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Tracing Cancer's Cause
The firefighters believe they passed a cancer risk to their children. Precisely how is unclear.
About 200 cases of rhabdomyosarcoma are diagnosed each year in the United States in children younger than 10. Amanda was the second child of an Anne Arundel firefighter to contract the disease.
  Retired firefighter Dave Fowler, 52, with granddaughter Gabriella and wife Cindy, found out he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1997. (Photos By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post) |
Fowler learned he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma eight years later, when he arrived home from a shift one January morning.
Three times since, doctors have told him he was about to die. Each time, he focused on some future date -- a holiday, a graduation, an anniversary -- and toughed it out. Fellow firefighters joke that he's too stubborn to die. The fact that he is alive at 52 is one of the things they have to celebrate.
But Fowler lives in a perpetual morphine haze. He can no longer drive. He used to walk the four miles to his old fire station in Earleigh Heights and back again. Now, he can barely make the half-mile to the neighborhood gas station.
"C'mere, Pumpkin," he said, scooping his 15-month-old granddaughter, Gabriella, into his arms on the patio of the family home. "If it wasn't for her," he said, "I think I'd be dead now."
Exposure to Tainted Oil
The old Dollhouse still sits on the grounds of the training academy, set against a sweep of forest behind fire headquarters. The academy opened in 1968. Firefighters from Anne Arundel, Howard and Prince George's counties, Annapolis, Fort Meade and the U.S. Naval Academy trained there, according to Ell.
Starting in spring 1971, the academy accepted annual shipments of used transformer oil from Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. Trainers pumped oil into the Pit, a pool of water that would be set ablaze; the Christmas Tree, a rectangular steel structure that spat flame; and the Dollhouse.
"For days, you would just be blowing that stuff out of your nose," Fowler recalled.
Production of PCBs ceased in 1977 after the government declared the substance a carcinogen. Two years later, state officials detected PCBs in a tributary to the Severn River and traced them to the academy, which is near a creek bed.
Katherine Farrell, a state health official at the time, made inquiries and learned recruits "were very heavily exposed" to the tainted oil, "kind of wading around in it, breathing it, with and without respirators." She asked the county to warn its fire department.
The firefighters knew about PCBs and had asked the utility as early as 1976 whether the donated oil contained them. According to an internal department memo, BGE officials repeatedly told them the oil did not. One fire official cited in the memo said a BGE official in 1977 told him, "That stuff won't hurt you anyway, my guys wash their hands in it."
