Carol Van Strum was at home when her four children who had been fishing down at the stream near their home in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Park. The children were complaining about how a crop duster plane had buzzed their property near the creek and dumped an unidentified chemical substance on their heads and over the entire area.
That evening, the Van Strum children displayed strange symptoms and after-effects that Carol immediately identified as having been linked to the chemical duster. The kids had bloody diarrhea, nosebleeds, and severe headaches. The next morning, Carol found that many area residents were also complaining of similar symptoms. Other odd goings-on began to occur as well.
Several women who lived in the area had miscarriages shortly after incidents of spraying. Locals described finding animals that had died or had bizarre deformities — ducks with backward-facing feet, birds with misshapen beaks, and blinded elk; cats and dogs that had been exposed began bleeding from their eyes and ears. At a community meeting, residents decided to write to the Forest Service detailing the effects of the spraying they had witnessed. “We thought that if they knew what had happened to us, they wouldn’t do it anymore…”
As it turned out, the Forest Service admitted that the chemical was actually an herbicide that they were “using to kill weeds.” It was referred to by the Service as 2,4,5-T.
The chemical was one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange, which the U.S. military had stopped using in Vietnam after public outcry about the fact that it caused cancer, birth defects, and serious harms to people, animals, and the environment. But in the U.S., the Forest Service continued to use both 2,4,5-T and the other herbicide in Agent Orange, 2,4-D, to kill weeds. (Timber was — and in some places still is — harvested from the national forest and sold.) Between 1972 and 1977, the Forest Service sprayed 20,000 pounds of 2,4,5-T in the 1,600-square-mile area that included Van Strum’s house and the nearby town of Alsea.
As in Vietnam, the chemicals hurt people and animals in Oregon, as well as the plants that were their target.
Van Strum became an activist at that point against what she called the unnecessary use of chemical herbicides in populated areas. Taking it upon herself, she penned a letter on behalf of her community requesting that the Forest Service cease their spraying of the chemicals in their area. The Forest Service refused.
After the Forest Service refused their request to stop using the herbicides, she and her neighbors filed a suit that led to a temporary ban on 2,4,5-T in their area in 1977 and, ultimately, to a total stop to the use of the chemical in 1983.
For Van Strum, the suit was also the beginning of lifetime of battling the chemical industry. The lawyer who had taken their case offered a reduced fee in exchange for Van Strum’s unpaid research assistance. And she found she had a knack for poring over and parsing documents and keeping track of huge volumes of information. Van Strum provided guidance to others filing suit over spraying in national forests and helped filed another case that pointed out that the EPA’s registration of 2,4-D and other pesticides was based on fraudulent data from a company called Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. That case led to a decision, in 1983, to stop all aerial herbicide spraying by the Forest Service.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as environmentalists, that wasn’t even a word back then,” Van Strum said. “We just didn’t want to be poisoned.”
During her unpaid research work at the law firm, the mother of four began to collect documents from every conceivable source. Anything that dealt with chemical research, experimentation, testing, corporate records, data compilation, or results oriented documentation, Carol would amass and store in her home. Soon, she was looking at over 100K documents.
Still, Van Strum soon found herself helping with a string of suits filed by people who had been hurt by pesticides and other chemicals. “People would call up and say, ‘Do you have such and such?’ And I’d go clawing through my boxes,” said Van Strum, who often wound up acquiring new documents through these requests — and storing those, too, in her barn.
Along the way, she amassed disturbing evidence about the dangers of industrial chemicals — and the practices of the companies that make them. Two documents, for instance, detailed experiments that Dow contracted a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to conduct on prisoners in the 1960s to show the effects of TCDD, a particularly toxic contaminant found in 2,4,5-T. Another document, from 1985, showed that Monsanto had sold a chemical that was tainted with TCDD to the makers of Lysol, who, apparently unaware of its toxicity, used it as an ingredient in their disinfectant spray for 23 years. Yet another, from 1990, detailed the EPA policy of allowing the use of hazardous waste as inert ingredients in pesticides and other products under certain circumstances.
Carol’s persistence even went up in the chain as high as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that had done a particular study regarding the possible relationship between private and public chemical usage and the frequency of miscarriages in humans. The samples of water, animal tissue and human fetal tissue used in the study by the EPA were taken directly from the area of Oregon where these complaints had first originated. It was later known as the Alsea Study.
As the EPA completed its study, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Carol had attempted to get copies of the report, only to be told later that the study could not be released because much of the date “had been lost.” Inexplicably, the EPA took a pass on the FOIA order and failed to release the details of the study.
A lab chemist contacted Carol and provided her with a copy of a test results document that showed that the EPA had, in fact, found that the tissue and water samples tested were “significantly contaminated with TCDD.”
When confronted, the EPA claimed there had been a mix-up and that the samples were from another area. Van Strum filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the results and, for years, battled in court to get to the bottom of what happened. Though the EPA provided more than 34,000 pages in response to her request (which Van Strum carefully numbered and stored in her barn), the agency never released all the results of the study or fully explained what had happened to them or where the contaminated samples had been taken. And eventually, Van Strum gave up. The EPA declined to comment for this story.
In 1977, Carol woke to an intensely hot, horribly consuming inferno inside and around her home. She managed to escape, but could not save her four children who all perished in the flames. Firefighters who investigated the conflagration noted that it was incredible how quickly the house had burned away and opened up the possibility that arson was involved. As might be guessed, the investigation into the suspicious fire was never concluded.
Van Strum suspected some of her opponents might have set the fire. It was a time of intense conflict between local activists and employees of timber companies, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies over the spraying of herbicides. A group of angry residents in the area near Van Strum’s home had destroyed a Forest Service helicopter that had been used for spraying. And, on one occasion, Van Strum had come home to find some of the defenders of the herbicides she was attacking in court on her property.
“I’ve accepted that I’ll never really know” what happened, said Van Strum, who never rebuilt her house and now lives in an outbuilding next to the cleared site where it once stood.
But her commitment to the battle against toxic chemicals survived the ordeal. “If it was intentional, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “After that, there was nothing that could make me stop.”
Carol is 74-years-old now and has spent nearly a lifetime collecting documents relating to these and all other cases of chemical insinuation into our lives. The documents are well over 200K to date, but were beginning to deteriorate inside the makeshift warehouse in her decrepit, listing 80-year-old structure of a barn.
Modern environmentalists, interested in her story and her individual prowess in facing one of the most fearsomely aggressive lobbyist groups in the United States, recently approached her with the proposal to take all of the documentation and do a spectacular all-inclusive dump on the internet to form a sort of environmental-activist library that others could use as source material and research in their fight against the chemical tyrants that apparently have a lot of pull in the EPA and the rest of the Swamp!
Still, after all these years, Van Strum felt it was time to pass on her collection of documents, some of which pertain to battles that are still being waged, so “others can take up the fight.” And the seeds of many of the fights over chemicals going on today can be tied to the documents that sat in her barn. The Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories scandal is central in litigation over the carcinogenicity of Monsanto’s Roundup, for instance. And 2,4-D, the other active ingredient in Agent Orange, is still in use.
Meanwhile, private timber companies continue to use both 2,4-D and Roundup widely, though not in the national forest. Van Strum has been part of an effort to ban aerial pesticide spraying in the county, and is speaking on behalf of the local ecosystem in a related lawsuit.
“I get to play the Lorax,” Van Strum said. “It’s going to be fun.”
You have to admire a woman like Carol. Through perseverance and incredibly agonizing tragedy and loss, she still managed to bring to its knees an industry that revels in the destruction of people and the natural resources that surround us, all for treasure. I hope that there are others like her who continue to champion the little people who appear to have no other outlet than an alternative news media that actually cares about what happens to Americans, and not what dress Michelle Obama wore to the BET Awards.
Source: The Intercept
f’ing EPA, environment my ass…they keep using stuff that kills and maims
Yvonne McCarty – check this out ! More reason for chemical free homes !
There is a difference between environmentalist today that protest and push past people, for Canadian grey wolves to be turned loose in America and this, Apple’s and oranges