A story in the Detroit Free Press today brought back some ugly memories. For those too young to remember or not born in 1973 — and that’s a lot of people — a history lesson is in order.
“PBB” was a national sensation and a political firestorm in Michigan 45 years ago. And researchers are still trying to figure out what the legacy is for human health.
What follows is the saga as told in Ruin and Recovery 17 years ago. In a future post I will discuss implications for Michigan and the nation.
Joyce Egginton’s The Poisoning of Michigan is the best book length treatment of the disaster.
The front-page newspaper headlines and evening news coverage awakened by the early chemical scares of the 1970s were nothing compared to a chemical crisis that began in 1973. This time the problem compound was PBB, or polybrominated biphenyls, and instead of affecting a limited number of people eating fish from particular lakes or rivers, it would contaminate virtually every citizen of the state. Even so, it was merely a sentinel for a larger army of chemicals that had generated jobs and economic growth for many Michigan communities, but would in time cost taxpayers over $1 billion in cleanup costs and pose unknown health risks.
Sometime in May or June of 1973, the Michigan Chemical Company accidentally shipped a fire retardant with the brand name of Firemaster to Farm Bureau Services, a supplier for thousands of Michigan farmers, in place of Nutrimaster, a cattle feed containing magnesium oxide. Firemaster was a brand name for PBB, used to reduce the flammability of plastics and electrical circuits. Customers incorporated Firemaster in, among other things, auto dashboards and casings for telephones and hair dryers. The mistake apparently happened at a time when Michigan Chemical ran out of preprinted bags and hand-lettered the trade names of the two products in black. The similarity of product names or even smudging of the letters was all it took to make the first link in a disastrous chain of events.
Farm Bureau Services sold the mislabeled feed to, among others, dairy farmer Fred Halbert of Battle Creek. Halbert purchased 65 tons and after one week of feeding it to his cows in the fall of 1973, noticed the animals were sick. They lost appetite, lost weight and produced 25 per cent less milk. When Halbert stopped feeding the Firemaster pellets to the cows, they showed signs of recovery. He resumed feeding them with the Farm Bureau product and noticed the symptoms of illness again.
In October 1973, the state Department of Agriculture’s head diagnostician inspected the herd and at first suspected lead poisoning. When tests for lead proved negative, the department sought help from Michigan State University and laboratories in Wisconsin, Iowa and New York to isolate the contaminant in the feed. Not until May 1974 did the department determine, with help from Halbert’s son Rick, a chemical engineer, that PBB was the poison. The department then tested feed and farm products across the state. In the first six weeks after the identification of PBB, the state seized 621 tons of feed, quarantined 388,000 chickens, destroyed 13,000 tons of butter and cheese, and imposed a quarantine on 34 dairy herds with 4100 contaminated animals. By 1975 the state had quarantined more than 500 farms and condemned for slaughter over 17,000 cattle, 3,415 hogs, 1.5 million chickens, and 4.8 million eggs.
“Never before in the history of the United States had there been such an incident of extensive contamination of food products by a toxic substance, so there were no precedents to follow in resolving the problem,” the department of agriculture reported in its final summary of the crisis in 1982. “Because of the complexity of the problem there was widespread public misunderstanding, which greatly increased the difficulty of reaching the goals.”
The department’s defensive post-mortem on PBB contamination reflected the fact that the crisis cost state agencies, elected officials, and the companies responsible enormously. Before the controversy died away, PBB spawned intensive coverage by the national news media, a made-for-TV movie, a special episode of a popular network drama, and bitter charges of government and industrial coverup and incompetence from the affected farmers and families.
PBB contamination was a serious health worry but also a sensation made for the age of electronic news. It was graphic: television reports and newspaper stories displayed sickened and slaughtered herds of cattle and farm families stricken both by their economic loss and fears of illness. It was upsetting: as Congress moved in the spring and summer of 1974 toward the impeachment of President Nixon for breaking faith with the American people, critics of the Michigan Department of Agriculture said it had misled farmers and the public about the extent of the problem for months, seeking to protect its friends at the Michigan Farm Bureau. And it was exotic: manufactured for only five years, PBB was so new and poorly-understood that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not even set a safety standard for the chemical in food until after it was determined to be the source of Michigan’s previously mysterious farm scourge.
PBB was not confined to the small number of farms that bought the specialized feed supplement containing magnesium oxide largely because of the sloppy practices of Michigan Chemical Company of St. Louis, a twin city to Alma some 45 miles north of Lansing in the central Lower Peninsula. Dennis Swanson, an employee of the Department of Natural Resources, inspected the facility not long after its mistake was exposed. A plant executive told him the company had been monitoring its inventory carefully. But upon entering the building, Swanson spotted what looked like gravel covering the floor, a material that had literally fallen through the cracks from the second floor of the building. “I scooped it up,” he said, and took it back for laboratory analysis. It turned out to be pure PBB. Swanson also took three samples of water from the Pine River, which flowed past the plant, and captured some catfish. When analyzed, they all tested positive for PBB. Later, Swanson said, federal authorities collected information from him as part of a criminal prosecution of the company and its plant manager that was dropped when the latter died.
The Company’s negligence was causing two environmental disasters simultaneously. Locally, PBB – and, it was later discovered, DDT – smothered the bed of the Pine River for miles downstream, and the plant site itself was seriously contaminated. In 1999, the state would still warn anglers not to eat any fish for 20 miles downstream of the old Michigan Chemical facility. In 1982, the state settled environmental claims against the company for cleanup of the plant site and a nearby landfill where it had dumped tons of PBB from 1971 to 1973 for $44 million – but the amount would fall short of the total bill, and the state would have to use public money to clean up the river.
But at the time, the attention of state officials, the national news media and Michigan citizens was concentrated on the fact that PBB had entered the state’s food chain, entering the body of anyone who drank milk or ate chicken or beef from the affected farms. And since many farmers participated in cooperatives that blended products from both contaminated and uncontaminated farms, millions of citizens took PBB into their systems.
But what were the health effects of PBB? Scientists knew almost nothing about this angle, since the chemical had entered commerce so recently. It was clear that some dairy herds were severely affected. On farms that received the greatest concentration of PBB in feed, milk production dwindled, there was high calf mortality, and the animals were unstable and listless. Others appeared to be largely unaffected, and one 1975 study by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that milk production, calf and adult mortality, and even clinical signs like lameness and wound healing did not appreciably differ between highly-exposed herds and uncontaminated herds. The absence of a proof of harm would characterize a steady stream of chemical crises through the decade and in the 1980s, setting up fierce debates between industrial interests and some government officials who dismissed the seriousness of human health concerns, and environmental advocates and affected citizens who were outraged that chemicals were presumed innocent until proven guilty. The sparring over what constituted a “safe” level of PBB consumption further depressed public confidence in the competence of officials who, critics argued, had attempted to “cover up” the contamination from the fall of 1973 until the spring of 1974.
As a precaution, the state ordered the slaughter of the most highly-contaminated cattle, hogs and chickens. Losing trust in the competence of the Department of Agriculture, Governor William Milliken directed the Department of Natural Resources to handle the disposal of the farm animals. Burial of the PBB-tainted animals touched off another controversy. Using what it thought was the best technical procedure available, the DNR’s Waste Management Division selected two sites on state land. One was in Kalkaska County’s Garfield Township, east of Traverse City. The landfill was well sited geologically: the water table was 100 feet below the soil surface, and the nearest important surface water was the Manistee River, over three miles away. No drinking water wells or private dwellings were nearby. The state owned the land. But DNR failed to notify Kalkaska County officials of their plans, and when these became public, the outraged County successfully sought a court injunction. The burial finally went ahead, but only in the teeth of local resistance.
The controversy was even greater at the second PBB-contaminated livestock burial site, near Mio in the northeastern portion of the Lower Peninsula. Again isolated from water bodies and far from private land, the new landfill provoked a massive outcry. When Governor William Milliken visited Mio in 1978 to address local concerns, he found himself the object of a crowd’s wrath, and he was hung in effigy for the only time in his career.
Although some of the rage was undoubtedly stirred by the delay in the state’s response, agriculture department officials unsympathetic to farmers’ complaints about the effects of PBB on their herds, and the state’s decision to force burial of the slaughtered animals, the larger part resulted from the lack of clear scientific knowledge of the health effects of the chemical. Farmers and the public at large had been contaminated without being given a choice in the matter. Chemicals that had seemed grave enough when found in fish or bald eagles were doubly alarming when they turned up in the human body.
The Department of Public Health compounded the crisis of public confidence by bungling initial health studies, underfunding and neglecting others, and ultimately trying to portray the results as more positive than they were in fact. An initial 1974 study that compared farmers from quarantined farms and others from unquarantined farms, on the assumption that the latter had no PBB contamination, found there was no appreciable difference in health between the two groups. The state health director years later, conceded the study had been flawed because both groups of farms had some PBB contamination. Still, it and some subsequent studies found no hard evidence of health problems. Worries without answers persisted into the 1980s, when the department confirmed that approximately 95 per cent of Michigan’s population had residues of PBB in fat tissue. But at the same time a health department official argued that because PBB had been banned from commerce, removed from the food chain, and largely cleaned up or contained in the environment, exposure to the chemical had stopped. “There’s no evidence of any harm being caused,” said Dr. Harold Humphrey, state director of environmental epidemiology, in 1982. “It looks like people can relax.”
In an age when other issues were commanding public attention and chemical manufacturers had spent considerable sums trying to remake the image of their products, these reassuring messages were passed along in the 1980s and 1990s by the same news outlets that had trumpeted PBB as a catastrophe in the 1970s. “Michigan’s notorious PBB scare of the 1970s, which predicted alarming spikes in cancer and birth defects by the mid-1990s, turns out to be only that – a scare,” reported the Detroit News in 1997. “…[t]he fears the episode aroused may, in fact, be another example of how allegations of chemical dangers based on incomplete information can escalate into hyped and highly politicized frenzies.”
By the 1990s the officials who had borne the brunt of the public’s anger after the discovery of PBB, or watched the controversy at close range, were under the impression that PBB had been overblown as a health issue.
But some of the long-term research suggested the chemical had harmed Michigan residents. Largely through federal funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state for more than two decades maintained a study group of over 3,500 persons from the most highly exposed farm families in the state. Researchers reported in 1995 that women from the group with higher levels of PBB in their blood had an increased risk of developing breast cancer. A second study published in 1998 revealed higher risks of digestive cancer and lymphoma among members of the group with higher PBB blood levels. “PBB exposure is certainly related to some kinds of cancer,” said Dr. David Wade, a state health department official, in 2000. A third study suggested that girls born to women who had the highest levels of the chemical in their blood reached menarche six months earlier than those whose mothers had been less exposed. This raises the question of whether PBB’s effects may include damage to reproductive health in the second or later generations of the most exposed families.
The PBB “scare,” as the Detroit News called it, appeared to be a victim of expectations. The massive outbreak of cancer feared in the mid-1970s did not materialize, permitting some to say PBB had been largely cleared as a health risk. The subtle, delayed effects that turned up in the 1990s studies failed to generate extensive news coverage. PBB appeared destined to assume its place as one of the many real – but forgotten and overlooked – environmental causes of cancer and other health effects.
PBB was just one of the chemicals, and St. Louis just one of the contaminated communities that would come to light through the 1970s and early 1980s. It seemed everywhere they looked, state officials found evidence of contamination. And Michigan was slowly recognizing that industry had ravaged one of its most abundant, sensitive resources – groundwater –in the 20th Century just as the logging industry had ravaged the forests of the north in the second half of the 19th Century. A critical part of the public trust entrusted to the care of government had been defiled. It would take over a century to completely clean up the mess.