The Poison Underground Part 1: Tainted groundwater still scares Security

Story originally ran Dec. 12, 2004

Some Security and Widefield residents have raised the question for years.

They’ve talked of cancer, of thyroid disease, of skin rashes.

They’ve wondered whether those health problems could be connected to what lies below: a

five-mile trail of contaminated groundwater under thousands of homes in the area south of Colorado Springs.

The tainted groundwater has spread from the Schlage Lock plant in Security for at least two decades.

At issue is the chemical perchloroethylene, or PCE, a probable human carcinogen.

Schlage officials acknowledge that PCE-contaminated groundwater seeped into the Widefield aquifer, which supplies much of the area’s water.

But company officials say the community water systems are safe and PCE is not responsible for residents’ health problems.

Kathryn Cumm-Hall, a plaintiff in one of 19 personal-injury suits filed this year against Schlage in Colorado’s 4th Judicial District Court, isn’t convinced.

“I won’t even cook with the water here anymore,” Cumm-Hall said. She drinks bottled water and is afraid to eat the fruit from the peach, apple and cherry trees in her back yard.

“I don’t know enough about chemistry to know if there’s a toxic amount of this stuff in the fruit,” she said.

The contamination has far-reaching effects.

Schlage has spent more than $18 million trying to clean up the mess.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in charge of overseeing the cleanup, is conducting a multipart review to answer questions on health risks.

Two popular fishing ponds at Fountain Creek Regional Park have been closed for years because of contamination.

The courts have become increasingly involved. Suits filed in state and federal courts have produced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of documents.

The personal-injury lawsuits, which seek unspecified damages, allege that Cumm-Hall and others suffer health problems resulting from exposure to PCE “through skin contact, breathing, bathing, showering and consumption.”

That leaves people in the 2,000 or so mostly modest, middle-class homes above the tainted groundwater to wonder whether the air they breathe could be a threat and whether the water they drink could endanger their health.

Schlage says no.

Health officials say no.

But it may ultimately fall upon a jury to answer those questions. The first trial stemming from the suits is set for October 2005.

Most plaintiffs refused to discuss the lawsuits, referring questions to their lawyers. Attorneys on both sides of the dispute were similarly tight-lipped.

But the growing mountain of court documents points to the hurdles lawyers face in proving their case against Schlage and indicate the complexity of the issues involved. It will take a week of hearings just to determine which experts will be allowed to testify.

SOLVENT DUMPED IN 1979

Schlage is one of El Paso County’s biggest private employers, with roughly 800 employees at its Security plant. The plant, which makes commercial and residential locks, opened in 1977.

Two years later, in an incident detailed in county Health Department files, employees emptied as many as 50 barrels of PCE into a pit at the plant. A smaller, accidental spill occurred in 1982.

PCE, a solvent used to clean metals, seeped into the groundwater, then migrated off Schlage’s property. The resulting path, or plume, of contaminated groundwater runs 30 to 70 feet beneath hundreds of homes.

Lawyers must show that plaintiffs were exposed in some way to the PCE, such as drinking contaminated water or breathing vapors rising from the ground.

Water in two wells feeding Widefield’s drinking-water supply and one feeding Security’s was found to be contaminated in the early 1990s.

The wells were quickly taken out of service and the water now is treated before reaching the public, Schlage and health officials say. Testing the air in 10 homes and a school above the plume found no problems, state health officials reported in early 2002.

Proving that plaintiffs were exposed to PCE — and at a high-enough level to cause health problems — is just one challenge for attorneys. They also must show PCE can cause the ailments detailed in the suits.

“The personal-injury component of anything like this is actually very, very complex,” said Perry Sanders, an expert in environmental law.

The Louisiana lawyer is part of a team — including Colorado Springs attorneys Rob Jones and Rob Frank and J. Mike DiGiglia of Woodland Park — representing plaintiffs in the suits. Sanders and his family have temporarily moved to the Colorado Springs area while he works on the litigation.

Sanders said the cases will be based on “dose-response relationships,” a foundation of the science of toxicology. Dose-response focuses on what level of dose, or exposure, of a chemical can cause toxic effects.

“We’re strictly looking at dose and how you can extrapolate dose and whether conditions can be caused by whatever dose is provable.”

Court documents shed more light on the attorneys’ strategy, including the use of Dr. James Dahlgren, a California toxicologist who gained fame as the medical expert in the case that inspired the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

Records in the case of Kenneth Freese, a plaintiff who suffered bladder cancer, show a focus on “vapor intrusion,” or exposure through the air.

One expert’s report concludes that groundwater containing significant concentrations of PCE reached the area under Freese’s house as early as March 1983.

Another report estimates air concentrations that could have resulted from the solvent migrating up through soils and into homes.

Based on those reports, Dahlgren concluded that Freese had a significantly increased risk of cancer. He also cited studies indicating that PCE may cause bladder cancer.

“Mr. Freese’s exposure to the PCE plume from Schlage Lock Company is more likely than not a cause of his bladder cancer,” Dahlgren said in an Oct. 12 letter to Jones, a Freese attorneys.

Dahlgren also obtained medical histories and conducted physical exams and tests on Freese and other plaintiffs.

“There is a pattern of illness in these plaintiffs and their families involving the neurological, endocrinological, immunological, respiratory and gastrointestinal health problems which are consistent with the known toxic effects of chlorinated solvents,” he wrote in a June 2 letter to Sanders.

Sanders acknowledged he anticipates calling Dahlgren as a witness.

“There are a handful of people in the nation who have lots of experience with chemical exposure and dose-response issues,” Sanders said. “He is certainly one of them.”

Dahlgren’s expertise is costly. He gets $8,000 a day for appearing during a trial, according to a fee schedule included in court documents.

Gail Wurtzler, an attorney with Davis Graham & Stubbs, a Denver-based law firm representing Schlage and its parent company, Ingersoll-Rand, declined to discuss the suits.

Court filings on behalf of Schlage challenge the “theoretical estimate” of indoor-air concentrations and question Dahlgren’s methodology.

“We will have experts who will have a different opinion,” Wurtzler said when asked about Dahlgren’s involvement.

Judge Rebecca Bromley of the 4th Judicial District Court will decide in February which experts will be allowed to testify in the Freese trial.

The hearing, designed to prevent the admission of so-called junk science at trial, is projected to last a week.

Bromley will hear highly technical arguments from the expert witnesses and evaluate their qualifications, the reliability of the scientific principles they advocate and the usefulness of the testimony to the jury.

OTHER SUITS FILED

The personal-injury suits are just the latest litigation rising from the Schlage contamination. The attorneys leading the suits are the same ones pressing a class-action suit alleging the contamination damaged property values.

In 2000, Security and Widefield residents flocked to meetings held by the lawyers to discuss the property suit, which seeks unspecified compensation for homeowners. Even then, many worried about lives, not land.

Lawyers at the time, though, were careful not to link the plume and health problems. The suits filed this year came after extensive research, Sanders said.

The personal-injury suits in the 4th Judicial District Court are not the first to claim health problems from the contamination.

A suit filed in 2003 in U.S. District Court in Denver alleged that a Widefield man’s liver

cancer was a result of the contamination.

A judge dismissed the case in October at the request of both sides.

Brian Smith, then 27, was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer in 2001. He underwent a liver transplant in 2002.

Smith and the law firm representing him, Hanes & Schutz of Colorado Springs, declined to comment.

Court files contain a report from Wayne Roth-Nelson, an environmental health scientist, contending that Smith drank contaminated water from municipal water wells from 1980 to 1992. Another report prepared for Smith’s attorneys by toxicologist Kathey Verdeal discusses Smith’s specific “rare subtype” of liver cancer and the apparent lack of a cause other than chemical exposure.

Animal studies have linked liver cancer to PCE exposure.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is analyzing the incidence of liver cancer and other cancers above and around the plume.

The analysis is part of a study that also is reviewing issues such as drinking-water and indoor-air safety. It’s unclear when results will be released, said Mike Wilson, chief of the environmental epidemiology section at the state Health Department.

The study, called a public-health consultation, will cover the incidence of thyroid cancer. But it won’t look at thyroid disease, the problem listed most frequently in the personal-injury lawsuits.

With thyroid disease, unlike cancer, there is no state or national registry from which to compare numbers, making it difficult if not impossible to determine whether the incidence of thyroid disease locally is abnormal.

Thyroid disease involves an overactive or underactive thyroid. Wilson said he hasn’t seen a clear association made between it and PCE exposure. But he added, “I wouldn’t say I’d rule it out.”

Troy Cardenas, another personal-injury plaintiff, takes medicine daily for his thyroid disease, which he blames on the PCE contamination.

He was diagnosed about 10 years ago.

At a meeting he attended a few years ago on Schlage Lock, people with thyroid disease were asked to raise their hands, he said. Hands “popped up all over the place,” Cardenas said.

“Thyroid disease isn’t common enough for the number of people who have it around here,” he said.

According to the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, 1 in 10 Americans suffers from thyroid disease. More than half remain undiagnosed, the group says.

Cumm-Hall’s complaint attributes her thyroid disease to PCE exposure. It lists other conditions, too: respiratory problems, migraine headaches and fibromyalgia, a chronic condition marked by fatigue and muscle and joint pain.

During an interview, Cumm-Hall left briefly to take medicine for a budding headache. She told of repeated bouts of pneumonia and of constant fatigue.

“Everything I want to do is an effort,” said Cumm-Hall, who said she is in her 50s.

Cumm-Hall, chaplain for the Colorado State Fraternal Order of Police, began to believe in a link between her ailments and the contaminated groundwater after reading articles about it.

“It got to the point where I didn’t want to turn on the heater. I didn’t know if whatever was coming out of the ground was going into the heater and then into the house.”

She has no intention of leaving her home, despite her fears.

“Everybody says it so casually, ‘Well, if you’re sick, then move.’” But she has lived in her house, on Aspen Drive in Security, for nearly 30 years. “It’s not fair to even think about asking me to move.”

Freese, the plaintiff with bladder cancer, shares that attitude.

He bought his home on Sumac Drive in 1956. The original owner of the house, he lives there alone; his wife, Theresa, died of a heart attack in 2001.

“My house is paid for and everything, and I don’t want to move,” Freese said. “My wife loved it and my kids loved it. And I’m going to stay right here and when they carry me out, put me in an ambulance, that’ll be when I leave.”

Freese was diagnosed in 1998 after blood in his urine alerted him to a problem. He underwent surgery and a therapy that involved repeated injections of a live virus into his bladder. The cancer appears to be gone, he said.

“I’m just hanging in there, and I hope it stays that way,” said Freese, 83.

Unlike Cumm-Hall, he doesn’t take precautions when drinking or using the water. He has been through a lot, having served in World War II, Korea and, briefly, Vietnam, during more than 20 years in the Army. Today, he said, he has the attitude that what will be, will be.

Asked how confident he is of a link between his cancer and the plume far beneath his home, Freese shrugged. “You can’t be sure,” he said.