The Poison Underground

Vast stretches of uninterrupted territory host stately rows of cotton plants. Soiled wisps of the white stuff drift along the road. West of town, between Fourth Street and Evans Road, acres of dark weed-dotted land stretch a flat quarter-mile before halting at the fence that marks the boundary of Reese Air Force Base. In the field, exuberant weeds sprawl laterally, oblivious to the bright yellow sign posted on a nearby water well: "TOXIC." If they could read the notices warning of encroaching pollution, even the Texas weeds might consider pulling up roots.

When Rusty Cagle and his partner Norman Allen purchased the land abutting Reese Air Force Base July of 1990, no yellow signs warned that they were buying a small chunk of a very big Pentagon problem. Cagle, his wife Sheila, and Norman and Kelly Allen invested their savings and their labor in forty acres of land with a greenhouse, located beside Reese -- some nine miles from the heart of Lubbock. Two years after opening a large plant nursery and building their homes on the property, they discovered their water was so severely polluted by toxins migrating from Reese that the families could not use it. Nor could they continue running their moisture-cooled greenhouse without endangering the health of their employees.

Over the next year, repeated attempts by the partners to recover their losses from the Air Force met with delays and empty assurances. With time running out on their claim, they had little choice but to sue the federal government. They provided considerable evidence that Reese's faulty pollution monitoring system had failed to detect contaminants migrating off base. Yet despite that evidence, and despite Reese's history of environmental violations, the families still lost their suit-and virtually everything they'd worked to build. In addition to all they had lost, Cagle says he and Allen now owe the U.S. $35,000 for the government's legal expenses.

"I'm still patriotic," said 36-year-old Cagle in an interview last fall, in his distinctive West Texas drawl. "I feel there are good people in our government -- good decent people. It's just that I haven't met any of them." He sat in a porch chair at his brother's steak house outside Lubbock, and with a sweeping gesture indicated the spread of land he once owned. He says his parents taught him the requisite values of a West Texas existence: patriotism, respect for authority, hard work. None of this prepared him for his dispiriting battle with the protectors of his country, or for losing his faith in the government he'd always respected. Cagle, for a short time a successful small business owner himself, now works for an hourly wage at his brother's restaurant, Cagle's Steaks.

From the porch, Cagle has a clear view of the land he and Allen once owned. Weeds swarm around a large and now abandoned greenhouse complex. Cagle leans back in his chair as though reconciling himself to the laborious task of recounting the events that poisoned his land and led him, by slow degrees, to this porch.

"All my life I wanted to be an entrepreneur and own my own business," he says. After working for several years as a construction engineer, in 1988 Cagle had saved enough money to launch his own business, and he and his longtime friend, accountant Norman Allen, opened a small nursery in Lubbock. The business immediately did well, and in 1990, the partners purchased the property abutting Reese Air Force Base, complete with a 100,000-square-foot greenhouse -- ideal for expansion. The previous landowner, the Furr's Supermarket chain, was liquidating its regional assets, and gave Cagle and Allen a good price and a year's contract to supply the chain with potted plants. Over the next two years, the partners sold their smaller greenhouse in town, Allen built a home for his family on the new property, and nearby, Cagle also began construction on a home for himself and his wife, Sheila.

The new business, Western Greenhouses, was thriving when the first hint of trouble came. One day late in 1992, Reese officials dropped by to ask Cagle not to use one of the greenhouse wells, saying they might draw pollution from the base onto the property. According to Cagle, that was the first he'd heard of any pollution. "They swore up and down at the time," said Cagle, "the pollution was not on the property yet."

Four months later, in a demand for action, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an unprecedented citation against Reese for endangering people who were using local well water. The citation ("7003 order of imminent and substantial endangerment to human health") ordered Reese and the Air Force to clean up the groundwater, and in the meantime required them to supply people living over the plume with filters or a clean water source.

The Reese environmental team complied by distributing filters and bottled water and studying clean-up methods. Cagle and Allen were unwilling to trust filters for their drinking water. Instead they ran plumbing directly from the base water supply (which Reese pipes in from Lubbock) to their homes. But the greenhouse operation could not use chlorinated city water. When Reese officials proposed filtering the greenhouse water, Cagle and Allen initially resisted, fearing damage to the pumps and unaware that breathing the TCE-laden vapor could be more harmful to people than drinking the water. But when the EPA threatened to fine the business $5,000 per day, they agreed to use carbon filters. Unfortunately, the abundant TCE and other pollutants quickly saturated the greenhouse water filters and ruined several expensive pumps. Left with only a trickle of water, plants died, and business subsequently fell off.

With their business in ruins, Cagle and Allen filed the required administrative claim for the value of the property and business with Reese and the Air Force, and began negotiating. Military representatives amicably discussed relocating the families and the business -- even indicating they had a tract in mind with a greenhouse-pending Pentagon approval. Cagle and Allen were relieved. "We told them we just wanted to end up with what we originally had," said Cagle. "Our information from the Air Force was that they were trying to get someone at the Pentagon to approve the settlement, and they said it was just days away -- you know, give us another week, and another week. Well, that just kept going on for months."

Under federal law, Cagle and Allen had a year from the date of filing their claim to negotiate a settlement-or they would lose any claim to damages. A year passed, no word came from the Pentagon, and no settlement was reached. So, the day before the claim's statute of limitations expired, the two men and their families filed suit, under the prescribed Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). Under FTCA, however, the burden of proof rested with the plaintiffs to prove that Pentagon negligence had caused a problem.

Initially, Cagle says, he was "totally against the lawsuit. "I wanted to try to work the situation out. But the way the Air Force dealt with us during that one-year period, I could see that there was no other way but to try to find justice in the federal court system. We found out, then, that you are not entitled to a jury trial when you sue the United States of America."

Their day in court did not bring relief. The trial held in Lubbock in February, 1995, lasted six days, and the judge ruled against them. "There's no way on earth we should have lost that case," said a still-stunned Cagle in Lubbock, after the trial. "The decision was made before we even walked into the courtroom." Cagle and Allen believe that local efforts to save Reese from closure influenced the outcome of their hearing. "It was a political statement," said Allen, sharing Cagle's assessment that the decision was pre-determined.

"The court opinion was twenty-seven pages long, written in six days' time -- in response to 1,059 pounds of documents." (The decision was released February 24, 1995 -- just days before the list of bases under consideration for closing was released by the Federal Base Realignment Commission, appointed by Clinton administration. Reese was on the list.)

The plaintiffs had sued for $4.5 million, which accounted for, among other assets, the greenhouse and related improvements, the two homes, and loss of potential business profits ($72,000 net per month before the pollution was discovered). But the defense, represented by the Federal Tort Claims division of the Justice department, valued the property and business at only $25,000. Moreover, the government denied any military negligence in creating, detecting, or notifying the public of the pollution.

In his decision in Western Greenhouses vs. the U.S. Government, Federal Judge Sam R. Cummings described plaintiffs Cagle and Allen as having been "negligent" for not properly pre-inspecting the land. But Cagle and Allen maintain that prior to the purchase, they followed the prescribed rules for Small Business Administration inspections. Moreover, Cagle points out that Reese environmental experts publicly denied the off-site pollution themselves until 1993. Trial documents confirm that Reese did not notify the public of the danger until three months after discovering the extent of the off-site plume.

In the early '80s, the Department of Defense had established a nationwide program (Installation Restoration Program or IRP), to detect and monitor on- and off-site military base pollution. Each base was required to install monitoring devices to find migrating pollutants. Documents obtained by Cagle's attorney show that Reese monitors detected trace amounts of off-site TCE in 1988, adjacent to the property. The public was notified, but told that there was no danger since only trace amounts had been found.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Mark Weegar, of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, said the Texas Water Commission (now incorporated within the TNRCC) warned Reese that their monitoring methods were inadequate, specifically for the detection of TCE. (TCE is heavier than water, and so most of the TCE effectively skirted a monitoring system designed to find lighter, floating fuels.) All the while the plume was migrating, undetected, beyond the compound.

Since the military was by definition not culpable, the judge said, responsibility for the business losses rested with the business partners, because they had not obtained a new insurance policy. Cagle says the court refused to recognize the impossibility of that requirement. "We called everywhere. Even Lloyds of London wouldn't insure us," he said. And he added that while an insurance policy might have protected the business from liability, it would not have protected his workers from breathing TCE.

After losing his lawsuit Rusty Cagle took a job in his brother's restaurant, cooking and chopping wood. In lieu of ownership, he made an agreement with his bank on his home."The bank, they don't want it, so they won't foreclose on the property," said Cagle. "I've made an agreement with them that I'll just pay them rent, I guess forever." Of the original forty acres, all but the eight that the houses stand on were lost. Instead of foreclosing, the bank shifted the property to a limited liability company.

Norman Allen abandoned his home when his seven-year-old daughter developed a type of colon tumor not commonly found in young children. Concerned about his child's health problems and the prospect of living where he would daily witness the deterioration of his former business, Allen and his family moved away permanently. "It was the pain of being there, watching the greenhouse fall apart -- and we built our house with the intention of being there for the rest of our lives," said Allen.

But the ordeal of Cagle and Allen was not complete. Several weeks after the trial, the two men received a $35,000 bill from the federal government, for the legal expenses of the defense. Cagle says they cannot pay. "I guess you could say, you can't get blood out of a turnip. I'm dead broke, so there's no way I can pay it," said Cagle. Allen was even more blunt. "They can kiss my ass," he said. "We were fined for taking up their six precious days in court."

In the aftermath its court victory, the Air Force recently began cleanup efforts. According to Mark Weegar of the TNRCC, who is project manager for the Reese cleanup, "Under the base closure, the agency is confident that environmental restoration is moving ahead on schedule." He says that all parties are being cooperative, and estimates complete cleanup will take fifteen to twenty years.

But as recently as last fall, Reese Public Affairs Chief Bill Tynan insisted that people were never directly exposed to the TCE. "No one," he said, "has ever drunk TCE in their water around Reese." Yet the June 1993 EPA "7003 Order"-the first ever issued against a military installation-had cited Reese explicitly "because of danger to people drinking off-site well water contaminated by Reese Air Force Base." In October 1994, the TNRCC levied a $81,439 fine against Reese, for continued violation of environmental regulations. For Cagle, Tynan's intransigence is "Reese business as usual." "They lied to us every chance they had," he said, "from the privates who came out to change the filters to the commanders. I was brought up believing you could trust these people. They're the last people on earth you can trust."

Late last year, Rusty Cagle sat in his porch chair, looking over what's left of his land and his dreams, and chewing over events of the past few years. From his brother's restaurant, he has a view of the now shabby greenhouse complex. Weeds have invaded the formerly mown grounds, and a danger sign attached to the wall warns of the subsurface menace. He did all the right things, he believes, followed the rules, as best as he knew them, and in good faith. But he lost just the same. Cagle sums up his dealings with the federal government with a frank and permanent sense of injustice. "You know, it's just not right when a person works as hard and as many years as I did to build a business, and then the people that are supposed to protect you -- take it away from you."

Yet Cagle still speaks of his family's future with optimism. He and his wife, and their three-year-old daughter seem to have escaped in good health, thus far. "Emotionally, we've rebounded," he says firmly. But Cagle's entrepreneurial spirit has not revived. "I've lost my motivation to do what I've done before. I'll never again be in that position." He stares out at the black dirt field, flecked with specks of cotton. After a long pause, he concludes, "I'll never try that hard again."