McHenry Co. brain-cancer cluster trial opens in Philly

PHILADELPHIA -- A lawyer for 31 people who lived near a northern Illinois chemical plant and contracted brain cancer told a jury Monday the plant dumped toxins into the groundwater from 1960 to 1977, causing a deadly cancer cluster.

Defendant Rohm and Haas Chemical Co. denies any link, saying the carcinogen at issue -- vinyl chloride -- causes a rare liver cancer, not the two types of brain cancer seen in plaintiffs.

"Unfortunately, Mr. (Frank) Branham is one of many people who die each year of cancer, for reasons we just don't know," lawyer Kevin Van Wart of Chicago told jurors in opening statements Monday in Philadelphia, where Rohm and Haas is based. "That is a reality of modern-day living."

Branham died in 2004 at age 63, just months after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma in Arizona, where he and wife Joanne had retired. On a visit back home after his death, she learned that men in the next two houses down in McCollum Lake, had also developed brain tumors. The other men, Bryan Freund and Kurt Weisenberger, have oligodendroglioma, or OGD, and have survived.

"Three people in a row with brain tumors didn't seem normal," said Freund, 49, a jeweler and truck driver who has endured a craniotomy and unsuccessful chemotherapy in the five years since he was diagnosed. He moved to town in 1987, and said he is now too sick to work and deeply in debt.

The 31 plaintiffs have separate suits pending against Rohm and Haas, which bought the plant from predecessor Morton Chemicals in 1999.

Morton had built an eight-acre sludge pond with no liner at the plant in Ringwood, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, where they made a thin plastic used in food wrappers, plaintiffs' lawyer Aaron Freiwald said. Company officials knew by at least 1973 that toxins from the sludge pond were leaking into the groundwater but hid the information, he alleged.

McCollum residents relied on well water, and used the contaminated water to drink, shower, wash dishes and water their gardens. The toxins broke down into the carcinogen vinyl chloride, which was also released into the air as water was used, Freiwald said.

"The company knew that this waste had the potential to cause harm. They knew that it was hazardous ... and the company concealed it," Freiwald said.

He also accused the company of underplaying a 1978 spill of the compound that breaks down into vinyl chloride.

Rohm and Haas denies the fraud and cover-up claims and insists the plant met safety and reporting requirements of the day.

As environmental science evolved, the company in 1985 discovered the vinyl-chloride contamination, Van Wart said. Officials immediately reported it and worked with local and state officials on remediation efforts, he said.

He told jurors there is no scientific evidence to back up the alleged brain-cancer link.

About 6,700 people out of 1 million in the U.S. will develop brain cancer, Van Wart said. He argued that any exposure to vinyl chloride, even as measured by the plaintiffs, would increase Branham's risk of developing brain cancer by only another one chance in a million.

"This idea of a cancer cluster at McCollum Lake village is a courtroom creation," Van Wart said.

Franklin Delano Branham was a home contractor. His petite widow Joanne, now a waitress in Fort Apache, Ariz., wore his thick gold wedding ring around her neck as she sat behind her lawyers in the ornate city courtroom Monday. She declined comment during a break.

The trial is expected to last eight to 10 weeks.