WOBURN

The city of Woburn is a town of thirty-six thousand people which lies twelve miles north of
Boston. In 1966, Reverend Mr. Bruce Young arrived at Woburn Trinity Episcopal Church - his first
church. He was twenty-eight years old and ambitious but seeing the state of the parish, he intended
to stay only for about five years. However, things changed in his sixth year, the sick became the
heart and soul of his ministry.
There were twelve children diagnosed with leukemia in the city. Anne Anderson, mother of
Jimmy, thought that it is strange to have unusual number of children having leukemia occuring in the
same neigborhood. She tried to connect each and every detail that will correlate the common cause
with each and every child. She postulated later on that it has something to do with the water.
According to Dr. Truman - the chief of pediatric hematology, some types of leukemia can be
caused by ionized radiation or by chemicals like benzene. Some scientists also suspected that viruses
might cause leukemia in humans.
Wells G and H which are highly problematic served mostly the homes. There are unending
cycle of calls and complaints by the residents to the wells – sporadic closure of the wells – re-
opening it and stating that it is absolutely clean, safe and potable. There are also 184 barrels of
industrial waste on a plot of vacant land in northeast Woburn. Subsequent tests revealed that both of
the wells were heavily contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) listed by the Environmental
Protection Agency as “probable” carcinogens. On September 1979, a headline of Lagoon of Arsenic
was discovered as an acre in size and five feet deep, that was contaminated with arsenic, lead,
chromium, and traces of other heavy metals. The article in Woburn Daily Times stated that there
were arsenic in small doses which is suspected as a cancer-causing agent and chromium known
carcinogen to caused tumors of the lungs and nasal passages when inhaled.
When Reverend Young learned about the Daily times, they conducted a meeting in regards
with the leukemia case. Thirty people came. Of the twelve cases they had as an information, eight
were located in east Woburn, and six of those were clustered in the Pine Street neighborhood, where
perhaps two hundred families lived.
When Young thought the distribution looked highly unusual, he went to Dr. Truman to ask
about the cases. Dr. Truman agreed that it was undoubtedly a very striking cluster. They consulted
Dr. Clark Heath - the world’s foremost expert in leukemia clusters. Despite Heath’s doubts about
clusters, he still felt it was “highly likely” that infectious agents played a role in the cause of
childhood leukemia. Nevertheless, Heath investigated and arranged to send an epidemiologist to
Boston to meet with Truman and to collect the records of leukemic children from other Boston area
hospitals.
They called Joe Mulligan - Donna’s lawyer in Robbie’s hip case and separation – as their
lawyer. Reverend Young unfloded the map with leukemia cases, there were odds of a cluster like
this ocurring by chance are on the order of a hundred to one. Twelve children with leukemia—eight
of them within a half-mile radius, six of them living almost next door to each other—and
contaminated drinking water. It was, in legal terms, as Mulligan later said, “almost res ipsa
loquitur”—the thing speaks for itself.
Five of the families—Anderson, Robbins, Zona, Kane, and Toomey—decided to have
Mulligan represent them. Among the twelve known cases, five of them - Robbie, Jarrod, Michael,
Lilley and Jimmy- hopelessly died.
The Centers for Disease Control and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health jointly
released a report entitled Woburn: Cancer Incidence and Environmental Hazards. The report was
based on the investigation of Dr. Heath which confirmed that an unusual number of leukemia cases
did indeed exist in east Woburn. Analysis shows that residence at the time of diagnosis reveals a
significant concentration of cases in the eastern part of Woburn, where the incidence of disease was
at least seven times greater than expected. It further emphasized that although there was no proof
that the contaminants in the wells would cause leukemia, their presence was a cause for suspicion.