Hill began calling agencies and private industries that owned land in the Alsea area to inquire about when and where they had applied herbicides. “I did tell them immediately about my concern. I didn’t try to hide anything. I just explained that I had discovered that several miscarriages had occurred in the spring, and that I was trying to find out just where and when they might have sprayed. I wanted to go back for a number of years, and I do remember one man at a private company expressing great surprise that any kind of health problem might be associated with herbicides. But later he was very open about giving me information, something I didn’t find everyone quite so willing to do. Another company gave me different kinds of information at different times, and in fact there were quite a few discrepancies in the information they gave me. But I think in general that the recordkeeping on the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of herbicide spraying has been nothing short of deplorable when you consider the possible health implications of these substances. Even Oregon State University, which has long been an outspoken proponent of herbicide spraying, has stated that the recordkeeping of the actual spraying is terrible.
“One of the problems is determining just who owns the land. If you look at a map of this area it’s really a checkerboard pattern, with someone owning a few acres here, and someone else owning a few acres there, so if we saw somebody spraying with a helicopter out there right now”—pointing to one of the snowcapped mountains that appear to be just a short walk from Alsea’s high school—“it would take us a long time to determine just who owned that land. Sometimes if someone is spraying even just across the hill from where you live, you still might not know just who owns that land.
“So there are really no natural barriers between the houses and the land being sprayed, and it’s almost impossible to avoid drift from the spraying. In fact the Bureau of Land Management did a study in the Coos Bay area under very controlled circumstances, observing all the current required buffer zones along the streams, and they found that 70 percent of the time the herbicide was entering the water. And the EPA has documented drift up to twenty-two miles. But most studies were done on flat land under pretty controlled circumstances of wind and weather, and herbicide users based their conclusions on these studies. But when you consider the actual conditions on the coast of Oregon, where there are mountains and hills and air currents running in and out of those hills, it’s just really unpredictable. And being twenty miles from the coast as the crow flies, our area has equally unpredictable precipitation patterns. They will be sure that we’re going to have a nice day, and yet eight hours later it’s raining. They’re supposed to have a clear weather sign for twenty-four hours once they have decided to spray, but Oregon’s weather is notorious for its unpredictability, especially in the spring, which of course is the peak season for herbicide spraying.”
By establishing a “buffer zone” between areas to be sprayed and sources of water, the Forest Service and other proponents of herbicides have been able to rationalize the use of substances contaminated with dioxin. Theoretically this zone will keep herbicides and herbicide contaminants from entering the drinking water or food chain, but in reality the Oregon coastal area has been a herbicidal free-fire zone for a number of years. Theoretical buffer zones, explains Hill, do not prevent area residents from being exposed directly to herbicides. “Right after we sent our letter to the EPA an environmental group in Portland tried to get the buffer zones increased, but 75 percent of the State Board of Forestry is composed of timbermen, so needless to say the proposition failed. And just because the EPA temporarily suspended certain uses of Silvex and 2,4,5-T doesn’t mean the spraying of herbicides hasn’t continued. Just this year, for example, a woman was at her house one afternoon and there’s a helicopter spraying across, just about a quarter of a mile from her house. And she had all of her windows open because it was a beautiful day, although quite windy, and all of a sudden she smells something and she knows it’s a herbicide. So she gets on the phone and she tries to find out who it is that’s spraying, but she can’t find out. And she makes several telephone calls, and all of a sudden it’s five o’clock and all of the offices are closed. She calls the Forest Service and they can’t help her, even though all the helicopters use the same helipad, all of them.
“She calls the State Board of Forestry, which is supposed to have the permits for everybody, and they can’t help her. She calls a few private companies, and she can’t find out. Everybody’s closed over the weekend, and finally it’s Monday afternoon when she finds out the name of the company that has sprayed. Meanwhile, she has become very sick and her children are very sick. Her nose and throat were burning, her eyes were irritated, and her son was vomiting.”
Four days later, on a Tuesday morning, the company responsible for the spraying sent someone to take blood and urine samples, which, when tested for residues of herbicides, turned out negative.
“But this is meaningless,” says Hill, who has delegated the dessert-making to her teenage daughter and, having poured us each a second cup of coffee, is seated across from me at a table in the home-economics room. “There’s a doctor in Coos Bay who has worked for some time with people who’ve been exposed to herbicides, and he points out that just because they don’t find traces in your blood or urine doesn’t mean it isn’t someplace else in your body. For example, dioxin is stored in fat tissue. And even if the herbicide has passed through your body there’s no proof that it hasn’t done some damage in passage. An X-ray also passes through your body, but it can do some damage as it travels through. But of course this is all hearsay, you know. In a court of law it would be just that—hearsay.”
One of the most fascinating and incriminating aspects of the history of herbicide use is that whether reports have come from Vietnamese peasants, Oregon housewives, Arizona potters, or mothers living near the Long Island Rail Road, complaints about the effects of 2,4,5-T on humans and animals have been remarkably similar.
In Minnesota, a homesteader who had searched for five years to find land that had not been sprayed with chemicals fired a shotgun at a Forest Service Helicopter. But according to columnist Jack Anderson:
It returned the next day and thoroughly sprayed the forest adjoining the land. Subsequent testing of his water supply by Minnesota health authorities showed traces of herbicide containing dioxin.
Within a few days of the spraying, his family suffered headaches, nausea, dizziness and diarrhea…
Another horror story is told by Neddie Freedlund, a farm wife in Wisconsin. After a neighbor sprayed his land with 2,4,5-T, she reports her entire family was seized with intense bellyaches, fever and sleeplessness.
Her baby began screaming in agony and pulling his hair until bald spots appeared. She subsequently has suffered three miscarriages although she had previously borne six healthy children.
Freedlund also claims that similar maladies affected her barnyard. There was a dramatic decline in the quantity and quality of the milk produced by two cows. Her pigs gave birth to piglets that were either abnormally large or small. Rabbits had premature and deformed offspring.3