HARD TO SWALLOW

For the most part, Barry is backed in that assertion by his predecessor, William Miller, who headed the department during the Friendly Hills controversy. "There was no contamination in the Kassler water," Miller says, though he allows a shallow well that served as a source of some of the Kassler supply was found to be tainted with traces of toxic chemicals. That well was closed by the state health department at the end of 1984. Kassler was shut down a year later because its sand filtration system was too slow and labor-intensive to make it useful today, Miller says--although "there was concern" that an underground plume of contamination from Martin Marietta would move downhill and "find its way into the Platte, and we were taking water out of the Platte into the Kassler plant."

But a CDH employee who investigated Martin Marietta pollution in Waterton Canyon at the time says he thought "there was no doubt that contamination got into the water system." Greg Starkebaum, who worked at the health department's hazardous materials and waste management division until 1989, recalls the water department saying there was no problem. "I called bullshit on that," says Starkebaum, who now heads the environmental section of a local management consulting firm.

Also in contrast to the assertions of Barry and Miller, Judge Weinshienk's dismissal ruling says that "Kassler was closed due to toxic contamination." The ruling points out "the discovery of TCE [trichloroethylene] in the Kassler water supply" and describes as "reprehensible" Martin's discharge of hazardous waste to the water and land above Kassler. The overriding issue was whether that contamination reached Friendly Hills. It might have, Weinshienk wrote, but the residents couldn't prove it did in quantities large enough to cause them harm.

"The way the court ruled, we would have had to do actual samples of the water during those years [1975 to 1984]," says Curtis Logue, whose son died of a heart defect four days after birth. "We moved there in 1982," Logue recalls. "It was a brand-new subdivision. It was our first house, right next to the foothills. We were all young families in the neighborhood. We thought we were right there on the edge of the wilderness. We all thought we had a neat house in a neat community. That was the last thing on our minds, that something was wrong with the water. Who's going to be doing water samples?"

The Logues were among the first in the area to suspect the water; they had been alerted by their son's doctor, a cardiologist who was familiar with studies that related heart defects in infants to exposure of their pregnant mothers to TCE and TCA (trichloroethane) in drinking water. When they raised their concerns at public meetings with health officials, says Logue, they found their neighbors began to turn against them.

"Here were people who we had helped put up fences and mailboxes, and now they were arguing with us or they wouldn't talk to us," Logue says. "They were worried about property values going down. We got some threats. At one meeting at Kendallvue Elementary, some people were saying we deserved to be shot for what we did to their neighborhood. People were screaming at the top of their lungs. It was a free-for-all. And the people there from the water board and the health department and the EPA were sitting there at the front of the room all pious, like nothing was going on."

Health department officials are still acting as if nothing happened, complains Andrienne Anderson. CDH recently enacted a new data-request policy that officials say better protects the identity of individuals whose medical records comprise its database. But Anderson says that measure is being used to stonewall research by epidemiologists trying to get to the bottom of the Friendly Hills issue.

According to Glen Groben, the new policy, instituted last March, would have prevented him from studying the possible relationship between health disorders in children and their exposure to water from Kassler--even if he had completed a study protocol as the department demanded.

"They said they wouldn't give out data with cell sizes less than three," says Groben. (A cell size is the number of persons afflicted with a specific condition in a given population group.) "With environmentally caused cancers, you're always dealing with low numbers because of the mechanism of cancer development," Groben explains. "It takes time. So their restrictions on cell sizes under three made my research impossible."

According to the health department's executive director, Dr. Patricia Nolan, the policy was put in place due to concerns that health information might fall into the hands of people who'd violate the privacy of individuals whose records make up CDH's database. "It's not that hard statistically to identify a person in a population group of 5,000 people," she says.

"Who'd need to?" responds Richard Clapp, who believes his 1991 request was also impeded by CDH confidentiality restrictions. "We made it clear that we were not in any way intending to identify individuals in our research."