemicals that showed up, but not at levels that consistently violated some sort of standard. We defined "consistently" as "greater than 10% of the time".
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