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Tracing Cancer's Cause
By the end of 1980, BGE had stopped delivering transformer oil to the academy and the fire department had stopped burning it. But firefighters contend the site wasn't thoroughly cleaned until five years later.
Linda Foy, a spokeswoman for the utility, noted that BGE employees trained at the fire academy. "We would never knowingly put people at risk," she said.
Compiling a Case
  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) |
Cindy Ell had been researching cancer for the firefighters union when, in August 1996, she blew out two discs in her neck. While laid up, she took to researching full time. In summer 2002, she went to work for Kenneth Berman, a Montgomery lawyer who was preparing workers' compensation cases for widows of Anne Arundel firefighters.
By 2004, they saw a potential case against those they deemed responsible: Monsanto Co., which manufactured the PCBs; General Electric Co., which sold them; and BGE, which provided them to the fire department. Suing the county is forbidden under state law unless the firefighters can prove intentional wrongdoing.
In June 2004, someone tipped off a reporter to what Berman and Ell were doing. In the resulting crush of publicity, the county hired Jonathan Samet, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, to look for a link between cancer and PCBs.
Samet concluded that the firefighters faced an elevated risk for cancer, but he found nothing to link their illness to PCBs or any other specific cause.
Samet, working with limited funds, found and interviewed 17 firefighters. Berman and Ell had offered the researcher the identities of many more cancer victims, living and dead. Samet contends he followed proper procedure for conducting impartial research.
"It's very difficult to pinpoint that a specific cancer was caused in a specific firefighter by a particular environmental exposure," Samet recalled.
He recommended further study. Mikulski requested a national investigation of cancer in firefighters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded this spring that it was aware of the Anne Arundel study and "prioritizing research needs."
Berman has won 17 workers' compensation cases. Each ruling amounts to a concession by the state that the firefighter's job made him sick. There is no need to prove how the firefighter got sick.
A victory entitles firefighters and their families to recover medical expenses, two-thirds of lost wages while the firefighter is alive and the cost of a funeral.
