Tuesday: A toxic well, a life changed

PERHAM, MINN. -- When Tom Hammers accidentally cuts his finger, he can't feel the pain.

His nerves were damaged at age 16 by drinking water from a tainted well. It happened in 1972, the summer that changed his life.

That year, Hammers and 12 other employees of his father's construction business drank water from a new well at the company's office. The water tasted good. Nobody knew the well had penetrated an old arsenic dump.

Even now, 35 years after the poisonings, it is the only documented case in Minnesota of chronic illness traced to chemical dumping and polluted groundwater. Its lesson is still relevant today because the arsenic contamination that caused it -- like the tainted groundwater around many old dump sites -- still isn't fully cleaned up.

The case has been written up in two medical journals.

For Tom Hammers, now 51, arsenic is part of the story of his life. And the story begins before he was born.

In 1931, farmers across the Midwest faced a scourge of grasshoppers and crickets that devoured entire fields of crops.

Perham, located in lake country about 180 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, didn't escape the hordes. Otter Tail County's farmers were desperate for help.

Modern insecticides hadn't arrived in the 1930s. Instead, the U.S. Department of Agriculture supplied Minnesota farmers with poison bait -- a mix of bran, sawdust, molasses, water and an arsenic compound -- to spread on the fields. In Perham, workers mixed the local allotment at a shack on the edge of the Otter Tail County fairgrounds.

When the eradication program ended in the 1940s, many 100-pound bags of bait containing perhaps 50 pounds of arsenic compound were left over in Perham. Workers dug a shallow trench at the fairgrounds and buried the surplus in the sandy soil.

The arsenic was still there, long forgotten, oozing into the groundwater, nearly 25 years later. That's when Hammers' father, Bob, purchased adjacent property. He erected an office and warehouse for his construction company and installed a well just 31 feet deep.

Tom Hammers, just out of his freshman year in high school, joined the summer construction crew that also included his 34-year-old uncle, John Altstadt. Each day, before heading to a job site, the two filled jugs with water from the new well.

"It was hot, and we're drinking lots of water after lunch, and you'd start to getting flu-type symptoms, nausea," Tom Hammers said.

The sickness continued for 10 weeks, affecting others on the crew as well as Bob Hammers, who worked in the office and drank coffee brewed with the well water.

Tom Hammers and Altstadt suffered the worst. Slowly, they got weaker. Then their hands and feet became numb.

"They couldn't figure out what was the matter with them and why they kept having flu symptoms," recalled Florence Hammers, who watched in alarm the decline of her husband, her son and her brother.

Soon Altstadt could barely walk, so his doctor arranged for him to see a brain specialist in Fargo, N.D. "That was where he was at when they diagnosed arsenic poisoning," recalled his widow, Rosie Altstadt.

He was admitted to a Fargo hospital with his doctor fearing for his life, she said.

Tom Hammers had lost 22 pounds in two weeks. He soon joined his uncle in Fargo. "The next thing I know I was laying in St. Luke's Hospital," he said. "I don't remember getting there. I don't remember how I got there. "

His father was not admitted to the hospital. But for weeks, the three men received daily injections of a drug developed during World War II to treat poison gas victims. It helped rid their systems of much of the arsenic, but couldn't reverse the nerve damage.

By then, health officials had zeroed in on the company's well and found arsenic far above the safe drinking water level. It hadn't been noticed because arsenic is odorless and tasteless. White residue in the office coffee pot also tested positive for arsenic.

The construction office soon connected to municipal water lines, and abandoned the well. Nobody tried to clean up the pollution right away.

Lifetime health issues

Tom Hammers returned to school in the fall of 1972, but he couldn't play football. His reflexes were gone, he said. In the spring, he tried baseball, "but by the time I got the glove on the ball, the ball had already gone by."

He lost the sense of touch in his hands. He had to be careful not to let his fingers freeze or to touch anything hot.

He felt no pain if his hand or forearm was cut. If he grabbed someone, the strength of his grip could hurt them if he wasn't careful. Odd pains or an itch sometimes occurred suddenly, the result of nerve damage. He is at greater risk for skin cancer.

He could still hunt and fish, and he kept working in construction, becoming president of the company. His father, who died in 1993, had less nerve damage, and the loss of sensation might have helped his arthritis, Tom Hammers said. Family members wonder whether Bob Hammers' cancer was linked to the arsenic.

After the poisoning, life was far more difficult for John Altstadt. He had trouble walking. He couldn't feel things with his hands or feet, and he quickly fatigued. Eventually he could no longer work. He died in 2004.

Other employees who drank the water didn't suffer nerve damage, according to the two medical studies of the group. Many of them filled their water jugs at home, and so they probably didn't consume as much from the well, Tom Hammers said.

Perham, population 2,700, was an even smaller town in 1972. When news of the poisoning spread, older residents stepped forward. They remembered the grasshopper baiting of the 1930s and the burial of the leftover poison after the program ended.

Not fully cleaned up

Toxic waste dumps, such as the Perham site, got little attention in the 1970s.

Then, in 1976, toxic waste started bubbling into homes next to the Love Canal chemical dump in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The federal Superfund cleanup program was enacted four years later.

Don Swenson, who was mayor of Perham at the time, watched a television program about Love Canal that ended with a list of the nation's top hazardous waste sites scrolling over the screen.

"Perham showed up on the list," he recalled. "We had tourists calling us asking if they should bring their own water."

The city's water was never threatened.

The Perham arsenic dump got more attention in 1982 when Tom Hammers and Altstadt testified before a state legislative committee about what happened to them. A state Superfund law was passed, but it took another two years before any major work began in Perham.

By digging up the worst of the arsenic, "groundwater pollution was expected to attenuate naturally," but after a few years the concentrations remained high, according to a subsequent federal review.

In 1998, federal and state agencies began extracting groundwater from four new wells, treating it to remove arsenic and injecting it back into the ground. After nine years and nearly $3 million, the arsenic levels are down but still exceed the federal standard in some test wells.

Now, engineers are considering other ways to remove the remaining arsenic. In the meantime, the pump-out system prevents the arsenic from spreading, so no other wells or people are threatened, said Susan Johnson, project manager for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Land restrictions block future well drilling on the property, she added.

Hammers Construction, which builds commercial and industrial buildings, has a special project underway: a new headquarters. It has sold the building that Bob Hammers built and is moving 3 miles west of Perham. The new building won't be on the city water system, so a new well must be drilled.

This time things will be different.

"We're definitely going to have it tested," Tom Hammers said.

David Shaffer • 612-673-7090

David Shaffer • dshaffer@startribune.com