OVER LUNCH IN a dark corner of Spuds, hard by Interstate 93, Nick Paleologos reminds me of something I had completely forgotten -- that at an earlier lunch, in 1991, I first told him about Harr's book-in-progress. Paleologos, a state-rep-turned-movie-producer (he and his business partner, Fred Zollo, have made such films as Mississippi Burning and Quiz Show), was thinking about making a Woburn movie, and I suggested that Harr's book -- if he could ever finish writing it -- might make a good starting point.
Paleologos stayed in touch with Harr for several years, but in the end he lost out to Robert Redford and Disney. The next time Paleologos was heard from was in 1997. Disney was refusing to pay the families for their life stories, and Paleologos filed a bill with the state legislature that would have forced the company's hand. Paleologos took some heat -- in some quarters, he was denounced as a money-grubbing enemy of free speech who was bitter over being cut out of the action -- but in the end, Disney settled. Paleologos isn't allowed to say how much the families got, except to say the payments were in keeping with movie-industry standards. "They weren't numbers I'd picked out of a hat," he says, chuckling.
Paleologos is hardly a newcomer to the story of Woburn's toxic-waste problems. He remembers reading in the Daily Times Chronicleway back in 1979 about a community meeting that Anne Anderson and Bruce Young were organizing. He knew Young because the priest had allowed him and Zollo to hold theatrical rehearsals at Trinity Church when they were still high-school students. "My attitude was, if Bruce Young says there's something wrong, there's something wrong. He had instant credibility with me," Paleologos says. Over the next few years, Paleologos, Anderson, and Young worked together to pass legislation creating a state "Superfund" to clean up toxic-waste sites (mimicking a previously passed federal law) and a state cancer registry so tragedies such as Woburn's could be detected and documented more easily.
"I felt a huge amount of frustration at not being able to move the bureaucracy as fast as I thought it ought to be moved," he says. "Now, looking back, I think it moved pretty quickly." Indeed, by 1985, before the trial even began, Paleologos's work on the toxic-waste problem was essentially done. The EPA's investigation was well under way. (The EPA officials who at the time moaned that Schlichtmann's lawsuit was impeding their progress will either laugh or cry at the close of the movie, when it's "revealed" that the EPA got involved in the case only as a result of Schlichtmann's work.) Today, Grace, Beatrice, and three other property owners are paying for a multimillion-dollar project to clean up East Woburn: the Superfund law makes property owners responsible whether or not they actually contaminated their land. (Beatrice, unlike Grace, has never even admitted to responsibility for pollution on its own site.)
Indeed, A Civil Action tells just a small part of the Woburn story, the leading characters of which aren't lawyers but ordinary people who showed courage, intelligence, and common sense in the face of extraordinary circumstances. The result has been a sea change in attitude from the insular 1970s and early '80s, when city officials simply insisted the water was fine and that Anderson, Young, Ryan, Paleologos, and the like were just troublemakers.
By contrast, Woburn's current mayor, Robert Dever, a retired airline pilot who's been in office since 1996, goes out of his way to convince the public of his environmental sensitivity. Last year, for instance, when routine testing revealed that one of the city wells contained trace amounts of TCE, Dever shut it down immediately -- even though the amounts were far below the threshold set by the EPA.
"The top priority to me is to make sure we have a clean and safe water supply," says Dever. Linda Olsson, an environmental activist, says such rapid action definitely shows a change in attitude, although she still wishes there were "more communication between the city and the community."
Yet, in some respects, Woburn has the feel of a place that has come full circle rather than moved forward.
In North Woburn, the home of the city's other toxic-waste site, city, state, and federal officials are moving ahead with plans to pave over the contaminated land with a train station and a parking lot. But Gretchen Latowsky, who was the director of Woburn FACE (For a Cleaner Environment) until its rather acrimonious demise several years ago, says nothing should be done until a system is in place to treat contaminated groundwater that's flowing off the property.
"What really bothers me the most about this is that everyone has lost sight of where we started," says Latowsky, who -- as project director for community technical assistance for the JSI Center for Environmental Health Sciences -- has lectured from Eastern Europe to the Alaskan wilderness on the lessons of Woburn. (Dever responds that the groundwater problem will be addressed in any construction plan.)
Then there are the companies that Schlichtmann sued, none of which has ever admitted to one iota of responsibility for Woburn's suffering. Former tannery owner John Riley has always insisted he never used any of the chemicals at issue in the suit. Beatrice, of course, never did anything other than cut a bad deal when it bought Riley's property. And even though Grace had to admit that its employees dumped TCE in back of the Cryovac plant, its official corporate position continues to be that none of that TCE ever made it into Wells G and H. The company has put together an entire Web site (http://www.civil-action.com) dedicated to putting its point across. Presumably it is no coincidence that the URL is almost identical to that of the official movie site, http://www.civilaction.com.
Ironically, Grace is now the subject of another toxic-waste controversy. Two weeks ago the Toxics Action Center released its second annual "dirty dozen" list of the state's worst environmental hazards. Among them: a Winchester dump site that allegedly contains contaminated materials from an old Grace chemical plant in Cambridge. A homeowner in the Winchester neighborhood, John Morgan, claims that TCE in the material leached north into the Woburn well that was shut down last year. Grace has emphatically denied all allegations. But Bruce Young says he can't help but observe that the denials sound exactly like those the company issued nearly two decades ago.
"I feel like Don Quixote a little bit," he says.
