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It was a remarkably frustrating series of events for both sides. I've talked to seven or eight Dow executives, including some speaking off the record, who say dioxin was a technical non-issue; they had studied their own workers' cancer rates and found them lower than in the general population; and if that were true, how could the public be at greater risk?
Nor did local department of health records show an increase in cancer.
Dow's point man then was David Buzzelli, now the corporation's chief environmental officer. Buzzelli was an outdoorsman himself, a member of Ducks Unlimited --- a genial man with arched eyebrows, a solid physique, and an emotional tie to the dioxin issue. His job at Dow before environmental affairs had been running their manufacturing operation. A few days after he had taken that job, Geraldo Rivera had "ripped Dow and our herbicide 2,4,5-T up one side and down the other on 20/20. So, here I was telling my wife, 'Isn't this an exciting challenge?' and I turn on the television and someone is taking a knife to my baby." Buzzelli wasn't the only Dow staffer to feel that way; many Dow people were tempted to see the hubbub as leftover napalm-bashing, especially since out-of-towners seemed to be raising all the commotion. "The company I knew," he said, "wasn't the company the public saw."
But the dioxin controversy was not a good way to prove it. No one disputes the immense toxicity of dioxins, or the fact that they linger in human tissue. But the threshold amounts (Dow measured its emissions in parts per trillion, and claimed the concentration were too small to be dangerous), the degree of carcinogenicity, and the triggers of health effects are still under fierce debate. Untangling the truth about dioxin has been beyond the American scientific establishment for more than 15 years. But it's an emotional issue.
Then, in Midland, there were stories of mysterious ailments, often among people who felt afraid to protest too loudly in a company town. Diane Hebert (pronounced Eh-Bear), who came to public prominence by raising the brine-spills issue, says she often fielded late-night calls about chemical leaks. "It might be ten o'clock, and someone tells you that their child died of a rare heart defect (and they live in an area where you know the water's bad), and both their in-laws died of pancreatic cancer and so did the dog, and what do you say? You keep responding."
Television news crews found Hebert, who is petite with fluffy blonde hair, photogenic; they would interview her curled up on her couch, looking and talking like a likable flight attendant (which she once had been). But that image was deceptive; she had the persistence to spend hours in file-rooms at the Michigan DNR, looking for contradictions, and the cogency to articulate them. Judging from newspaper clippings, that articulation became increasingly persuasive.
Many Midland people supported Dow; they still performed, ostentatiously catching fish from the river, for TV news. But support dwindled to its lowest point during the final "significant emotional event," as Buzzelli later called it. In the spring of 1985, a team of Greenpeace members, trailed by TV cameras, paddled into the Tittabawassee on inflated rafts to plug Dow's discharge pipes. After several days, they were arrested; in a county jail bloodtest, a 27-year-old Greenpeace staffer named Melissa Ortquist tested positive for syphilis. (Later tests near her home in New York contradicted the results.) That week, a Dow public-relations executive made the mistake of calling Diane Hebert and telling her that Ortquist "had V.D."
Typical Midlanders hadn't had mush use for the Greenpeace people, who were seen as hippies and hypocrites (some of them smoked cigarettes while preaching about cancer from dioxin). But when the news broke about Ortquist, that was different. The "traditional" Dow was not supposed to indulge in cheap shots. Moreover, the incident raised a disturbing question: If Dow could get past privacy laws to see those test results from the Midland health department, did that mean the company could see --- and possibly edit --- county health statistics? Letters asking that question began to appear in the Midland Daily News (along with a full-page apology to Ortquist from the Dow chairman).
Dow has antagonized regulators for years, but never before most of its neighbors. Now people throughout the company pressed for a change in behavior. And other influences surfaced within the company. The company was moving "downstream," abandoning its pure bromine manufacture entirely, and making more consumer products. Marketing people worried about boycotts of Cepacol, Fantastik, and other consumer brands that Dow had recently acquired. The "Perception is Reality" signs went up; the "great things" ads were planned. David Buzzelli, already seeking alternatives to antagonism, became president of Dow Canada, where he joined that country's business roundtables, inspired by the U.N. Brundtland Commission's promotion of sustainable development. If environmental quality and economic growth depended on each other, then (the Canadians felt) business people and community leaders should meet to find common solutions. Other Dow executives, finding themselves in an ongoing give-and-take with environmentalists, began to listen to them. When Oreffice moved to board chairmanship in 1985, he was replaced as CEO by the Bulgarian-born Frank Popoff; Popoff's environmental speeches were perhaps the most obvious signal that a change had begun in the company.