Deadly Waters: Milwaukee One Year Later
The Plain Dealer
Sunday, June 9, 1994
By KEITH EPSTEIN
Squealing to herself, 3-year-old Becky Furmann bounds into the room in Barney shoes, an imaginary Tinker Bell in tow.
Above her bed, stuffed animals cavort in rainbow colors. On the wall, a poster of Big Bird blazes yellow. Circling the room, Becky – and Tinker Bell – play with a toy truck.
In this child’s room, though, are somehow too many cabinets. They hold boxes of syringes. Pumps for intravenous feedings. Plastic gloves. Containers labeled “Reglan,” “Bactrim,” “Morphine.”
Suddenly, Becky stops playing. The Barney shoes freeze upon the floor, motionless. She forgets even Tinker Bell.
“My tummy hurts,” she moans, obviously in pain.
Within her tiny body a microscopic bug is ravaging her intestines, invading her gall bladder, cutting its nasty way through her pancreas.
It got there from the water she drank.
Ordinary tap water.
The same city water that sickened an estimated 403,000 people here a year ago, sending 44,000 to doctors, 4,400 to hospitals, accounting for 479,000 lost days at work, costing employers tens of millions.
Now health officials are acknowledging another statistic, little noticed elsewhere in the country: the number of dead and dying. They say at least 104 people have been hastened to their deaths – months and sometimes years sooner than expected – by the parasite that last April somehow slipped through the usual safeguards at a water plant only blocks from Becky’s home.
“The health impact has turned out to be far more severe than we ever suspected,” says Paul W. Nannis, Milwaukee’s health commissioner. “For most of us, it was like a bad flu. For some, it’s a tragedy.”
The toll has been largely missed outside Milwaukee. Some say that’s because most – of those afflicted have human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.
People like Becky.
Of 122 HIV patients, 82 have died what Nannis terms “very accelerated deaths.” Among them were five children, including Becky’s best friend, Brandon. Becky is the only child still alive. Other people are dying. A national search is on for still more people who may have ingested “crypto” while visiting here.
Yet for all the political impact of Milwaukee’s crisis, which underscored the potential for peril in household taps in many communities, little has changed for the 230 million Americans who depend on public systems to safeguard them from a variety of contaminants.
The Senate last month weakened standards. States and cities had complained of the cost of complying with so many rules, such as testing Ohio water for an insecticide used only in Hawaii. Debate resumes in the House, probably later this summer.
You might be tempted not to care about Becky: Her mother was a prostitute. You might be tempted to say to yourself, well, she was going to die anyway; after all, she had HIV at birth.
You may be troubled by her non-traditional family: She’s being raised by two gay men, the only people who seem to have loved her in her short life.
Larry Furmann, the man Becky calls Daddy, knows how you might feel.
But he wants you to consider this:
“Did Becky have a choice?
“People can say gays deserve HIV or that drug addicts will have to stop using needles. Fine, we can debate that. But this precious child, this beautiful little girl, had no choice in being born this way and then having drinking water that comes out of a faucet bring her a quicker death and so much more pain. It just wasn’t her fault.”
Who’s to blame?
Just how did the parasite cryptosporidium get into Lake Michigan and then through the Howard Ave. water plant, causing one of the largest outbreaks of waterborne disease in U.S. history?
How did so much get through that even a person who took a sip at an airport water fountain got terribly ill? The answer remains as murky as the water was last March and April.
Health authorities knew, figuring backward from when people got sick, that the parasite must have begun surging through city pipes around March 23, 1993. What else might have been happening then?
Seeking answers, investigators combed records of dairy farms and slaughterhouses, reviewed documents from the water plant, analyzed water flows from streams and rivers.
Milwaukee gets its water through an intake pipe in Lake Michigan, only two miles downstream from the outflow of a sewage plant and near the mouth of the Milwaukee River.
Experts thought they might have some valuable clues when somebody told them a large quantity of city water had been frozen that March for an ice sculpture contest. But studies of the melted ice also proved inconclusive.
“We assume a massive infusion of a high level of crypto,” said Nannis. “But from where? There are three rivers and a big lake. It’s hard to prove anything.”
Mysteries encourage people to concoct theories of their own, some of which involve fanciful coverups involving water workers who go missing.
“Everybody wants to know who to blame,” said Nannis.
One of the most popular theories is the most obvious, considering that the parasite – most often associated with cattle – turned up in a big dairy state.
Was runoff from dairy pastures or a Milwaukee packing plant to blame? Had somebody illegally disposed of dead calves?
“Each industry came forward saying, ‘Don’t implicate us. It’s not us,’ said Nannis. “People don’t want to be tarnished.”
No evidence surfaced suggesting they should be.
Less murky is what happened once the contaminated, brownish water arrived at the water plant.
Workers “had a difficulty in maintaining a proper … dose” of water treatment chemicals that were new to them, concludes Kim Fox, an Ohio-based Environmental Protection Agency researcher who investigated the event. “The big lesson is you need to test your water all the time, continually, maintaining vigilance.”
As a result, Milwaukee is one of the few cities now doing so. Its equipment includes lasers that constantly count particles in the water as it moves through the treatment plant. Too many particles warn of potential contaminants. Mayor John Norquist advocates a fancy ozone treatment system to more effectively treat water – at a cost of up to $40 million.
Forty communities are experimenting with similar methods of disinfecting water with ozone gas instead of chlorine, byproducts of which have been linked to cancer.
Larry Furmann has heard about the theories, the equipment, the costs.
“I’m just filled with rage,” he said. “I fully believe there was some jerk who didn’t care about looking at some dial or gauge.” There’s talk of a lawsuit.
“But what good does that do Becky now?”
Letting Becky go
Ric and Larry, now in their 50s, once dreamed of running a foster home for young children with HIV. Ric, whom Becky calls “Papa,” is a teacher-turned-homemaker. Larry – “Daddy” – is a former drug abuse counselor who now works part-time so he can help care for Becky.
Ric says he always wanted a child. For Larry, a divorced father of two, adopting Becky was the result of what he calls his “do-gooder” tendencies. At first, anyway.
“But now,” he sighs as Becky runs over and cuddles up to him, “I feel like parent and child with her.”
He loads her syringe with pain-killing morphine.
“She’s really got to me,” he continues. “It’s gonna hurt like hell when she goes.”
Becky calls the broviac catheter on her chest “Freddy,” like a friend. It’s a plug through which Daddy or Papa can pump medicine or, when she can’t keep any food down, liquid nutrition directly into a vein. Her doll has a catheter into her chest, too.
“Freddy is nice,” Becky volunteers as Ric clears the table of medicines and syringe wrappers. “Fred is nice because he’s in my heart.”
Concerned that Becky might be taunted in elementary school, both men changed their last names – to Becky’s.
Elementary school. They’d actually expected she’d attend, at least until kindergarten or first grade.
But then, two months ago, after alarming lab tests, doctors warned Larry and Ric to start watching Becky for signs of hemmorhaging. “When it’s time,” says Larry, “hopefully we’ll have the strength to let her go.”
As gay men, they knew too well the realities of AIDS, the inevitability of death, the fact that it can arrive sooner than expected. Both had young friends, sick and dying before their “time,” long before anything turned up in Milwaukee’s water.
But they weren’t prepared for this: A chubby little girl with a pink ribbon in her hair who has little chance of living much beyond her fourth birthday.
In August.
“She’s so young, so innocent,” Ric says softly.
Becky, now smiling blankly at the TV, slips into the haze of narcotic-induced tranquillity.
Risks beyond Milwaukee
Sudden severe and widespread sickness from drinking water – more commonly associated with places like Mexico or Turkey – is still a rarity in the United States. Yet almost weekly, health officials document examples of contamination at documented examples of contamination, sometimes leading to illness and death.
Here in Milwaukee, supermarkets still do a brisk business in bottled water. Yet even that is rarely pure. Other substances dissolve too easily into water: Polluted runoff, chemicals from lawns, cow manure, pet waste, and in places such as Cleveland, sewer overflows that wash human feces into lakes and rivers.
The Centers for Disease control estimates that bacteria, viruses and other pathogens sicken 940,000 Americans each year, of whom 900 die. Between 1970 and 1992, according to the CDC, more than 100 outbreaks of microorganisms sickened more than 140,000 people in 40 states.
Even cryptosporidium, usually found in mice, turkeys and calves, has turned up three other times in water systems since 1984 – in Carollton, Ga., Medford, Ore., and Braun Station, Tex.
Healthy people with normal immune systems usually suffer cramps, nausea and diarrhea, but survive. But people with immune system disorders, older people and young children can die.
Even so, most attention focuses on the perils of chemicals, including those use to disinfect untreated water.
In one study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, doctors from Harvard and Wisconsin medical schools estimated that chemicals such as trihalomethanes – byproducts of the use of chlorine to treat water – may cause 10,700 rectal or bladder cancers a year. Last week, the federal EPA, environmental groups, cities and water service and supply companies agreed to steps that would reduce trihalomethanes, but actual results may be years away.
Lead still poses problems, especially for children, and environmental advocates such as the Natural Resources Defense Council warn of the perils of nitrates, arsenic and other contaminants in public water supplies.
Testing for every possible contaminant is impractical. “You could bankrupt this and every other city by testing for every carcinogen and bacteriological agent known to man,” Nannis said.
But even though the federal government will take at least another year to come up with safeguards against crypto, Milwaukee has adopted its own standard:
Zero tolerance.
“We’ve learned never to be complacent again,” said Mayor Norquist.
Can it happen again?
“No,” said Nannis. “But of course,” he added calmly, “good science dictates that we can never say never.”
I’m dying’
Last Christmas, Ric made a nativity scene on the dining room buffet. Larry, the decorator in the family, was arranging the figurines when Becky wandered over.
“Papa,” she said. “I need to talk with you.” Her tone seemed out of character, too somber for a three-year-old.
“What is it, honey?” asked Larry.
“I’m dying,” she replied.
Ric and Larry exchanged stunned glances.
“Who told you that?” asked Ric.
Becky thought for a moment, then answered: “Santa Claus.”
“What happens when you die?” asked Larry.
“I go out,” she answered.
“You go out? You mean outside?”
“No,” said Becky. “I just go out. My hair falls off. I go out. Then I meet Daddy. And Papa fixes me.
And then I’ll be all better.”
