Toxic Town

This four-episode miniseries is based on the true story of the town of Corby, England. Corby was home to a steelworks factory, a major employer in the area, until the early 1980s, when the factory closed due to the decline in steel demand. A private contractor demolished it under the direction of Corby’s local elected leaders, the Corby Borough Council, which was anxious to ready the site for redevelopment.

During the cleanup process, a local engineer hired to oversee the contractor and report any concerns informed the Council of many contractor errors and deficiencies, which he had carefully documented. The town leaders dismissed the engineer and allowed the contractor to continue.

In subsequent years, a cluster of children located near the cleanup site was born with limb and other physical abnormalities, and the mothers started to suspect a connection. The story first broke the news in 1999. When an attorney the parents hired to investigate the cleanup process carried out interviews that seemed to confirm their suspicions, the Council and contractor stonewalled him.

Over time, 19 families signed onto a class-action suit, and in 2009, the High Court of Justice in London ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, holding the Council (but not the contractor) liable for the contamination and ordering it to pay 14.6 million pounds in compensation and legal costs. The key witness for the plaintiffs was the dismissed engineer who had kept such scrupulous records.

Describing the kind of gaslighting that mothers of poisoned children often experience, one of the mothers, Maggie Mahon, later stated,

“I don’t think anybody ever set out to cause birth defects…. I think their greed and selfishness took over, and it makes me angry that they tried to belittle us all in court and make us look the bad ones.”

Mother Susan McIntyre explained,

“Money didn’t interest any of us. All we wanted to know was, ‘Why? Why did this happen to us? How do we stop it happening to anyone else?’”

There were multiple theories as to how the cleanup might have caused the birth defects, with some explanations focusing on the sludge runoff from the cleanup haulers and infiltration of contaminants into the water table near the site. The cleanup and hauling of sludge also produced vast amounts of dust, which settled on nearby vehicles, buildings, clothing, homes, and lawns. The inhaled dust, it turned out, played a major role in causing the abnormalities.

There are several morals to this story. First, municipalities that are overly focused on short-term development prospects may overlook longer-term costs and risks. Second, toxic practices are unfortunately ubiquitous, and toxins can be spread in ways that we may not even be aware of. Third, and on a more positive note, persistence eventually pays off, even it takes a decade or more for the truth to prevail.