HARD TO SWALLOW

Karen Keller was a nursing student at the University of Phoenix in 1991 when she and three fellow students working on a class project requested death data on residents of the Windsor Gardens area broken down by census tract. "I filled out the form they sent and hand-carried it over there," she recalls. CDH asked for nothing more, she says. "We got the data within a week."

A number of other researchers' requests for data obtained by Anderson through the Colorado Open Records Act contain no indication that protocols were required. Most of the researchers were sent data in less than a week.

Particularly galling to Adrienne Anderson, a former visiting Rockefeller Scholar on environmental ethics at CU-Boulder, was CDH's ready accommodation of a 1989 data request by Dr. Steven Piantadosi. A biostatistician with the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center in Baltimore, Piantadosi had been hired by Martin Marietta and the water department in the suit filed by fourteen families in Friendly Hills and Harriman Park. That suit sought damages for the deaths of four children and the illnesses of a number of others allegedly caused by chemical contamination of drinking water.

Not only was Richard Clapp's request nearly identical to Piantadosi's, but the Johns Hopkins researcher also received data that had been denied the attorneys of Friendly Hills residents, Anderson says. Piantadosi used the CDH data to support defense contentions that Kassler water had not caused an elevated incidence of cancer in children or deaths among newborns in any census tract receiving it. (In 1984 the health department itself said the childhood cancer rate in Friendly Hills was two and a half times greater than the metro-area average; the agency later backed away from the finding.)

"Piantadosi got data that we did not get in discovery," says Kathleen Mullen, a Denver attorney who represented Friendly Hills families in the suit. "We maintain our experts should have gotten the same data."

Lack of supporting epidemiological data hurt the residents' case, noted U.S. District Judge Zita Weinshienk in her ruling dismissing the suit. While acknowledging "overwhelming evidence" that Martin Marietta had contaminated land and water in Waterton Canyon, the judge ruled that residents had failed to prove that water they received caused their injuries. The plaintiffs proved only that it was "possible that they were exposed [to contaminants]," Weinshienk wrote. "They submitted virtually no circumstantial evidence of exposure." (Throughout the suit, Martin denied either polluting Waterton or tainting municipal water at Kassler. In a recent statement, a spokeswoman said the company believes Weinshienk's ruling confirmed that Martin "neither caused nor contributed to the health problems cited by the Friendly Hills residents.")

"The court's decision left a bad taste in all our mouths," says Alan Keiser, a Denver Police Department detective whose son was born with a heart defect that necessitated two major surgeries. "Our whole area was affected by that water. My family's health was seriously affected. We were always sick back then. I still believe the water was contaminated. In the heart I know it happened, no matter what the court says."

The court might have allowed the suit to go to trial if not for Piantadosi's findings, says Anderson. And she claims that those findings were skewed by bad information given to the oncologist by the Denver Water Department. In determining the effects of Kassler water on the metro area, Piantadosi needed to know which census tracts got the water and which did not. According to Anderson, the water department misinformed him about water routing, something residents' attorneys didn't learn until after Weinshienk's dismissal order.

Maps Anderson obtained from water department files show that water pipes ran from the Kassler plant to the Friendly Hills area--in contrast to the map Piantadosi used for his report, which attributed Friendly Hills water to a source designated only as "other." Without proper water-delivery mapping, says Anderson, Piantadosi's study was inherently flawed.

Stephen Work of the water department provided the routing information to Piantadosi, according to a notation in Piantadosi's report. Now the department's director of operations, Work insists he wasn't involved in supplying information to Piantadosi. In any case, he says, "water from Kassler almost never ended up in Friendly Hills. The only way for it to go there would have been when the Marston treatment plant was out of service, and that was very rare." Work says he can make no sense of the "other" designation used in the report as the source of Friendly Hills water.

That point is moot to water department manager Hamlet "Chips" Barry. "The court threw the whole case out, saying there was no evidence of polluted water being served to anybody," he says. "There was no chemical contamination of the water supply by Martin Marietta or anyone else. They may have leaked some chemicals across the boundary of Kassler, but none of that contamination ever entered our system."