A Well of Pain

"No doubt, she's scorched earth in relationships all over the place. . . . But I still respect her. Somebody had to carry the banner up San Juan Hill. And I don't think there's selfishness here," he says, adding sadly, "I think it's a girl and her daddy."

'Smoking Gun' Documents

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When the Holt family learned in 2000 that they would be hooked up to the city of Dickson's water system because of a problem with their well water, Holt-Orsted and her family assumed it was a mere precaution. They didn't know anything about TCE. They weren't told that their well water contained 24 times the EPA's allowable limit of the toxin.

Only later, after the cancers started and after she'd begun sniffing around the subject, did Holt-Orsted connect the dots and realize the deep health trouble her family might be in. Based on TCE's toxicity and the fact that it had leaked from the landfill, the Holts filed suit.

But even then, Holt-Orsted assumed the contamination of her family's well was due to someone's carelessness or incompetence.

"In the beginning, that's what I thought," she says.

"Until I found the letters."

It happened quite by chance in late 2004, when she went to the state environment and conservation offices in Nashville and asked to see records about the landfill and the family's well water.

"They just hand you a big box of stuff," she says. "They didn't have a clue" that she was being handed fodder for her crusade.

In that box, she found letters and documents indicating that Tennessee environmental and water officials had concerns about the possibility of TCE appearing in the Holt's well water as early as 1988. The Holts' well was left untested for nine years while TCE problems in the wells of white families were tended to with haste, the records showed.

Based on those letters -- what Bullard calls the "smoking guns" -- the Holts amended their suit and added the civil rights claim of racial discrimination, which a judge split off into a separate action. (Both suits are pending.)

"Use of your well water should not result in any adverse health effects," an EPA official wrote to the Holts on Dec. 3, 1991, after one high TCE test was followed by two low ones. But a Tennessee water official questioned the EPA's conclusions, saying that the geology of the area was so prone to leaching that a low TCE test "was in no way an assurance that Mr. Holt's well water will stay below" the EPA standard.

State and federal officials agreed that the Holt well should be tested further. But for nine years, no tests were conducted.

Meanwhile, the toxin also showed up at high levels in a spring and several wells in 1993 and 1994. The white families at those sites were immediately told to stop using the water. And tests were conducted repeatedly all around the landfill -- but not at the Holt well.

Still, the Holts knew nothing. They did not know their well should have been monitored. And they did not know until many years later about the other families with TCE contamination. They never knew anything at all, until Harry Holt's daughter Sheila began poking around in dusty boxes.

A common manufacturing degreaser, TCE is "highly likely to produce cancer in humans," according to the proposed cancer guidelines contained in the EPA's 2001 draft report of its ongoing health risk assessment for TCE. TCE is associated with cancers of the kidney, liver, cervix, lymphatic system and, some say, breast. It is also associated with immune disorders, skin diseases and birth defects such as cleft palate.

Asked why the Holt well was not tested for nine years, Joe Sanders, general counsel for the state's Department of Environment and Conservation, said the state's resources were focused on the places where TCE existed at levels higher than at the Holts'.

"We're definitely not the Holts' adversaries and never have been," he said. "We tried to do what we've done based on the facts that we've had. I've seen Ms. Holt many times at different meetings. I think she's a fine lady and she sincerely believes her cause."

Background for a Funeral

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A sharp winter wind whips across an oak-lined ridge, over the tombstones and graves of the old Worley Furnace Cemetery, named for James Worley, a 19th-century slave who ran his master's iron furnace nearby.

Here lie the dearly departed of the historically black Eno Road community, now a dwindling group of African Americans who owned farms amid the area's gently rolling hills.

The cemetery is just across the road from the landfill. To the east are 150 acres of property owned by the Holts for a couple of generations. To the south, on the other side of the landfill, is the vacant and crumbling building of the old Negro Coaling School where Harry Holt was a student. Also to the south is the Worley Furnace Baptist Church where the Holt family once worshipped.

During the days of Jim Crow, African Americans played baseball on that open swath of land, but by 1956, the field had become a dumping ground, according to Bullard, the environmental expert, who found a reference to a "city dump" in a property deed from the period.

The city's official dump opened on that site in 1968. On its five acres, everything from dead animals to drums of chemicals were dumped. The site bred mosquitoes, flies and rodents. It produced the worst smells imaginable -- like burning carcasses -- which the Holts describe smelling every day, not to mention the dust, smoke and ash always in the air. Until 1972, it was unregulated.

After passing into county ownership in 1977, the landfill was upgraded and expanded to 74 acres. But by 2002, the acres of land where chemicals and rotting refuse once were dumped had been capped with layers of soil and clay from which tall white pipes rise like periscopes to vent the buildup of methane gases below. And a collection system for its leached liquids was installed.

But the old landfill's undulating landscape of tall grass interspersed with those tall pipes behind a fence topped with razor wire tells the ominous tale of what lies beneath.

Today, the site takes in only construction and demolition debris. Earth movers and trucks still rumble around there, producing a racket that intrudes upon the small cemetery across the road.

It was the background noise to Harry Holt's funeral.

"They didn't have enough respect to stop," Holt-Orsted says one mid-February morning, on her first visit to her father's grave since his Jan. 13 funeral.

Tears cut a trail of makeup down her face. She folds her arms tightly across her chest, braced against the wind, against the pain. She bends down to straighten two toppled angels that mark her father's grave until his headstone arrives.

Quickly, grief overwhelms her. The sound of plaintive weeping swirls in the cold wind.

"My dad didn't deserve to be treated like garbage," she sobs, gasping for breath.