Toxic Town: Cancer and Birth Defects in Somerville

From the 1970s to the early 1990s — the period when the worst contamination occurred, according to the lawsuits — company managers also instructed workers to throw sawdust into the cylinders after each charge to absorb the chemicals, then use it and other tainted wood scraps to fuel the boilers. According to Cheremisinoff, this caused an incomplete combustion that increased the toxicity of chemicals released into the air since the boilers were not intended to handle hazardous waste.

In his November 2006 deposition, 33-year-veteran employee Donnie Faust said he fed as much as five tons of ­chemical-treated wood into the boilers per shift in the early to mid-1980s. He said that managers specifically ordered him to burn the treated materials at night to avoid complaints from townspeople — a claim supported by several other former tie-plant employees.

It wasn't until years later that Linda Faust realized her own husband had shoveled the wood into the boilers, causing the black smoke and fierce odor she endured while working at the Handy Dandy.

"My job depended on it," Donnie Faust explained in his deposition. "My mother raised me and told me, 'If I told you the sky is pink, you will believe it's pink because I said so.' So, I learned to respect authority.

"They told me to do a job, I did a job."
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Dennis Davis oversaw the treatment cylinders and frequently had to climb inside them for cleaning and repairs.

"There was no way to avoid the chemicals," he says. "It burned your eyes; it cooked your sinuses; it took your breath away."

The trams that carried the raw lumber into the metal cylinders — which measured 153 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall — often bumped against each other, spilling creosote and other hazardous chemical solutions. Debris collected under the cylinder's heat coils, occasionally causing the trams to derail.

Before entering the cylinders, Davis would stuff his mouth with a handkerchief or a torn part of his shirt. "A lot of men, they would even put a piece of carpet in their mouth, and they would go off in there," he says. "Some people came back out of those cylinders with nosebleeds."

Even as recently as the early 1990s, Davis and other employees were given no safety equipment besides a hard hat and goggles. They went into the cylinders wearing only jeans, cotton shirts and steel-toed boots, and even provided their own mule-hide leather gloves, which tended to absorb the ­chemicals.

"You'd take your gloves off and your skin would be three shades of yellow," Davis says. "Literally, it would just peel two or three layers of your skin off, and you would be sore and hurting for days and weeks on end until you healed."

Today employees at the tie plant who enter the cylinders or work directly with hazardous chemicals are equipped with full-face shields, respirators and Tyvek rubber suits, boots and gloves, said Shaw, the Koppers representative, in his deposition.

According to Cheremisinoff, such protective gear should have been provided decades earlier.

Coal-tar products were among the first substances known to produce cancer in the workplace. In the late 18th century, English physician Sir Percival Pott observed a high incidence of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps caused by chimney tar and soot. Subsequent studies of occupational diseases linking creosote to skin cancer in railroad workers were published in the 1920s in the British Medical Journal and the 1950s in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Today coal-tar creosote is classified as a known human carcinogen; the tie plant for decades also used other heavily restricted pesticides, such as pentachlorophenol and chromated copper arsenic, which have been linked to cancers and birth defects (see "Toxic Town: Birth Defects").

As recently as 1980, chemical manufacturing companies warned against clothing contamination and skin contact with coal-tar creosote solutions. Some recommended that employers provide showers and work uniforms to preclude laundering contaminated clothes at home.

The warnings appeared on material safety data sheets, or MSDS, a system for cataloguing information such as toxicity, health effects and suggested protective equipment for chemicals and chemical mixtures. MSDS have been prevalent since the 1950s; the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration has mandated their use since 1986 under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

Dennis Davis, who served as safety committee chairman at the Somerville tie plant in the early 1990s, says he never saw or even heard of an MSDS until Koppers bought the facility. Several current and former tie-plant employees have testified that nobody ever informed them that the chemicals they handled on a daily basis may cause cancer.

Davis's uncle, Don "Slim" Hightower, worked at the tie plant from 1969 to 1995 as a machinist. In a November 2002 deposition, he described how he routinely got splattered with creosote while using a pressure hose to clean the inside of the cylinders. When he complained to a superintendent, he was told to "just go on with your work and just wash your hands or whatever."

In the late 1990s, Hightower was diagnosed with skin cancer that rapidly ate his face, nose and the bones on the roof of his mouth. "People stare at you; they wonder what happened to you," he said in his videotaped deposition, wiping his eye. "Little kids point at you; they don't understand why this is."

In November 2001, Hightower filed a lawsuit against BNSF Railway under the Federal Employers Liability Act, which gives railroad workers not covered by regular workers' compensation laws the right to sue their employers for on-the-job injuries.

He received an undisclosed settlement in June 2003, and died 18 months later.
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In depositions, former Somerville tie-plant superintendents Samuel Barkley and Vernon "Gene" Welch both admitted they had no clue what chemicals comprised creosote or whether any were considered carcinogenic. Though ultimately responsible for worker safety, both said they never informed employees about potential health risks.

They also expressed a general belief that exposure to low concentrations of creosote and the other heavy-duty pesticides used at the plant did not require any special precautions.

"I don't recall that we gave them — that I gave them any instruction," said Barkley, superintendent from 1971 to 1986, in an April 2003 deposition. "I mean, I would assume that they would make every effort not to get anything on them."

Barkley said that MSDS were kept on file in the main office, where rank-and-file employees were not ­permitted.

"...I never knew that there was a hazard in creosote," he said, adding that he never researched the subject or received any special training from his corporate bosses at the railway company.

Today 82-year-old Bark­ley has skin cancer, but he does not attribute it to chemical exposures at the tie plant.

"I was exposed to creosote all my working life," he said in his deposition. "It didn't bother me."

Welch, a Somerville native, junior college dropout and former town mayor who worked at the tie plant for four decades, including eight years as Barkley's handpicked successor as superintendent, from 1986 to 1994, said he believed adverse health effects could only occur in cases of "extreme exposure" — such as, if workers swam in creosote or drank it.

"I don't think that the exposure that the men at the Santa Fe treating plant had was harmful to them," he said in an April 2003 deposition. "...Based on my 40 years of being there, my father working there before me and his father before him, and we never had any problems."

Welch added, referring to Don "Slim" Hightower: "...You can't go around and hold a man's hand all day and say, 'Now, Don, don't get a handful of creosote and wipe your face with it or don't drink any of it.' You can put out the information and the rulebooks and tell them that they must comply with it. But, you know, it's their responsibility."

In a sworn statement, Robert Urba­nosky, who worked at the tie plant from 1977 to 1995 and now serves as a Burleson County justice of the peace, said he frequently suffered from headaches and nosebleeds while at the facility. He also testified that the treating chemicals were commonly used for dust control.

"I would never do that; that's against the law," Shaw, the Koppers representative, said in his deposition, adding that creosote has been a federally registered pesticide since the 1980s. "I don't think you can spray any pesticides on the roads for dust control or spray any pesticides just for the hell of it..."

Mendoza said in his deposition that Pentacon, a powder form of the federally registered pesticide pentachlorophenol, was often sprayed to kill weeds and control dust from the late 1960s through the 1980s.

He also testified that on rainy days back in the 1970s, superintendent Barkley would open the valve tanks on the cylinders and flush the chemicals into unlined ditches behind the plant. Workers called it the "Santa Fe flush."

The tie plant routinely discharged wastewater into local creeks, Mark ­Stehly, BNSF assistant vice president of environmental research and development, affirmed in an August 2007 deposition.

When asked about the potential hazards of creosote, Stehly said: "There are constituents within creosote that can cause cancer; there's lots of constituents in creosote that don't cause cancer."

In his deposition, Welch said he never warned employees against taking chemicals home on their skin and clothes: "It was such a minimal thing that I wouldn't have been concerned with it."

Regarding protective equipment, Welch said: "I don't know that anybody ever came to me and said, 'I need a respirator'...If he would've we would've investigated to see why he needed a respirator and if we felt like it was justified he would have been furnished a respirator."

Cheremisinoff condemned this specific statement in his deposition. "That's not a policy," he said, arguing that the tie plant violated industry standards for waste management practices and worker safety dating back to the 1920s, as well as federal laws implemented by the EPA and OSHA in the early 1970s. "[The superintendent] is supposed to assign respirators to those high-risk operations that require it."

Reached by phone, Welch, who is 73 and still lives in Somerville, said he has no regrets. "I don't think there's anything unusual in this area," he said. "There's cancer everywhere, and it's not just in ­Somerville."
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Wearing a Tyvek moon suit with a $300 Black & Decker vacuum strapped to his back, environmental scientist Paul Rosenfeld in November 2006 climbed into Linda and Donnie Faust's attic and sucked eight ounces of dust into a glass jar. He sent the container, along with attic-dust samples from 13 other Somerville homes, to a lab in California where test results showed astronomical levels of several cancer-causing chemicals.

Rosenfeld, who was hired by plaintiff attorneys, estimated that the cancer risk to the community in Somerville from benzo(a)pyrene exposure was a startling 10,593 times greater than protective health levels deemed acceptable by the EPA. Dioxin and arsenic levels also greatly exceeded EPA standards; similarly elevated contamination levels were detected in the attics of five Somerville school buildings tested this summer (see "Toxic Town: Suffer the Children").

In a March 2007 affidavit, Rosenfeld explained that one extra cancer per million is the level considered acceptable by EPA, and 100 extra cancers per million is a mandatory clean-up level. In Somerville, he wrote, the cumulative cancer risk to the community is 11,434 extra cancers per million — demanding an immediate remediation and possible evacuation of the area.

"That Somerville tie plant is the most egregious, horrible-acting facility...intentionally burning and poisoning the community...that I have ever seen in my life," said Rosenfeld, principal of Santa Monica, California-based Soil/Water/Air Protection Enterprise, in a December 2006 deposition. "There was a lot of ash and soot from the boiler that basically coated the entire community...and that contamination is still blowing around Somerville today."

Phillip Goad, a toxicologist who conducted environmental testing in Somerville for BNSF Railway, dismissed Rosenfeld's methodology in an August 2007 deposition, arguing that attic dust is "not relevant" for determining risk exposure since residents generally do not spend time in attics.

Goad collected carpet dust in nine houses, including the Fausts', and reportedly found no evidence of contamination that could be linked to the tie plant. He called the carpet a "historical reservoir" that residents contact on a daily basis. When pressed, however, Goad said that he never asked how frequently the families vacuumed or shampooed the carpets — which, he admitted, "would be a ­factor."

Rosenfeld, meanwhile, called attic dust a "time capsule" for environmental contamination. He argued in his deposition that it represents the best way to quantify historic exposure. In fact, he said, his estimates are conservative since the contaminants in the dust had been diluted over time.

Responding to concerns from Somerville residents, the Texas Department of Health Services conducted three cancer cluster studies in Burleson County from 2004 to 2006, finding a normal-to-expected rate of cancer among residents — a conclusion used by BNSF attorneys to bolster their case.

But the state's cancer cluster studies are flawed, says toxicologist James Dahlgren, since they rely on health information collected from death certificates, which are often inaccurate.

More significantly, Somerville has no hospital. As a result, Dahlgren says, the studies excluded many residents and tie-plant employees who moved away or died in hospitals outside Burleson County.

These limitations are noted in the state's final reports: "Cancer incidence data are based on residence at the time of diagnosis. It is possible that some residents who may have been exposed and developed cancer no longer lived in the area at the time of diagnosis so were not included in the data."
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James Dahlgren has spent the last year overseeing the first-ever epidemiological study for the entire town of Somerville. Nearly every weekend this summer, a team of his UCLA graduate students has flown 1,500 miles to Houston, then commuted by rental car to Somerville, where they went door-to-door asking residents to complete extensive health surveys. So far, they have collected 600 — half their goal.

Many residents have also undergone physical examinations, providing blood and urine samples for analysis. Dahlgren will collect and sort all the information to determine whether Somerville residents have a significantly higher incidence of cancer, as well as respiratory and neurological problems, compared to a similarly sized, unexposed control town in Mississippi (he declined to reveal the name of the town).

Dahlgren has published the only peer-reviewed studies on the health effects of people living near wood-treatment facilities. Two studies centered on towns in Mississippi — one in Grenada, which still operates a wood-treatment plant owned by Koppers Inc., and another in Columbus, home to a now-defunct facility owned by Kerr-McGee Corporation (which was purchased last year by Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum Corporation).

In each case, Dalhgren found that simply living near a wood-treatment facility caused elevated blood levels of several known carcinogens, including dioxins. General cancer rates were higher; upper respiratory problems and sinusitis were common.

Dahlgren expects cancer rates in Somerville will be far worse even than those in Columbus and Grenada, since the tie plant's operations were significantly larger and continued to use pesticides such as chromated copper arsenic and pentachlorophenol as recently as the late 1980s, long after the others had stopped due to widely reported health risks.

Dahlgren has already identified a dozen cases of stomach cancer in Somerville — which, he says, is as much as 40 to 60 times the national average for a town its size.

"Gastric cancer is rare for people in their 40s and 50s," says Dahlgren, who treated rescue workers exposed to toxins at the World Trade Center site on 9/11 and served as lead toxicologist in the famous Erin Brockovich case against Pacific Gas and Electric Company. "It's declining everywhere. But here, it's gone up."

Agency spokesman Clawson says the TCEQ has "no knowledge" of the recent environmental testing performed in Somerville.

The TCEQ has received 17 odor complaints against the tie plant since 2002, but has never conducted off-site testing to determine contamination levels for nearby residents. "We have not been able to determine the full extent of contamination," Clawson wrote the Press in an e-mail. But he says his agency remains confident that most of the contamination is at the plant site itself, where it is being remediated.

Dahlgren says he believes the tie plant's operations contaminated the aquifer throughout Somerville, which gets its drinking water from nearby Lyons.

According to Dahlgren, government agencies often will not investigate environmental contamination while litigation is pending. Clawson denied this.

Dahlgren predicts that present-day health risks in Somerville will exceed those found five years ago in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, where blood dioxin levels in residents were three times higher than the national average, according to a government-led investigation by the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry, a division of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In that case, however, demonstrating liability proved impossible since 14 toxic industrial facilities surround the affected communities, set just south of Lake Charles.

In rural Somerville, there is only the tie plant.
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It doesn't help Linda Faust's case against the tie plant that she smoked a half-pack of cigarettes every day since she was 17, or that she once sought treatment for marijuana dependency.

At the same time Faust was diagnosed with stomach cancer, doctors also found that she had helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that may increase the risk of cancer.

"The only likely causes of Mrs. Faust's stomach cancer are smoking and the H. Pylori bacterium, two carcinogens outlined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as causes of stomach cancer," according to a media statement from BNSF.

In depositions, BNSF attorneys interrogated Faust and other plaintiffs about other possible causes for their illnesses. They pointed to an aluminum refinery in Rockdale, 46 miles from Somerville, as a potential source of environmental contamination. They asked whether the plaintiffs cooked with charcoal grills, fried bacon without a vent or ate pickled foods — which, if consumed in large quantities, may cause an increased risk of stomach cancer.

In a November 2006 deposition, Heather Patterson, attorney for ­Galveston-based firm McLeod, Alexander, Powel & Apffel, P.C., which represents BNSF, quizzed Linda Faust on her diet. The transcript reads as follows:

Patterson: Before you had your surgery and before you found out that you had gastric cancer, did you eat a lot of salty food?

Faust: No.

Patterson: Did you like pickles?

Faust: On hamburgers or something.

Patterson: Did you eat much pickled food?

Faust: No.

Patterson: Did you ever eat sardines?

Faust: No.

Patterson: How about anchovies?

Faust: No.

Patterson: Did you eat things like pickled okra or anything like that?

Faust: No.

"It's ridiculous," says Jared Woodfill, the 39-year-old plaintiff attorney, who also happens to serve as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. "The tie plant was poisoning this town for decades, and they're asking if she ate pickles."

Linda Faust's smoking habits and bacterial infection are certainly contributing risk factors to her illness, says Dahlgren, the toxicologist. But by themselves, he says, they may not have caused her stomach cancer — especially at such an early age. Almost all cancers from cigarettes and diet occur in people over 60, he says.

Despite all that she's gone through, Faust has mixed feelings about possibly leaving.

"People here are friendly," she says. "They wave; they know their neighbors and all the kids' first names; you run out to buy a loaf of bread and you're lucky if you make it back home in an hour because of all the people you see along the way.

"Somerville is a nice town, actually," she says. "This isn't a place we're dying to get out of."

Dennis Davis knows he has created many enemies while raising awareness about the possible health risks in Somerville. He's received death threats; the tires on his all-terrain vehicles were slashed.

"It got to where I wouldn't walk out of the house without a loaded pistol on me," he says. "Everybody was against me; nobody wanted to hear about it. They'd say, 'You need to leave this alone; you need to butt out; the railroad built this town.'"

Along the way, some people have switched sides in the fight, if for no other reason than to put the decades-old rumors to rest and find out if the problems are real.

In September, a Tarrant County judge ordered a mistrial in Linda Faust's case when plaintiff attorneys mentioned the other lawsuits; a new trial is set to begin next month, representing the first of more than 200 complaints now pending against the tie plant's current and former owners.

Dennis Davis's case is set for February 25. He knows that if he wins, it could destroy the town.

Which is exactly what Dahlgren and others are saying should have happened a long time ago.

todd.spivak@houstonpress.com