NO ONE DESERVES more blame for what happened in Woburn than its city government. A middle- and lower-middle-class community 12 miles north of Boston, Woburn is one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. A toxic brew of chemicals has been floating through the Aberjona River valley, which bisects Woburn, for more than 150 years. City officials first started talking about drilling wells in East Woburn in the 1950s to alleviate the chronic shortage of drinking water. In 1958 they hired an outside consultant to conduct an engineering study. The conclusion: the groundwater was far too heavily polluted even to consider letting people drink it. Yet in 1964 the city committed the original sin in this multigenerational tragedy. Well G was installed on the east bank of the Aberjona. Three years later, Well H was built a few hundred feet to the north.
It was this highly contaminated water that Jimmy Anderson was exposed to in utero, was bathed in, drank, and played in. His mother always had her doubts -- it smelled bad, it tasted bad, it corroded the pipes in her and her then-husband, Charlie's, home. Those doubts grew into fear and then into conviction after Jimmy was diagnosed with leukemia, in 1972, and she began meeting other Woburn families when she'd bring Jimmy to Boston for treatment.
But Anderson's belief that the water had made her son sick was mainly a private one until May 1979, when several barrels of chemicals were found dumped near the Aberjona River. State investigators tested Wells G and H. They found no evidence that the contents of the barrels had made their way into the wells. What they did find, though, was even worse: drinking water contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchloroethylene, or PCE), and other industrial solvents. The wells were closed and have not been used since.
The discovery provided Anne Anderson with the resolve she needed to act. But few wanted to listen. She fought an unresponsive City Hall. She fought whispers that she was just a hysterical mother, that she was an outsider (she'd grown up in Somerville), that she didn't know what she was talking about. She even fought Charlie, who believed she was chasing a chimera. He asked their minister, the Reverend Bruce Young, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, to intervene -- to talk to her, to try to bring her some sense of peace over what had befallen their family.
"He said to me, 'She won't let go of it, Bruce,' " recalls Young, who'll retire from Trinity next June. Young says he tried to reason with her -- and agreed to help her when she got the idea of holding a meeting at the church in September 1979 for families who'd been affected by leukemia and other cancers. The response was overwhelming, far larger than he had expected. A map was put together, with colored pins marking homes where someone had been diagnosed with leukemia; a cluster became visible in East Woburn. And instead of trying to talk her out of her theory, Young became an advocate, knocking on doors and demanding answers where she couldn't.
"It became clear to me that we had a real bias here against a mother and a woman," Young says. "I was a priest. I brought to it a clerical collar. Whenever I called various agencies and offices, I would introduce myself as 'Father Young.' It was helpful in getting through to them. Maybe they said, 'It's that crazy priest again,' but on the surface it was at least an entrée."
The third key player in those early days was a newspaper reporter -- Charlie Ryan, who covered the city for the Daily Times Chronicle. He'd reported on the discovery of the barrels, on the contamination of the wells, and on the unearthing of an enormous toxic-waste site in North Woburn called the Industri-Plex that, as it turned out, was unrelated to the problems of Wells G and H. But Ryan's most important story came in December 1979, on a development he thought he'd been beaten on. The state's Department of Public Health was about to release the results of a study on Woburn's leukemia rate, and Ryan arranged to interview DPH officials. That morning, the Boston Herald American published a front-page story reporting that the leukemia rate was within the normal range for a city of Woburn's size.
"I was a little pissed," Ryan remembers, "but I went in there anyway." He sat down with a DPH statistician, who explained the results to him: essentially, the DPH had taken the number of leukemia cases and divided it by the total population of Woburn, based on the 1970 census. Ryan stopped him. 1970? The population of Woburn, Ryan knew, had fallen from 40,000 to around 36,000. Ryan asked a simple question: What would happen if the lower figure were used? The statistician recalculated the numbers -- and, all of a sudden, the number of leukemia cases appeared to be "statistically significant," the bland-sounding phrase used to describe what was obviously a very real problem.
"That story drastically changed everything," says Ryan, who got out of journalism a few years ago and now helps run the computers for Essex County Newspapers. "To that point, everyone had considered Anne Anderson to be just a hysterical mom. I think without that story, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state never would have pushed that hard."
Ryan's personal story is itself emblematic of Woburn and how it has changed from an insular, working-class city into a bedroom community with a well-educated middle class. Ryan was part of a large Catholic family; his late father had been head of the Woburn Redevelopment Authority and, on the surface at least, a well-entrenched member of the city's parochial political culture. But Ryan, influenced by the Vietnam War and the protest movements of the 1960s, traveled to India as a Peace Corps volunteer after graduating from Boston College, and married an Indian woman.
Thus, when career and family drew him back, he brought with him both an intimate familiarity with his hometown and a broader world-view. In one of his first stories, he made it clear that he would not practice journalism-as-usual: he reported on how local public-housing officials discriminated against the city's burgeoning Latino community. Not long after he began reporting on the toxic-waste story, Ryan recalls, an old friend of his father's told him, "Your father would be turning over in his grave if he knew what you were doing to his city." Ryan's response: "That means you didn't know my father very well."
