(The following report by Brad Hawkins appeared on the WFAA website on January 10.)
SOMERVILLE, Texas — Dennis Davis is in a race to find out what’s killing his home town.
“I decided to do a little survey of my own; just check door-to-door,” he said.
Cancer seems to be everywhere in Somerville, a railroad town of about 1,700 about 90 miles Northeast of Austin. “It’s coming faster than we can even blink our eyes,” Davis said.
The disease has claimed the lives of Davis’ neighbors in every direction. “Out of the first 25 or 30 homes I hit here in my neighborhood, there wasn’t a home here that someone hadn’t already died of cancer or had cancer today,” he said.
Cancer has cut every branch of Davis’ family tree, claiming the lives of his brother, father and uncle.
“It would eat his whole face off—the roof of his mouth, he lost his teeth,” Davis said.
Now, the race is a battle for Dennis Davis. “I now have pancreatic cancer and am trying to survive.”
Davis and more than 200 other Somerville residents believe all the cancer can be linked to the biggest employer in town, and they’re suing.
People in Somerville spend a lot of time waiting on the railroad, and they don’t mind. If it weren’t for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, the town wouldn’t exist—much less be thriving.
More than a million railroad ties and utility poles are manufactured annually at the Koppers Inc. Somerville plant, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006. Workers still dunk untreated wood in preservatives—including coal tar creosote—known cancer-causing chemicals.
Houston attorney John Devine represents plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against Pittsburgh-based Koppers and BNSF of Fort Worth, which sold the facility in 1995.
“Some people have three and four different types of cancer, and that doesn’t include the birth defects we’re finding in Somerville,” Devine said.
BNSF won’t talk much about the pending litigation, but released a statement saying there is “no reliable scientific evidence to support their claims. ” The company also said: “BNSF does not believe the plant is responsible for harming anyone.”
Linda Faust, who was born in Dallas, moved to Somerville to marry a plant worker. She weighed 143 pounds in 1990.
Now, she weighs 109 and frequently can’t control her bowels.
“They removed my complete stomach,” Faust said. “I have a loop here; I went down to 89 pounds once.”
Faust and her husband are also suing.
BNSF says her very rare stomach cancer, diagnosed in 1998, is more likley tied to Faust’s lifelong smoking habit and a carcinogenic bacterium found in her stomach.
Both Davis and Faust say they have not only endured their cancer—they’re facing the stigma of whistle-blowing.
“My brother-in-law is the mayor, and they are property-owners,” Faust said. “You don’t think I feel the pressure that maybe nothing is going to be done about this?”
But Faust said she feels more pressure when she sees children in her community.
“Some people would say, ‘Why don’t you just move out?'” Devine said. “But when you have your life savings, every asset that you have is here in Somerville, and you can’t sell it because the pall that’s hanging over this town.”
BNSF said the Texas Department of Health looked into cancer rates in Burleson County between 1995 and 2003 and found the disease occurs in expected numbers.
Dennis Davis says the death certificates don’t tell the whole story; countless people have died in hopsitals in other towns or, quietly, proudly, in their own homes.
“It’s a rough road; this has been a rough thing, coming down with my cancer myself,” Davis said. “We’re losing the people we love and care about every day because nobody wants to get involved here.”