July 24, 2005
Dioxin fuels Nitro fears
Chemical residue found in some homes; Monsanto lawsuit prompts EPA
inquiry

By Ken Ward Jr.
Staff writer
Behind a chain-link fence in a far corner of Nitro, workers continue
to tear down and clean
up what is left of the former Monsanto Co. chemical plant.

A month ago, rusted old chemical tanks littered the site along the
Kanawha River. Today, it
is mostly piles of concrete and other rubble.

Across town, other remnants of Monsanto's 50-year history remain
hidden in the dust
inside residents' homes and in the dirt of their backyards.


Dozens of homes in this community are polluted with what residents
fear are dangerous
levels of the toxic chemical dioxin, according to records filed in
court and with
government agencies.

Tests also show that some longtime residents have measurable amounts
of dioxin in their
blood.

"The town of Nitro is contaminated," said Charleston lawyer
Stuart Calwell.

In December, Calwell sued Monsanto and several related companies to
try to force a
cleanup.

Calwell also is trying to get medical testing and compensation for
people like Jimmy Agee,
a 69-year-old former Union Carbide worker and lifelong Nitro resident.

"My house is basically worthless," Agee said. "It's
full of dioxin. This place is eaten up with
it. Who wants to buy a house with this stuff in it?"

Nobody knows what this dioxin contamination is doing to residents.
Nobody has really
tried to find out.

In Minnesota, federal regulators found much lower levels of dioxin in
household dust near
a former wood-treatment plant. Two months ago, the U.S. Environmental
Protection
Agency ordered the company to clean up the homes.

But in Nitro, nobody has done anything — until now.

Last week, the EPA asked another federal agency, the Agency for Toxic
Substances and
Disease Registry, to study the matter.

EPA officials also said their staff scientists will examine dioxin
samples that Calwell
provided after collecting them as part of his lawsuit against
Monsanto.

"We're concerned about people's health," said David
Sternberg, a spokesman for the EPA's
regional office in Philadelphia.

"If data comes in, we would evaluate it to determine if we have
to take action or perform
more evaluation," Sternberg said.

A new molecule is born

On Dec. 23, 1917, Nitro was born as a literal World War I boomtown.

That day, the federal government broke ground on the first of 27,
200-bed barracks at the
site of the present Nitro city park, according to a history of the
town by William D. Wintz.

The site, about 15 miles from Charleston, became home to one of the
War Department's
large gunpowder plants. The name "Nitro" came from the
chemical term Nitro-Cellulose,
which was the type of gunpowder to be produced.

When the war ended, private companies took over the government
buildings, and
converted them into chemical plants.

Monsanto Co. acquired its Nitro site from Rubber Services Industries.
The company made
rubber chemicals for the tire industry.

In about 1947, Monsanto's agricultural division designed a new
molecule. In its pure form,
this molecule was called 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacidic acid, or
2,4,5-T.

This new substances killed plants. It made their roots outgrow their
leaves. Plants
destroyed themselves through defoliation.

In 1949, Monsanto started making this powerful herbicide ingredient
in Nitro.

Workers cooked batches of it in large pots, called autoclaves, rather
than making it
through a continuing production stream.
Ken Ward Jr.
Staff writer
(Page 2 of 3)

Dioxin has been linked to cancer, birth defects, learning
disabilities, endometriosis,
infertility and suppressed immune functions. The chemical builds up
in tissue over time,
meaning that even small exposures can accumulate to dangerous levels.

In the December lawsuit, filed in Putnam Circuit Court, Calwell
explained that much of the
dioxin waste from the Monsanto plant made its way into the Kanawha
River. Residents are
urged not to eat certain fish because they contain unsafe levels of
the chemical.

But, the lawsuit alleged, Monsanto also was the source of
dioxin-contaminated dust. Once
airborne, the dust "was carried by prevailing winds over the town
of Nitro, surrounding
communities and the plaintiffs' homes and businesses," the
lawsuit alleged.


Residents have sought to have their case declared a class action on
behalf of more than
25,000 current or former Nitro residents.

No `big alarm'

In May 2004, Calwell hired a contractor to collect dust samples from
Nitro homes. He
hired a lab to test those samples for dioxin. The contractors tested
more than a dozen
homes. They found levels of dioxin that ranged from 16 parts per
trillion to 1,210 parts
per trillion.

There are no regulatory standards for dioxin in indoor dust. But the
EPA's recommended
cancer guideline is 4.3 parts per trillion. The state's cleanup
trigger for residential soils is
3.9 parts per trillion.

In February, Calwell sent the EPA and the West Virginia Department of
Environmental
Protection letters about the test results.

Randy Sturgeon, an EPA chemical engineer and project manager, said
the data did not
"raise a big alarm" inside his agency.

"We came to the conclusion that it was not a health threat that
warranted further
investigation on our part," Sturgeon said in mid-June.

At the DEP, officials have decided to let federal regulators handle
the situation.

"I feel more comfortable with EPA in the lead," said Ken
Ellison, director of the DEP's
Division of Land Restoration. "I believe that EPA has more
resources and more levels of
support than we do."

The latest in the dioxin battle

The December lawsuit is far from Calwell's first battle with
Monsanto over dioxin.

In the mid-1980s, Calwell spent more than 10 months in trial trying
to prove that seven
Monsanto workers were made sick by handling dioxin-contaminated
2,4,5-T.

A federal court jury returned a verdict against the workers. After
the trial, Calwell and his
clients blamed rulings by U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver to
not allow some of the
workers' key evidence, according to press reports from the time.
Among other things,
Copenhaver would not let Calwell use an EPA map showing dioxin
contamination at the
Nitro plant in 1983 — more than a decade after Monsanto stopped
making its
contaminated herbicide.

In 1983 and again in 1985, the EPA and Monsanto agreed to deals under
which the
company was to clean up the Nitro site.

Today, though, the area remains polluted.

In a July 2000 report, the EPA said the Kanawha River contains unsafe
and illegal levels of
dioxin. The EPA said it should be cleaned up, but the agency proposed
no specific steps
and has not ordered any action.

In August 2000, Calwell sued Monsanto on behalf of a group of
residents along Heizer and
Manila creeks near Nitro. The residents allege that the dumping of
dioxin wastes by the
company polluted their properties.

The residents sought to expand the Supreme Court's 1999
"medical monitoring" ruling to
also allow lawsuits to force polluters to pay for property
monitoring. In December 2002,
the court declined to do so. That lawsuit continues, though, as
residents seek other
damages for Monsanto's pollution.

Meanwhile, Monsanto lawyers have cited the 1983 and 1985 EPA orders
as reason for the
Heizer/Manila lawsuit and the more recent Nitro case to be dismissed.

Charles Love, one of Monsanto's lawyers, argued that the EPA
orders pre-empt any effort
by the residents to sue. If the EPA has or is taking action, Love
argued, then residents
cannot file their own lawsuit.

In Putnam Circuit Court, Judge O.C. Spaulding rejected Love's
argument.

Last week, Love sought to move the case to U.S. District Court in
Charleston.

In an interview last month, he said he had not examined Calwell's
dioxin test results.

"We're too early in the litigation to have reached that
point," Love said.

Glynn Young, a Monsanto corporate media spokesman, said the company
did not take
Calwell's test results too seriously.

"Yes, these kinds of things need to be looked into, and if this
information had come from
anybody but a plaintiffs' attorney, it might have been handled
differently," Young said.
Monsanto made 2,4,5-T in Nitro for more than 30 years.

In its best-known use, the federal government bought 2,4,5-T to make
Agent Orange, the
defoliant deployed widely in the Vietnam War. About 11 million
gallons of Agent Orange
was sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam, Vietnamese citizens and U.S.
soldiers.

But 2,4,5-T was contaminated. Every batch of it contained 2,3,7,8
tetrachlorodibenzo-
para-dioxin. This chemical is also known as 2,3,7,8 TCCD — or,
more commonly, as
dioxin.
(Page 3 of 3)

"Lawsuits of this nature are not uncommon," Young said.
"This is what a lot of people do
for a living. We have been down this road before with Mr. Calwell 20
years ago."

Two cases, different result

In north-central Minnesota, St. Regis Paper Co. operated a
wood-treatment plant for more
than 30 years. The 125-acre site northeast of Duluth is on the Leech
Lake Indian
Reservation between Pike Bay and Cass Lake.

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Starting in the 1950s, lumber was pressure treated with creosote and
chemicals called
pentachlorphenol and copper chromium arsenate. This process generated
various types of
pollution, including dioxin and arsenic.

In 1984, the EPA added the site to its Superfund program, putting it
on the priority list for
toxic waste cleanups.

In October 2004, contractors tested homes in the area for dioxin
dust. They found
concentrations ranging from 0.234 parts per trillion to 240 parts per
trillion.

The EPA said in a report that, "the amount of indoor dust
concentration from the site
exceeded what the EPA considers to be acceptable for six of the 10
homes sampled."

As a result, the EPA proposed to order International Paper, which now
owns the site, to
clean up the homes.

The science behind such an action is fairly new. The EPA based it on
work done to study
and clean up the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

"We're taking a conservative approach to what we've
found," said Tim Drexler, the EPA's
project manager for the cleanup.

In Nitro, the median dioxin dust concentration for the 33 homes
Calwell tested was 238
parts per trillion — roughly the same as the highest
concentration the EPA found at the
Minnesota homes.

EPA officials say they are not convinced the numbers can be
accurately compared.

In Minnesota, the dust samples were taken from living areas inside
the homes. In Nitro,
Calwell's firm collected dust from attics and crawl spaces.

Sturgeon, the EPA project manager in Nitro, said the living-area
samples more accurately
reflect ongoing exposure. But Sturgeon agreed with Calwell that attic
samples give a better
estimate of how much dioxin has been in the home over a longer period
of time — say,
since the Monsanto plant last made 2,4,5-T in the early 1970s.

"If you want to know, over history, what accumulation of dioxin
you had in a home, attic
dust is one of the few places you could look," Sturgeon said.

`Wouldn't you be concerned?'

Since he filed the lawsuit, Calwell has collected more dust samples
in Nitro.

In court, he also is trying to halt the efforts of Monsanto to shed
itself of any liability for
pollution of the Nitro area. He hopes to avoid having that liability
wiped out as part of a
bankruptcy proceeding for one of Monsanto's successor companies.

At the EPA's regional office in Philadelphia, officials have
agreed to re-examine the Nitro
situation based on the additional dust samples.

In Charleston, officials from the state Bureau for Public
Health's ATSDR program are
reviewing that data at the EPA's request.

Barbara Smith, an epidemiologist with that program, said she is not
sure yet if the data
Calwell collected will give her agency enough to do a complete study.

"Just getting numbers is not going to be enough," Smith said.
"We've got numbers, but
we're not sure we have enough data."

If that's the case, Smith said, her agency might ask the EPA to
do its own sampling to
provide adequate data for a study.

Eric Carlson, an EPA liaison officer in Wheeling, said it would not
be fair to say his agency
is not doing anything about the dioxin problem in Nitro.

Carlson cited a March 2004 EPA deal in which Monsanto agreed to do a
new study of
dioxin contamination in the Kanawha River. As a result of that deal,
contractors for
Monsanto performed new fish sampling in the Kanawha.

"I wouldn't say nobody is doing anything," Carlson said.
"There is a significant amount of
work being done about the river."

Residents say more studies of the river are small consolation for
them.

"I'm concerned about the damage that has been done," said
Ross Stone, who has lived in
Nitro for 55 years and in the same house for 52 years. "I'm
interested to find out just
exactly what the outcome is going to be, how it affects people."

Joan Dixon, a 45-year Nitro resident, said, "There's dioxin
in my attic, and in my yard, too.
Wouldn't you be concerned?"

To contact staff writer Ken Ward Jr., use e-mail or call 348-1702.