Deadly Water

One of the first victims was Jimmy Anderson, then 3, who developed leukemia in 1971 and died in 1981. Within a year after Jimmy's illness began, Michael Zona, 7, succumbed. He lived a block from the Andersons in Woburn, Mass., a tidy community of 36,000 just a dozen miles north of Boston. In 1980 Roland Gamache, 32, was struck by the disease. He lived next door to the Zonas. In all, 19 cases of leukemia, five of them fatal so far, were reported between 1969 and 1983 within six blocks of the Anderson house in what became known as Woburn's "leukemia cluster." The purported source of the problem: toxic industrial solvents in two wells that served the neighborhood. Who dumped the contaminants and whether the pollutants led to the deaths are the subjects of a lawsuit against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods being tried last week in U.S. district court in Boston.

Lawyers for eight Woburn families are charging that factories owned by Grace and Beatrice contaminated the wells by knowingly dumping wastes into soil that leached into an underground aquifer. The two companies, said Attorney Jan Schlichtmann, "knew what they were doing could hurt people but . . . chose to do it anyway." The wells, closed in 1979, were found to contain five toxic chemicals, among them trichloroethylene, or a cleaning solvent that Schlichtmann contends causes cancer, a point vigorously denied by the defense.

Defense lawyers counter that the poison in the wells came not from their factories but from the nearby Aberjona River, whose banks are lined with industries that have dumped wastes for a century. Lawyer Michael Keating argued that the soil under the Grace Cryovac plant was too dense to allow seepage.

Although the complex trial will call on dozens of expert witnesses and last up to eight months, it will be watched closely elsewhere in the country where residents face contamination of belowground drinking water from toxic wastes. Throughout the nation, decades of careless disposal of industrial wastes have resulted in water that is unsafe to drink.

In suburban Adams County near Denver, residents have been buying bottled water and home-filtration systems since the Colorado department of health warned them in February not to drink the water unless it is boiled for five minutes. Reason: traces of TCE were in the supply. In an unusual gesture, the U.S. Army, conceding that some of the contaminants seeped from its Rocky Mountain Arsenal, agreed to put up $1 million for a tempo- rary purification system. Assistance also came from the Coors Co. of Golden, which gave away 2,200 cases of its famed Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water to thirsty residents.