Wilmington families validated on childhood cancer cluster

WILMINGTON, Mass. — Nearly 30 years ago, Jonathan Eaton’s family got terrible news: His seven-year-old brother had leukemia.

“Everything comes to a screeching halt when you get that diagnosis,” Eaton said. “You have to really pull together and focus on what’s important.”

It turns out, that screeching halt was hitting an inordinate number of families in Wilmington during that time in an area known as Kelly Hill. Between 1990 and 2000, 22 children in the Middlesex County town got a cancer diagnosis, most for leukemia or lymphoma. In the seven-year period prior, just two children were diagnosed with cancer.

“Some of the families that live up in the Kelly Hill area really started to recognize that there was something here,” Eaton, now chair of the Board of Selectmen, said. “That there was a lot of children that were getting similar types of childhood cancer and that really was statistically improbable and there must be some kind of causation to it.”

A new report finds they were right.

After a long and exhaustive investigation, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health linked contaminated drinking water to that long-ago cluster of childhood cancers -- specifically, the exposure of pregnant women to the contaminated water.

The culprit behind the cancer cluster was found in Wilmington’s groundwater in 2003: a carcinogenic chemical called n-nitrosodimethylamine or NDMA. The town shut down its wells after the discovery and its been part of the MWRA system ever since.

The plume of NDMA affecting Wilmington’s groundwater was traced to the shuttered Olin Chemical plant which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, produced specialty chemicals for the rubber and plastics industry until 1986. NDMA is no longer in commercial use in the United States, but the EPA says one of its former uses was a softener for co-polymers.

“The industrial waste was disposed in almost a pit of sorts,” said State Representative David Robertson, who represents part of Wilmington. “The NDMA is a heavy liquid. So when it sinks into the water table it forms a layer almost like oil on top of water, like you’d see in a kitchen. So in order to extract that you need to pump it up.”

The Olin property is a Superfund site and the EPA will decide on a clean-up plan that could range from minimal to as complete as possible.

Robertson and others are pushing for the latter -- in the hope Wilmington can get back its wells -- which would mean:

“Maximum removal of contaminated topsoil, pumping and removal of NDMA and other carcinogenic chemicals present in the water supply right now,” he said. “But will that ever restore the wells? We don’t know until actually the process is begun.”

Part of the engineering challenge, Robertson said, is that the NDMA has seeped into fractured bedrock and gotten below it.

“This is one of the first cases in the country which shows the damage that NDMA can do not just to the livelihood of young children, but to everyone in general and to a municipal drinking water supply,” Robertson said.

Because of the complexity of cleaning up the site, the disruption it caused an entire community and, most of all, the illness and loss of life, Robertson characterized the Olin site as “one of the worst in the Commonwealth.”

Eaton’s brother survived his bout with childhood leukemia. He’s married now and has a child. Others, he knows, weren’t so lucky.

“And that’s a cost, again, that was entirely unnecessary,” he said. “It should have never happened.”

Wilmington’s town manager, Jeffrey M. Hull, released a statement about the findings that reads, in part:

The Town has just received the results of this cancer study conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health that has been underway for over 20 years. We take the findings of this study very seriously and will be conferring with the Town’s environmental consultant, GeoInsight, to evaluate the findings before determining “next steps.” The public water supply is a basic resource that we all rely upon every single day for a myriad of functions not the least of which is sustenance. Wilmington’s water supply is tested on a regularly scheduled basis and continues to meet state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for drinking water. All residents receive an “Annual Consumer Confidence Report” no later than July 1st of each year that provides information about water quality. Providing residents and businesses with safe and clean water is a core priority of the Town.

—  Jeffrey M. Hull, Wilmington Town Manager

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW