Toxic Town: Cancer and Birth Defects in Somerville

Davis started thinking about the other families in his small town that he knew had serious illnesses — the cancers, the brain tumors, the babies born with cleft palates.

He went house-to-house in his neighborhood and was stunned to find that nearly every family he visited was privately dealing with some type of horrendous disease.

"There's a catastrophe in our community," says Davis, who in November 2006 at age 53 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "God knows what we're contaminated with."

Somerville, Texas, a sleepy, one-­stoplight town 90 miles northwest of Houston, is home to a massive wood-treatment facility, which for more than 100 years churned toxic chemicals into the atmosphere while manufacturing phone poles and bridge supports. Locals call it the "tie plant" since it was once the nation's largest producer of railroad cross-ties.

It was also among the industry's worst polluters, according to several prominent environmental scientists who now say Somerville residents for decades were exposed to wildly elevated levels of arsenic, dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — all known cancer-causing chemicals considered highly toxic even at low doses. (For more detailed information, click here.)

Dust samples taken during the last year from several Somerville homes and school buildings reveal contamination levels higher even than those found 30 years ago in Love Canal, the notorious chemical landfill in Niagara Falls linked to high rates of cancers and birth defects, according to James Dahlgren, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at UCLA School of Medicine who has been retained by plaintiff attorneys in several pending lawsuits against the plant.

"The situation in Somerville is a ­public-health emergency," Dahlgren says. "The government should be called in to investigate."

A Houston Press investigation found as follows:

• Though incidences of stomach cancer across the country have plummeted during the last several decades, now representing just 2 percent of all new cancer cases, Somerville residents are contracting the disease at a rate as much as 40 to 60 times the national average, according to Dahlgren

•Though industry standards have existed for decades regarding ­industrial-waste management, the tie plant as recently as the mid-1990s neglected to install any air-pollution controls on smokestacks, routinely flushed chemical waste into local creeks and improperly used wood-waste boilers as incinerators, causing an incomplete combustion that increased the toxicity of chemicals released into the air

• Though the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has never conducted any off-site testing to determine possible contamination levels for Somerville residents, agency spokesman Terry Clawson claims, "We are confident that the bulk of the contamination is on-site and is being remediated."

Davis and more than 200 other Somerville residents have sued current tie plant owner Koppers Inc., a Pittsburgh-based chemical manufacturer, and longtime previous owner Fort Worth-based BNSF Railway (formerly the Chicago-based Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), alleging the facility's operations have caused an array of serious health ­problems.

In October, Houston law firm Woodfill & Pressler LLP filed a class action complaint against Koppers, demanding the company provide all Somerville residents free medical screenings for early cancer detection. The complaint promises that ongoing studies will show Somerville as having "the largest cancer cluster and other malignant disorders ever seen."

The tie plant continues to use various heavy-duty pesticides and wood preservatives, including coal-tar creosote, a tarry, chemical stew which today is banned in more than two dozen countries and is classified as a known human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

According to Dalhgren, the various carcinogens spewed from the facility created a "synergistic effect," increasing their toxicity. As a result, the cancers reported in Somerville are not just occurring in younger people — they are also hyper-aggressive, killing them quickly.

Residents have long suspected that Somerville has a greater incidence of cancer and other severe illnesses than would be expected for a town with just 1,700 people. In the mid-1970s, the Texas Department of Health Services found that mortality rates from gastrointestinal cancers were twice as high in Burleson County compared to the rest of the state, as documented in a report titled "Creosote Blues" published 27 years ago in The Texas Observer.

"It's just assumed here that cancer is what kills you," says Somerville native Edward "E.W." Schoenberg, a plaintiff in the lawsuits who was diagnosed last year with bladder cancer.

Ronald Supak, a tie plant worker for 28 years whose son was born with a cleft palate, says: "My friends are all dying from cancer; I'm waiting for my turn."

The Press spent six weeks interviewing more than three dozen Somerville residents and reviewing tens of thousands of pages of railway company documents, environmental reports and medical records, as well as depositions, affidavits, sworn statements and other court documents collected from legal discovery and federal and state open-records requests with the TCEQ and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In sworn testimony, more than a half-dozen veteran tie plant employees made a laundry list of allegations against the facility, including:

• Failing to provide employees with proper safety equipment when handling hazardous materials

• Spraying toxic pesticides such as creosote and pentachlorophenol throughout the facility to kill weeds and control dust

• Burning creosote-treated wood in boiler stacks at night to limit complaints from townspeople regarding the intense odor and black smoke it produced

• Destroying several truckloads of key company documents in an attempt to cover up environmental abuses.

Koppers and BNSF have denied all allegations; spokesmen for both companies declined interview requests for this story, citing the pending litigation. "...It is our position that there is no reliable scientific evidence to support their claims," BNSF spokesman Joseph Faust e-mailed the Press in a statement. "BNSF does not believe the plant is responsible for harming anyone..."

Dahlgren says there is no doubt that toxic emissions from the tie plant have directly caused numerous health problems in Somerville residents. (To view a cross-section of victims in the community, click here.)

His recommendation: shut down the schools immediately and evacuate the entire town.
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Dennis Davis worked at the Somerville tie plant for 24 years, starting in 1971 as a junior in high school. Hired on as a roustabout, he drained ditches, cleaned industrial spills and stacked 150-pound railroad ties, as needed. The work was hard but the money was good.

It was something of a family tradition. His grandfather, father, uncle and older brother all had worked there. "During the Great Depression," he says, "my grandfather used to sit under a tree outside the tie plant with a horse and mule every day just waiting for someone to get hurt so he could take his place."

Many current Somerville residents can trace their family histories back several generations to the small town and its one-time largest employer — the two are inextricably linked.

The area known today as Somerville began as a railroad boom town. It's named for Albert Somerville, a two-term Galveston mayor and first president of the ­Chicago-based Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway Company.

In the late 1880s, the GCSF extended its tracks north from Brenham, building a railroad yard, train depot and roundhouse repair shop. Somerville became a busy stop on the main line linking Chicago to Galveston and a rail spur extending through East Texas to Beaumont. The area's population grew from fewer than 100 in 1880 to more than 2,000 by 1930.

According to local lore, the railway company initially sought to base a wood-treatment plant in nearby towns such as Brenham, Lyons and Caldwell, but none of those cities wanted it. Texas Tie and Lumber Preserving Company constructed the facility in 1897 — 16 years before Somerville became incorporated as a city.

The tie plant treated materials under contract for the railway company, which bought it in 1905, changed the name to Santa Fe Tie and Lumber Preserving Company and moved operations about a mile north to its current digs along Texas State Highway 36.

The facility handled materials exclusively for its parent railway company and performed no outside business. It remained a subsidiary of the GCSF — which in 1965 merged into parent company Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, then merged again into Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway and was later named BNSF Railway — until Koppers Inc. purchased it in March 1995.

The Somerville tie plant today operates on 115 acres, employs 90 workers and manufactures more than one million railroad ties per year. For about three decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, it was the nation's largest wood-treatment facility, operating on 300 acres, employing 350 and producing nearly two million ties annually.

Koppers, a publicly traded Fortune 500 company that specializes in manufacturing carbon chemicals from coal tar, had been the tie plant's main supplier of creosote. Today it sells 90 percent of the materials treated at the site to BNSF, which remains responsible for existing environmental contamination issues on the land.

The railway company for years had disposed of wastewater in unlined pits, contaminating the aquifer, says TCEQ spokesman Clawson. The state agency has overseen ongoing remediation at the facility since the early 1980s; the land beneath the plant remains listed as a federal hazardous waste site under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, according to Clawson.
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In the mid-1980s, when Linda Faust worked the graveyard shift as manager of the Handy Dandy convenience store, she'd duck outside for a cigarette every hour or so and watch the thick, dark clouds billow from the smokestacks at the nearby tie plant where her husband Donnie worked. The black smoke against the black sky appeared ominous, but she thought nothing of it.

That's just what nighttime looked like in Somerville, she figured.

Still, it annoyed her that her custom-painted Chevy Camaro always got coated with chocolate-colored oil rings. They were a pain to remove and only came off if she scrubbed them hard by hand. The same smelly stains embedded her husband's skin and work clothes on a near-daily basis.

Somerville has long been nicknamed "creosote junction" for the main wood preservative used at the plant, which infuses the town with a heavy, diesel-like odor. On a humid day, when the wind blows in your direction, you can still catch a whiff of chemicals strong enough to make your eyes water. But back then, especially in the wee hours, it was punishing.

For Linda Faust, it triggered intense allergies, headaches, nausea and nosebleeds. Eventually, her doctors say, it destroyed her sense of smell.

"If you had your windows down," she says, "you had to close them."

Born in Dallas and raised in East Texas, Linda Faust (no relation to the BNSF spokesman) never had allergy, sinus or stomach problems until she moved to Somerville.

In 1980, at age 22, she met and quickly married Donnie, who was raised in Somerville and began working at the tie plant in 1974 after graduating from high school.

Linda Faust used to complain to her husband about always tracking creosote into the house. She had no clue the chemicals might be harmful; she just didn't like the odor and oily residue.

In fact, she spent many years washing her own clothes in the same washing machine as her husband's creosote-stained work clothes.

The tie plant even provided families with metal barrels that once contained pesticides to use as makeshift barbecues. And, like many other Somerville families, the Fausts for years used creosote-treated railroad ties to line their vegetable ­garden.

"We thought we were eating healthy," Linda Faust says.

On April 1, 1998, Linda Faust was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of stomach cancer. Three weeks later, doctors removed her entire stomach and attached her esophagus directly to her intestine. They predicted she'd be dead by Christmas. She was 40.

By December, Faust had become a skeleton, dropping from 143 pounds to 89 pounds. Without a stomach, her body lacked the ability to break down foods. Anything she ate or drank was almost instantaneously expelled. She lost total control over her bowel movements. "I had accidents in bed," she says, "I had accidents in stores."

Today, at age 50, she's holding steady at 109 pounds but still has frequent accidents. All her teeth have crumbled from malnutrition. Her skin retains no moisture, causing her to appear wrinkled and ashen, older even than her own mother.

"I look in the mirror," she says, "and I cry."
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The tie plant's basic operations remain largely the same as a century ago.

Freight cars haul raw lumber — mainly oak, but also beech, gum, hickory and pine — into the facility from forests in East Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. The wood is cut to size in saw mills, loaded onto trams and pushed into long, metal cylinders, where it is heat-pressurized to remove all water and sap, then soaked with a heavy-duty pesticide — usually a solution that is 30 percent creosote and 70 percent petroleum. Excess chemicals are vacuumed from the cylinders, and the tar-black, steaming-hot lumber is removed, stacked for storage or loaded into open rail cars and hauled away.

It's a 24-hour treating process that protects the wood from termites, rodents, rot and fungus for 30 years.

The tie plant for decades operated three shifts, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. During peak production, in the early 1970s, it treated 25 tons of wood per day, according to BNSF consulting engineer Donald Corwin's March 2007 deposition.

In the early 1980s, the railway company replaced two wood-waste boilers with a single, more efficient combustion system. But none were ever retrofitted with air-­pollution controls such as wet or dry scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators or high-temperature fabric filters commonly used within the industry, according to Nicholas Cheremisinoff, a West Virginia-based chemical industry expert who pored through thousands of railway company documents for the plaintiffs to create a historical reconstruction of the facility's operations.

As a result, Cheremisinoff says, hazardous air pollutants were released into the Somerville community on a near-­continuous basis for decades. He estimates that the tie plant produced hundreds of thousands of pounds of chemical waste each year, and released as much as ten pounds of uncontrolled air emissions per day as recently as the early 1990s.

"You have an out-of-control situation where you cumulatively are releasing chemicals to the ground and air," said Cheremisinoff in a January 2007 deposition. "Nobody was doing any monitoring; nobody was paying any attention to any of the waste management aspects, the pollution aspects, the chemical handling aspects."

Cheremisinoff said the tie plant's current and former owners have virtually no safety-related records, including what he terms "core company documents" regarding waste disposal, boiler operations, pollution emissions, personnel records and accident reports.