Fred Wilcox - Waiting for an Army to Die

“We settled because of what life we have left and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. My wife has had things removed from her; I’ve had growths removed from me; friends have had growths. I’ve had heart problems; three or four times I’ve collapsed. Of course, a lot of people have died.

“The only good thing we’ve got going for us is, I don’t know if they’ll spray it somewhere else, but I know they won’t come back here.”

Like Vietnam veterans Paul Reutershan, Charles Owen, and Ed Juteau, Billie Shoecraft died believing her cancer was the result of having been exposed to herbicides. Like other Americans who have sued Dow Chemical, the McKusicks grew tired of waiting for their day in court, settling as others have for an undisclosed sum of money from a company that insists there is still no evidence that 2,4,5-T harms humans. While publicly defending its product against “chemical witch hunters,” Dow has quietly paid off those who seemed to have a solid case against 2,4,5-T, thus managing to avoid the possibility of an embarrassing day in court.

For the McKusicks the battle against toxic herbicides may be over, but for Americans living near power lines, railroad rights-of-way, national forests, or private timber companies, the continued spraying of herbicides is both disturbing and frightening. Their fears are often based on far more then what Dow has called “anecdotal evidence.” For example, many residents of the Alsea region in Oregon, which includes Siuslaw National Forest, are aware that dioxin was discovered in eight of thirty-two wildlife samples taken from the forest, in the breast milk of one out of six woman living within the Siuslaw, and in “extremely high levels” in the garden soil of a young woman who had experienced four spontaneous abortions in three years while living adjacent to the National Forest. And they have read about seventeen tree planters working on Bureau of Land Management land that had been sprayed eleven months earlier with both 2,4-D and Silvex becoming ill with symptoms of herbicide poisoning, and an eight-year-old girl who contracted a rare blood disease, and whose tap water contained the same herbicides doctors discovered in her blood. 2And of course they remember being told that when sprayed from helicopters herbicides are harmless to humans and animals because “they biodegrade so rapidly that by the time they hit the ground they are perfectly innocuous.”

On April 11, 1978 a high school teacher by the name of Bonnie Hill, along with seven women residing in the Alsea region, sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency suggesting that until herbicides were proven safe, their use in the State of Oregon be stopped. The eight women had experienced a total of eleven miscarriages, all but one occurring during the spring (peak) spraying season, and nine of the miscarriages occurring in the first trimester of pregnancy. The one woman who experienced a miscarriage in the fall lived in an area that had been sprayed in the fall of that year. In their letter the women declared: “Even the latest Forest Service Environmental Impact Statement admits that ‘All chemicals are capable of causing toxic effects upon the developing embryo… Chemicals can become available to the embryo in spite of the mother’s excretion and metabolism capabilities.’” Copies of the letter were also mailed to Oregon legislators, agencies and companies using herbicides, the editorial pages of major Oregon newspapers, and other health and environmental agencies the women felt might be sympathetic.

The letter was the result of a grass-roots research effort by Mrs. Hill, which began when she read about the findings of Dr. James Allen at the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Wilbur McNulty at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. In their research with primates Allen and McNulty discovered that rhesus monkeys fed minute doses of TCDD frequently miscarried, often in the first trimester of pregnancy. Hill, whose home is completely surrounded by land managed by the BLM, had experienced a miscarriage in the spring of 1975, and when she discovered that Silvex and 2,4-D had been sprayed not far from her home just a month before she lost her baby, she decided it was time to find out if other women in the Alsea region had experienced similar problems.

“I just started asking around,” Hill explains, “and every time I found out about a spontaneous abortion it had occurred in the spring. That’s what was so unusual. Up until recently I didn’t find out about any miscarriages that had happened at any other time of the year.

We are standing beside a counter in the home-economics room of the high school where Hill teaches, and as we talk she mixes the ingredients for a dessert she plans to take to a retirement dinner that evening. Apologizing for having to make the dessert, Hill offers her young daughter a graham cracker, and continues. “I think I was fairly cautious about it in the beginning, but the evidence just seemed to build over a period of about a year and a half. Every once in a while I found out about another miscarriage, and when I found out about the eleventh, I started asking some rather serious questions about the possibility of a correlation between springtime spraying and miscarriages in the vicinity surrounding or very near the spray zones.”

Hill began calling agencies and private industries that owned land in the Alsea area to inquire about when and where they had applied herbicides. “I did tell them immediately about my concern. I didn’t try to hide anything. I just explained that I had discovered that several miscarriages had occurred in the spring, and that I was trying to find out just where and when they might have sprayed. I wanted to go back for a number of years, and I do remember one man at a private company expressing great surprise that any kind of health problem might be associated with herbicides. But later he was very open about giving me information, something I didn’t find everyone quite so willing to do. Another company gave me different kinds of information at different times, and in fact there were quite a few discrepancies in the information they gave me. But I think in general that the recordkeeping on the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of herbicide spraying has been nothing short of deplorable when you consider the possible health implications of these substances. Even Oregon State University, which has long been an outspoken proponent of herbicide spraying, has stated that the recordkeeping of the actual spraying is terrible.

“One of the problems is determining just who owns the land. If you look at a map of this area it’s really a checkerboard pattern, with someone owning a few acres here, and someone else owning a few acres there, so if we saw somebody spraying with a helicopter out there right now”—pointing to one of the snowcapped mountains that appear to be just a short walk from Alsea’s high school—“it would take us a long time to determine just who owned that land. Sometimes if someone is spraying even just across the hill from where you live, you still might not know just who owns that land.

“So there are really no natural barriers between the houses and the land being sprayed, and it’s almost impossible to avoid drift from the spraying. In fact the Bureau of Land Management did a study in the Coos Bay area under very controlled circumstances, observing all the current required buffer zones along the streams, and they found that 70 percent of the time the herbicide was entering the water. And the EPA has documented drift up to twenty-two miles. But most studies were done on flat land under pretty controlled circumstances of wind and weather, and herbicide users based their conclusions on these studies. But when you consider the actual conditions on the coast of Oregon, where there are mountains and hills and air currents running in and out of those hills, it’s just really unpredictable. And being twenty miles from the coast as the crow flies, our area has equally unpredictable precipitation patterns. They will be sure that we’re going to have a nice day, and yet eight hours later it’s raining. They’re supposed to have a clear weather sign for twenty-four hours once they have decided to spray, but Oregon’s weather is notorious for its unpredictability, especially in the spring, which of course is the peak season for herbicide spraying.”