Great Lakes Article:

GREEN BAY, Wis. | For more than a century, the north-flowing Fox River has served as a natural superhighway to the giant paper mills that line its banks, powering the plants with hydroelectricity and opening the door to Lake Michigan's shipping lanes.

But for much of the last 50 years, the Fox River provided something else as well. Settled in the water and river sediment are thousands of pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial poison that makes the water undrinkable and the fish virtually inedible.

NCR Corp. played a major role in polluting the Fox River, and someday will likely bear a large portion of the cost of cleaning it up.

While the company deals with pollution problems in Dayton, at the Valleycrest landfill and now on the site of its former manufacturing complex south of Stewart Street, the Fox River cleanup potentially is the most expensive environmental problem NCR faces. Yet the roots of the PCBs in the Fox River reach back to Dayton, to Building Two in the old industrial complex that stood between Patterson Boulevard and Brown Street along Stewart Street, which housed the Special Research Division.

There, in 1954, NCR researchers developed a groundbreaking product, one that would make mechanical typewriters and cash registers easier to use.

It was called carbonless copy paper, or NCR (no carbon required) paper, and until 1971 it was made with PCBs at the Appleton Paper Co. plant on the Fox River. Carbonless copy paper is the major source of PCB contamination in the river, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Some estimates say there are 90,000 pounds of PCBs still in the sediment, releasing 600 pounds a year of the toxin, which can accumulate in the tissues of fish and mammals, including humans. A vast and growing amount of research points to a wide range of health problems involving PCBs.

Cleaning the Fox River basin, an effort that has been inching forward for 30 years, is a project nearly equal in scope to the more publicized Hudson River cleanup in New York, where General Electric is dredging years of accumulated PCBs from that river.

Total cost of the Fox River cleanup and restoration could be $600 million or more, according to environmental groups and U.S. EPA estimates. NCR and Appleton Paper, which agreed in 1978 to split their portion of the cost, could be responsible for 40 percent of the tab.

The potential cost of the Fox River cleanup adds to NCR's rising environmental cleanup bill. NCR is one of three companies — General Motors and Waste Management are the other two — that have invested $43 million to clean up the Valleycrest landfill.

The company must also contend with pollution at the former site of its main manufacturing plants on the south Dayton border. PCBs there have been measured at 320 times the federal limit, according to a company-ordered environmental report in 1995.

How many PCBs were used in the research and development of carbonless copy paper in Dayton, and what environmental problems they caused, are difficult to pinpoint. Many of those who worked on the project a half-century ago are dead.

NCR is well aware of its potential liabilities in the Fox River cleanup.

"It is no surprise to anyone that NCR's heritage includes manufacturing activity that stretches all the way back to the 19th century," said Jeff Dafler, manager of public relations for the company. "NCR is committed to addressing environmental issues arising from the company's manufacturing heritage and is conducting its business today in a way that is protective of employees, neighbors and the environment."

NCR is hardly alone with its legacy of environmental problems. Every major industry in the country has similar sites, polluted with PCBs, dioxin, pesticides, trichloroethylene, lead, asbestos and a host of other chemicals that have been revealed as dangerous toxins in the last half century.

"I wonder what we are doing today that we'll look back on and regret," said Beverly Perna, education specialist with the Tsongas Industrial History Center in Lowell, Mass.

The industrial history center is near Woburn, Mass., where a leukemia cluster was identified in the early 1980s. Three companies, including W. R. Grace & Co., were accused of contaminating drinking water and causing illnesses — events dramatized in the book and movie A Civil Action.

W. R. Grace has since sponsored its own book, Beyond A Civil Action — Woburn Issues & Answers, which claims new technical information shows the company did not contaminate Woburn's drinking water. But the book also says, "We recognize . . . that we made mistakes in addressing the concerns of the community and government agencies regarding the impact of waste disposal practices at our Woburn plant in the 1960s and 1970s."

Just how much the Fox River cleanup will cost NCR is anyone's guess. In a June 2002 report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, NCR noted that its "potential liability falls within a range as to which no amount in the range is a better estimate than any other, and even then it is not possible to estimate the high end of the range."

The report also states that if any of the other paper companies named as responsible parties for the Fox River cleanup were to become insolvent, NCR would be responsible for a portion of their shares.

The U.S. EPA released a Restoration and Compensation Determination Plan in 2000 that estimated the range of damages between $176 million and $333 million. The plan calls for dredging more than 7 million cubic yards of sediment from three sections of the river and depositing the sludge in a designated landfill.

However, the agreement reached in January for the first section of the river leaves open a final determination of a cleanup plan.

The U.S. EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service consider the Fox River basin, along with the Saginaw River in Michigan, to be the most polluted sites in the Great Lakes region. PCBs already released to the river, Green Bay and northern Lake Michigan have done immense damage to fish, sport and commercial fishing, large birds such as the bald eagle, and they threaten human health, according to both federal agencies.

"The Fox River is still a significant source of PCBs," said Charlie Wooley, assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "It is still an environmental issue in the restoration of the Great Lakes."

For people who live near the banks of the Fox River, it is primarily a health issue.

Two years ago John Hermanson lost his wife, Anne, to ovarian cancer at the age of 42. Like many people along the river, Hermanson cannot point to a direct link between the PCBs in the river and his wife's disease, but he suspects there is one.

"You can't be certain there is a direct link, but you never know," said Hermanson, sitting among the kayaks and outdoor gear in his store, Life Tools Outfitters. "Anne grew up Catholic, and up here there is a strong tradition of the Friday night fish fry. That was at a time when people ate fish loaded with PCBs all of the time."

Hermanson said that a popular restaurant near the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, where his wife attended, regularly sold meals made from fish caught in the Fox River.

Since his wife's diagnosis, Hermanson has become active with the Clean Water Action Council, one of several groups pushing for a quicker cleanup of the Fox River.

The Fox River, Green Bay and northern Lake Michigan have been under a fish advisory issued by state and local wildlife services since 1976. The advisory warns people not to consume more than six fish a year from those bodies of water. Without restoration, the fish advisories will last 100 more years.

Hermanson said some people around Green Bay are resigned to the pollution.

"There is a feeling that it has always been this way," he said. "But the paper industry may not always be around, but we'll be around."

Barbara Sydon's non-Hodgkins lymphoma is in remission, but she, too, suspects a link to the waters of the Fox River.

Sydon, 66, still sails the river and the bay, but she won't fish there.

"The fish I eat comes from a grocery store," she said. "I'm not interested in glowing in the dark."

Yet every summer Sydon sees a flotilla of boats with people casting their lines on the river.

The source of the PCB contamination in the Fox River began in Dayton in the early 1950s with a brilliant scientific discovery, which led to a very promising new product — carbonless copy paper. The process used then-legal but now banned PCBs.

In 1950, NCR researcher Barrett K. Green invented microencapsulation, in which a colorless liquid (containing the solvent PCBs) could be coated on the back side of a sheet of paper, encased in tiny cells to eliminate smearing. The liquid reacted with a claylike coating on the top side of a second sheet of paper, producing a clean image without smearing.

NCR, then still called the National Cash Register Co., immediately recognized its potential to eliminate messy black carbon paper from office work and provide clean copies of register receipts. The specialty paper, which since 1971 has used other chemicals besides PCBs, is still produced in Appleton, Wis., and elsewhere. Appleton is the world's largest producer, making nearly 500,000 tons annually. The paper is still found in check books and register receipts.

In 1954, NCR formed a partnership with Appleton Paper of Wisconsin to make the pressure-sensitive, microencapsulated coating to the paper. Sales of carbonless copy paper were impressive from the beginning, bringing $20 million annually at first, later climbing to more than $200 million.

In Appleton, however, tons of PCBs were being dumped into the Fox River during the manufacturing process. Although some of the adverse health effects of PCBs have been known since the 1940s, solid evidence of the dangers did not emerge until the 1960s. Environmental groups and regulators began exerting pressure on companies to clean up the mess.

In 1970, Monsanto Corp., the nation's largest producer of PCBs, asked NCR and its other customers to sign letters releasing Monsanto from liability from improper use of the chemical. Numerous lawsuits have arisen from the health claims of people using carbonless paper in office settings, though none have been filed against NCR. Most have targeted the paper suppliers. People complain of skin irritation and respiratory disorders.

Even though NCR and Appleton ended the use of PCBs in the production of the paper in 1971, PCB-saturated paper still exists in waste dumps and recycling centers, and may still be a pollution source for the Fox River. NCR sold its interest in Appleton back to the company in 1978, but numerous government agencies have named NCR as a responsible party because of the damage done to the river over several decades, beginning in 1954.

Numerous studies since the 1960s have shown PCBs to be a serious poison that can cause damage to the reproductive, neurological and immune systems of wildlife and humans.

A National Academy of Sciences committee stated that, "PCBs pose the largest potential carcinogenic risk of any environmental contaminant for which measurements exist."

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has issued one of several reports listing PCBs as probable cancer-causing agents, as well as the cause of genetic and endocrine disruption.

PCBs, which accumulate in the body of fish, large mammals and humans, mimic estrogen in the body. Women of child-bearing age and children are particularly susceptible to a variety of development and reproductive disorders. PCBs have been linked to impaired intelligence, attention deficit disorder, reduced sperm counts and the inability to reproduce in birds that eat large fish, such as eagles and herring gulls.

Wisconsin residents are showing built-up PCBs in the body at three times the level where health effects begin to show, said Rebecca Katers, executive director of the Clean Water Action Council.

"There is a documented breast cancer cluster in Green Bay, and it is located in the ZIP codes along the river," said Katers, who has been working on the Fox River cleanup for 17 years. "We also have high rates of illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes."

The most likely path of exposure to PCBs is through eating contaminated fish, but the official fish advisories may have little effect.

"Studies have shown that 50 percent of fishermen ignore the advisories," said Katers. "And people fish year-round up here."

The companies charged with polluting the Fox River with PCBs have been strongly resisting dredging the river to remove contaminated sediment, opting for a "natural cure" they say will eventually bury the PCBs until they break up.

Plans for dredging the river, however, are moving slowly ahead, backed by the U.S. EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We are very supportive of dredging," said Wooley of the fish and wildlife service. "Our goal, as every biologist in the U.S. and Canada, is for the Great Lakes to have fish that are safe to eat and water that is drinkable and swimmable. And we can get there."

Although Green Bay residents are nearly surrounded by water from the Fox River and Green Bay, they can't drink it now. Drinking water is brought in by a $150 million pipeline from Lake Michigan, with another pipeline planned.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. EPA announced in January a final plan to clean up the upper stretches of the Fox River, about 26 miles long.

A decision on a plan for the remaining sections is due in June.

Although they reached a $40 million settlement agreement with the U.S. EPA in 2000 for the first phase of the cleanup, NCR and Appleton will still be liable for their share of the remaining cleanup and restoration costs.

"I don't see how they can avoid it," said Susan Pastor of the U.S. EPA in Chicago.

Green Bay residents have many different views of the Fox River cleanup.

Paper mill workers make an average of $49,000 a year, while the average Wisconsin worker earns $29,000. Some people think the environmental push will drive the companies out and take their high-paying jobs with them. Others think, as the companies say, that dredging will make the problem worse by stirring up the PCBs and sending them downstream.

Following the model of GE's argument in the Hudson River, the industry representative Fox River Group is arguing for "natural attenuation," or letting the PCBs go away on their own, instead of dredging.

"The selection of massive dredging, the largest environmental dredging project ever in the U.S., as the preferred approach for the lower Fox River was just plain wrong," a Fox River Group report stated in January 2002.

"Dredging will destroy a lot of walleye habitat," said Tim Dantoin, spokesman for the Fox River Group.

Dantoin, who grew up in Green Bay, does not eat fish from the Fox River.

"I wouldn't even if there were no PCBs," Dantoin said. "It has always been an industrial river. PCBs are just the latest comer. There is also toluene, benzine and all sorts of other stuff."

Bob Garfinkle, owner of the Bob's Fish and Tackle bait shop in Green Bay, won't eat the fish either.

"The Department of Natural Resources has found deformed frogs and frogs with three legs," Garfinkle said. "That's scary."