Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [47]
Stepping out of a drainage culvert on a fall morning, Spiegel pointed to a section of the brook that runs behind the Edison Glen condos. The water in the stream is clear. The banks are covered with native hardwoods, shrubs, and grasses. EPA contractors and the Wetlands Association even hauled in deadwood and placed it where trees would have fallen if a storm had blown them down. Together they designed, engineered, and rebuilt a beautiful riparian area. “A model cleanup,” the EPA proclaimed. Except for a few rip-rapped hot spots along the banks, the brook looks as it might have when a kid named Thomas Edison wandered around it 150 years ago.
AT DUSK ON the same fall day when Bob Spiegel showed off the clear creek, a few hundred feet downstream Livingston’s abandoned CIC site still sits, eerie. Acres of black rubber sheeting covered with disintegrating black sandbags are scattered along the seams. A rock perimeter dike is covered with thick, black cloth. Black plastic lies atop a ten-foot-deep ditch. Black fifty-five-gallon drums stand in formation. It is a giant shroud, patched and leaking, mourning the dead acres. At the end of a hot September day, the degrading rubber cap can’t contain the fumes. The air is infused with a dense, sweet chemical odor that clings to your palate and wears at your airways.
From the top of a rotting observation platform you can see an EPA sign that proclaims DAYS WORKED 312—LOST TO INJURIES 0. You can also see the second story of Gail Horvath’s house and the Metroplex Bakery that makes the buns for McDonald’s. Only one of the trailers backed up at the loading docks bears the golden arches logo. After news reports of yellow-green fluid oozing across the bakery’s parking lot, the Ronald McDonald party wagon disappeared from the bakery, as did most of the trailers with the golden arches on their sides. In a video Spiegel delivered to local TV-news directors, even the snow in the bakery parking lot was green. On August 2, 2002, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger reported, “Ambient air used in the bakery’s production process is a potential for human exposure to contaminants.”
Not good publicity for McDonald’s.
In the late 1980s six bakery employees died of cancer. They lived in different neighborhoods, led separate lives. “The only thing they had in common was working at that bakery,” said Ed Herman, a plaintiff’s lawyer from Princeton. In 1992 he filed a lawsuit on behalf of the six widows and lost. Ten years later the loss still gnaws at him. “There were more people who wanted to sue,” said Herman. “People with cancer were coming out of the woodwork.” An Edison cop walked away from his home and his mortgage after being diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. His wife later developed cancer as well.
“We would have had to do an epidemiological study,” said Herman. “It would have cost our firm more than a million dollars.” He consulted with big firms that had tried toxic tort cases and was told his was a long shot. “We spent a lot of money, about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, spinning our wheels to try to get these people the money they deserved for their losses. Bottom line was, without the study we couldn’t prove the chemicals were linked to the cancers.” (This is precisely the kind of lawsuit that is now almost impossible to file in Texas after two rounds of “tort reform” pushed by Governor George W. Bush.)
“I was convinced then and I am convinced today that the chemicals on that property had something to do with those cancers,” said Herman. “It was such a high number. Too many people got too many types of cancer.