Movie sequel: mother speaks out against arsenic in water supply

The story of a small town and its contaminated water. ANDREW GUMBEL asks: is this the new Erin Brockovich?

LOS ANGELES - Soon after moving to Fallon, in Nevada, Laura White's husband, Michael, started developing skin lesions on his arms.

As his condition worsened over the course of a week - it got so bad that it began to resemble psoriasis - the couple suspected that it might have something to do with the water supply.

They had previously lived in the countryside outside the town, and knew that the water extracted from their private well there was so salty it killed their plants and made it almost intolerable to take a shower.

What they did not know at the time was that Fallon and the surrounding area has the highest concentration of arsenic in its drinking water of anywhere in the United States; twice as high, in fact, as the federal Government's long-standing legal limit, and 10 times higher than the safety levels mandated in most of Europe.

Lesions like Michael White's can be a precursor to chronic rashes, liver spots and full-blown skin or bladder cancer - all well-documented symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

In his case, he followed his hunch, switched to bottled water, and the problem with his arms subsided. The city has since sent out a number of flyers alerting its citizens to the problem with its water. But his wife, for one, is far from reassured.

Laura White wants to know why children are still given tapwater in Fallon's elementary schools (her two, aged 7 and 5, are under strict instructions not to touch it and take juice to school instead). She wants to know why the city fathers have bitterly resisted pressure to install a treatment facility and clean up the water supply. She also cannot understand why President George W. Bush has just scrapped new federal standards for arsenic in drinking water - one of the more controversial environmental moves of his Administration.

She also has urgent questions about a cluster of leukaemia cases that have broken out in Fallon, affecting 12 children. She wonders, given the official attitude to arsenic and the profusion of industrial, military and mining interests in this part of northern Nevada, what other poisons might be out there that she has not been warned about.

"We just got done watching that film Erin Brockovich, and it sounds exactly like Fallon," Laura said on the porch of her modest home, children hanging off her and toys strewn across the scrawny yard, in a scene reminiscent of the movie (which depicts a different water-poisoning scandal in rural California). "The city acts like it doesn't care. I want out of here bad."

But it is not just isolated residents such as Laura White who have raised the alarm over Fallon. Toxicologists and environmental activists have long been urging the federal Government to intervene there and in hundreds of other afflicted communities across the States. (Some, like Fallon, have naturally occurring arsenic; others have inherited the problem from nearby mining ventures.)

In the wake of the arsenic poisoning disaster in Bangladesh, in which thousands of people encouraged by a United Nations programme to dig their own water wells fell chronically ill, the National Academy of Sciences issued a comprehensive report in 1999 describing arsenic as a major health hazard, and suggesting that a concentration such as Fallon's could result in as many as two extra cancer cases for every 100 residents.

In the dying days of the Clinton Administration, new rules were at last issued, tightening the legally acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to the European standard of 10 parts per billion. As a result, Fallon, whose level is around 100 ppb, was ordered to install a treatment facility by 2003 and comply with federal standards or else face fines of $US27,000 ($66,000) a day.

But that has now been undone by President Bush, whose Administration announced last month that it was revoking the new rules on the grounds that the medical risks were not sufficiently proven to justify the costs of installing expensive filtering systems in largely rural, impoverished communities.

Under Bush's leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency now says it will review the evidence and consider its own acceptable level of arsenic contamination - a move that has enraged the scientific community and added to the perception that Bush is more interested in handing out political favours than he is in public health or the environment.

"Nothing in the research or in current thinking suggests that we have overblown the problem. If anything, our arsenic is more toxic than we thought," said Paul Mushak, a North Carolina toxicologist who has worked with the EPA for 20 years.

"That makes it more medically offensive to say the science isn't there. The science has been there in overwhelming abundance for years."

Fallon is too small to demonstrate the effects of arsenic conclusively - particularly given the controversies surrounding jet fuel from the neighbouring air naval station, mercury from mines near the Carson River, nickel carbonyl from a local car-parts factory, and other poisons coursing through the local community.

With just 8200 residents, anything short of a spectacular jump in the number of cancers is likely to be statistically insignificant and lost in the noise of other illnesses and other causes.

The cluster of acute lymphocytic leukaemia cases is spectacular (24 times the expected norm), but according to the best scientific knowledge, it is unrelated to arsenic and its cause is still being investigated.

City officials find themselves caught between the embarrassment of national exposure as the arsenic capital of America, and an almost preternatural reluctance - driven largely by fear of what it will take to fix the problem - to admit there is anything wrong at all.

Mayor Ken Tedford insists there are no documented cases of illness, and stands by the quality of what comes out of his municipal taps. "It's pretty good water," he said. "It has naturally occurring fluoride. In fact, it's real pure - outside of the arsenic."

Old-timers around Fallon, a farming community built a century ago on reclaimed land from the Carson River, even go so far as to say it is the arsenic that has kept them alive into their 70s and 80s. "Don't get me wrong," Mayor Tedford counters, "arsenic at some level probably is harmful. But why are we treating the water if no one here's been harmed?"

Despite his rosy views, however, most Fallon residents have long since switched to bottled water. "I wouldn't give that water to my dog," was a common refrain. Laura White said it tasted "mouldy, like it's been sitting for ever." And conversations with residents turned up plentiful anecdotal evidence of arsenic-related health problems, which have never been thoroughly investigated.

One motorbike-store owner, calling himself Kix, said an autopsy on his grandmother a few years ago - she died of other causes - had revealed levels of arsenic high enough to kill most people. Even local doctor Gary Ridenour, who has publicly pooh-poohed the health risks associated with arsenic, said he had treated families for symptoms of poisoning. (He noted, however, that the families were not hooked up to the city supply but drew on well water on their own land.)

If Fallon and surrounding Churchill County have been allowed to get away with exposing their people to such high arsenic risks, it is partly because the federal Government has dragged its feet over several presidencies.

Fallon signed an initial agreement with the EPA as long ago as 1990, when George Bush sen was President, but could not easily raise state or federal funds until it became clear exactly how pure its water would have to be.

The deadlock was finally broken in 1999, after the National Academy of Sciences report came out, and the EPA sent a notice of violation, ordering the city to clean up by 2003, money or no money. Ironically, the Clinton regulations were actually welcomed by Mayor Tedford because they set a clear standard and opened the way for federal grants to help meet installation costs estimated as high as $US10m.

President Bush's rollback has actually complicated matters because the EPA order stands, but the $US4.6 billion in federal funds set aside to help clean up the arsenic is now back off the table. "It's thrown a little more doubt into the equation," the mayor said.

But many of the citizens of Fallon are sure of one thing. As Laura White puts it: "This is no place to bring up kids."

- INDEPENDENT