In a Glass of Water, A Mother's Worst Fear

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51936-2002Feb9.html

In a Glass of Water, A Mother's Worst Fear

In Hampton Roads, Studies of Miscarriages Cause Concern, Spark Lawsuits

By Anita Huslin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, February 10, 2002; Page C01

Annette Spaven already had three children when she found out she was

pregnant again four years ago.

She and her husband were surprised but pleased by the prospect of welcoming

another child into their Chesapeake, Va., home. So when she suffered a

miscarriage in the first trimester, they tried again.

Six months later, she lost another baby.

" I wondered if something was wrong with me, " said Spaven, 38.

About the same time, two women on her block had miscarriages. Across town, a

woman gave birth to a boy who died shortly after birth. For more than a

decade, they and others wondered why they'd suddenly lost their pregnancies.

Today, many are also wondering something else: Might they have lost their

babies simply because they drank tap water while they were pregnant? It's a

question that has roiled this booming port community ever since residents

became aware of controversy surrounding chemicals in the public drinking

supply. Now, 25 women are suing the city, and nearly 170 more have filed

their intentions to do so.

Fueling their fears are a growing number of studies that link birth defects

and miscarriages to chemicals that are produced when chlorine, used to

purify drinking water, mixes with organic matter, such as fertilizer in

surface water.

Chemical and water industry officials maintain that the body of scientific

evidence linking so-called chlorination byproducts to adverse birth effects

is inconclusive.

" To have liability, in our opinion, you have to prove there's a cause and an

effect, " Chesapeake city attorney Hallman said. " I haven't seen any

study that has proven a causal connection. "

In a statement last month, the Environmental Protection Agency called the

issue of chlorination byproducts in drinking water " an important health

concern. " The federal agency will be proposing new water quality reporting

requirements for utilities this summer and plans to fund further research.

Meanwhile, however, millions of Americans are unaware of what their water

utilities know: The levels of chlorination byproducts in their drinking

water often spike higher than the EPA's allowable annual average.

This happens as well throughout the Washington area, utility records show,

though the EPA does not require the information to be included in regular

water quality reports from utilities.

Chesapeake residents learned about the problem only when the city's public

health director issued a bulletin about it. And then more stories from women

like Spaven started to come out. And so did the lawyers.

Now, the Hampton Roads city has become a test case for the nation. Water

utility operators across the country, including the Washington Suburban

Sanitary Commission, are watching to see what becomes of the lawsuits.

The women are alleging that the city did not adequately warn them about

potentially harmful levels of toxins in their water, sometimes nearly 10

times higher than the danger level identified in the largest public health

study to date.

Chesapeake documents obtained by the women's attorneys show that the city

had seen significant spikes in chlorination byproducts since the early

1980s.

No comprehensive study of the city's miscarriage or birth defect rates has

ever been done, so it is impossible to draw a comparison between the period

when the byproducts were spiking and when they were not. Nationally, about

one in six women suffer miscarriage, according to federal statistics. The

first 25 women suing all suffered miscarriages in the mid- to late 1990s.

The 168 other cases date to the 1980s. Altogether, attorneys are seeking

nearly $1 billion in damages.

" I just hope that . . . people will pay attention to what's going on in

their cities, " Spaven said. " No one should have to go through what we have. "

First Reports

Welch, the director of the Chesapeake Public Health Department, hadn't

even heard of chlorination byproducts or the term " trihalomethanes " -- also

known as THMs -- before the city's public utilities director came to her

office one day in early February 1998 with a problem.

The city was preparing to tear down two purifying towers at its water

processing plant to make way for a system that would help solve chronic

water quality problems.

Seated near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the city for yearsstruggled to

manage the salt that rises with the tides. Until it built the two towers, it

had also quietly grappled with the problem of THMs. Now, it was going to

tear down the towers. Once that happened, chlorine byproduct levels could

rise precipitously, perhaps even exceeding EPA limits, utility director Amar

Dwarkanath said.

The city planned to ask for a waiver of EPA water quality standards, at

least during this phase of construction, but it would need a letter from

Welch supporting the request.

And there was one more thing.

Dwarkanath gave Welch a copy of a report that was about to be published in

the medical journal Epidemiology.

It was a study done in California, where Department of Health Services

researchers followed more than 5,000 pregnant women. They found that those

who drank five or more glasses of tap water a day containing 75 or more

parts per billion of chlorination byproducts were 65 percent more likely to

suffer a miscarriage. Pregnant women are generally advised by their doctors

to drink at least eight eight-ounce glasses of a water to avoid dehydration.

And now Chesapeake was facing the very real possibility that its tap water

would become awash with consistently high THMs, possibly even for months.

Welch examined the research closely, then called some colleagues for advice.

Half said they would inform the public; half said they wouldn't.

On March 24, 1998,Welch wrote a letter to Dwarkanath with her conclusions,

suggesting that the city ensure that pregnant women who got their water from

the Chesapeake plant use bottled water. On March 31, 1998, she sent a public

health bulletin to family practitioners, OB-GYNs, internists and the media,

urging pregnant women who drink five or more glasses of water a day to drink

primarily bottled water and to boil their tap water for a minute or install

a tap filter.

Almost immediately, the phones started ringing. Worried pregnant women

called, and so did those who had lost babies, wondering aloud if the water

might have been the reason.

Welch could not answer all of their questions. But, she said, she believed

the California study raised enough questions to warrant warning the public

about THMs. But there are many reasons miscarriages occur, she pointed out,

and it's often difficult to pinpoint one.

" When there's a limited amount of research, you go with what you have, " she

said. " I'll never apologize for informing the public. "

But to determine whether THMs absolutely cause miscarriage or birth defects,

she said, " you've got to do more research . . . and that takes time. "

After a few weeks, Welch's phones quieted down and things at the Chesapeake

public health department got back to normal.

But in the community, people were sharing stories. Stories like those told

by Marcy Shaffer, now 38, who lived in Chesapeake and gave birth to

just before Christmas in 1997.

He was born with just a bundle of nerve endings in his half-formed skull. He

lived for a couple of hours, long enough for her to wrap him in a white

blanket and for her family to say their goodbyes.

About the time of Spaven's miscarriages, two neighbors across the street

also lost their babies. After carrying her baby for 8 1/2 months,

Rapada, now 22, gave birth to Haley in the spring of 1998, then buried

her in a tiny ivory-colored casket at the foot of her grandmother's grave.

Her best friend, Rapada, now 21, suffered two miscarriages that

fall.

In conversations during lunch breaks, after church or over coffee with a

neighbor, more accounts were circulating. It would not be long before

someone would try to piece it all together.

Legal Implications

The cases started coming to Louis Napoleon " Mike " Joynes in the same way

that most business arrives at his firm.

The Joynes & Gaides law office sits at a busy intersection near the edge of

Chesapeake, and the increasing traffic in what is the fastest-growing city

in Virginia provides at least one new customer a week.

It was one of these clients, an auto accident victim, who mentioned his

wife's miscarriage to Joynes and asked: Could that have had something to do

with the city water?

Joynes, who had not paid close attention to the public health bulletin, said

he'd look into it.

So he called up a colleague at Willcox & Savage, an old Virginia blue blood

firm with several lawyers who focus on environmental law. They were familiar

with THMs and the issues associated with them, so they began researching the

city's water situation.

" What we discovered was that the levels of THMs in Chesapeake were some of

the highest we'd ever heard of -- 700, 800 parts per billion, " said

, who specializes in environmental litigation.

He had spoken to some experts in environmental health who were familiar with

the research on the issue and their response was the same: " They were pretty

much shocked by this, " said. " All of the scientific reports showing

health impacts from THMs involved levels much lower than what we were seeing

here. "

But little of that information has reached the public anywhere. In

Montgomery County, officials recently started asking questions about THMs at

a special hearing called after utility data obtained by Environmental

Working Group, a chemical industry watchdog, revealed THM spikes in water

supplied by WSSC.

Officials at WSSC, which provides water and sewer services to 1.6 million

residents in the Washington area, acknowledged that the spikes were a

concern but noted that the utility continues to meet EPA water quality

standards.

The Chlorine Chemistry Council, a national trade group, maintains that the

research to date " has been inadequate to definitively demonstrate an

association " between THMs and birth defects, miscarriages and stillbirths.

In Chesapeake, lawyers wondered just how many women could have been

affected. In July 2000, Joynes & Gaides started running television and radio

ads seeking women who had suffered miscarriages or delivered babies with

birth defects.

And the phones started ringing again.

'All This Pain'

Annette Spaven was one of the hundreds of women who called. The ads didn't

say anything about Chesapeake water, but she wondered if that was behind it

all.

She had grown up in Chesapeake, then moved away after getting married. In

1993, after moving back to Chesapeake, the couple had their third and, they

thought, last child. When Spaven unexpectedly became pregnant in 1997,

something wasn't right.

She started cramping and bleeding one morning, so she went to the hospital,

where doctors ordered an ultrasound. The results showed simply a mass of

tissue growing in her womb, with none of the early signs of a baby that they

would have expected.

Hours later, she suffered a miscarriage.

Later that year, she got pregnant again. This time, she said, she worked

very hard to make sure she did everything right, including drinking more

than the recommended eight glasses of water a day. When she had cravings,

she ate ice -- lots of it -- from the ice-maker in her freezer.

In early 1998, she miscarried again.

" That was it for me, " she said. " I wasn't going to try again. "

Then, when the television ads came out, she started wondering and turned to

the Internet for answers. What she found infuriated her.

" I couldn't believe it. I'd sit there every night and tell my husband, 'Look

at this stuff.' All these people, all this pain. "

The first lawsuit was filed last April, and a hearing date has been

scheduled for September. City attorneys are trying to block the case by

arguing that the plaintiff filed her lawsuit more than two years after her

miscarriage, too late for what the law requires.

A court date for Spaven's case has not yet been set. In some ways, she said,

she believes the outcome of her case is unimportant. When you've lost two

pregnancies, nothing will change that. But her story and those of other

women should be heard, she said, to warn the public about these once-obscure

chlorination byproducts.

" You just take for granted . . . that you never have to second-guess what's

in your water, " she said.

In January 1999, Spaven moved to Virginia Beach. Ten months later, she

delivered Kerrigan, a healthy baby girl.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company