Jane Kay broke the story of the TCE contamination of public drinking water on Tucson’s south side 40 years ago this year. To me, to many of her other fellow journalists, and perhaps most of all to hundreds of southside families, this story represents the pinnacle of a newspaper’s service to its community.
Other Star staffers played roles in the investigation — including Robert Cauthorn, a data-journalism pioneer before data journalism was a thing, and Jon Kamman, then the Star’s managing editor. I’ll get to them in a minute. But this was Jane’s beat, Jane’s story and Jane’s incredible work.
With characteristic modesty, Jane says it started with “doing what journalists do — asking questions, being curious.” But from the start, those questions framed a horribly dark picture — the possibility that for decades, despite the assurances of public health and other local officials, thousands of southside residents received trichloroethylene-contaminated water that likely caused a shockingly high incidence of rare cancers, liver and kidney damage, central nervous system and blood disorders, lung and respiratory troubles and cardiovascular problems.
Reporters are not scientists. But sometimes they must do scientific research — or ask questions that spur others to do the research — because the public interest has not been protected before the questions are asked.
In the story of the TCE contamination of several communities on the south side, the research needs were double-barreled: Which Tucson neighborhoods, if any, got bad water, and for how long? And second, what health effects had those neighborhoods experienced?
Some background explanation is necessary here. Hundreds, no doubt thousands, of businesses and other concerns across the nation (including government agencies) over the years treated TCE and other industrial solvents and chemicals cavalierly, causing small, localized issues. But the amount of TCE in Tucson’s groundwater was far, far greater.
How did that happen?
Tucson, of course, is one of the best places, if not the best place, in the country to store aircraft. After World War II, many of the nation’s fighters and bombers were brought in 1945 to Davis-Monthan Field and the 4105th Army Air Forces Base Unit, which was the start of the huge boneyard that exists today. The planes were covered in plastic — “cocooned” — essentially shrink-wrapped.
When the Korean War happened, many of the planes were needed. The plastic had to be melted off, and many of the engines needed rebuilding. Contractor Grand Central Aircraft employed thousands in the 1950s doing that work.
The “de-cocooning” involved spraying industrial solvents containing TCE onto the planes with firehose-like equipment. All the melted plastic and solvents ran off into nearby washes and eventually into the groundwater.
Thousands of gallons a day of greenish-yellow water flowed off the runways across the Nogales Highway in a stream perhaps 100 yards long. “The stream would run seven days a week — 24 hours a day — and not just a trickle,” one nearby resident, Bill Cox, told Kay. “You’re talking 10 to 12 feet across. It ran on the south side of our place and went to the neighbors. Then it went underground,” he said.
There were plenty of other industrial sources around the airport as well, including extensive documented pollution from the old Hughes Aircraft plant.
In September 1981, the Tucson Water Department announced that it had closed three wells because TCE had showed up in tested water from them. The department told the City Council and the public that the wells’ output had been pumped into a reservoir and mixed with clean water before being delivered to residents, and nobody got water with TCE above safe levels.
Kay would eventually discover that was not true.
That year, Dr. Patricia Nolan, director of the Pima County Health Department, told the County Board of Health that risk to residents was “virtually nonexistent.”
Kay would discover that was not true, either.
Kay used Water Department records, including well-pumping data, pipeline maps and well tests, interviews with Water Department employees, and computer modeling done for Superfund work to discover that thousands of people on Tucson’s south side got water highly tainted with TCE for decades.
Hydrologists backed her research as accurate.
The second half of her research was medical. Kay went door to door in the neighborhoods most affected, including Mission Manor and the old PAT Homes neighborhood, basically the area north of Los Reales Road and west of the airport.
She spoke with more than 500 people. Only five of them refused to talk. The rest cooperated with her, and the stories they told — of lives cut short or degraded by cancers and other illnesses tied to TCE — were absolutely agonizing. She took the data she gathered and fed it to Cauthorn, who devised a program to plot the illnesses on maps that could be used in the paper, and also organized the data to help Kay in her reporting.
Kay found that cancers and serious illnesses among Sunnyside School District students were far higher than in comparable districts. And the incidence of disease in the neighborhoods that got bad water was far higher than the national averages.
The parishes at St. John’s and St. Monica’s Catholic churches noticed an increase in cancer deaths among parishioners.
Behind all the statistics were the people — people who had lost loved ones, who had lived with chronic illnesses, who had watched their friends and neighbors suffer the same way.
Kay told their stories — with grace and empathy.
In May of 1985, the Star published 30 stories setting forth Kay’s discoveries, and telling the story of the affected neighborhoods.
The Star kept gathering data.
A form headlined “Do you know someone who should be counted?” ran with each story.
Kamman, the managing editor, organized and helped a crew of Star staffers who mailed packets of the stories to more than 6,000 households on the south side.
The impact of Kay’s stories was enormous. Agencies began to wrangle over cleanup responsibilities and expenses. Families began to share information and ultimately two class-action lawsuits, one against the Tucson Airport Authority and the other against the Hughes Aircraft Company, resulted in settlements of more than $130 million for affected families.
Jane Kay started at the Star in the Features department (as too many women journalists interested in investigative news reporting were forced to do in those days). Shortly before I arrived at the Star, Kay got the job she wanted and deserved — environmental reporter. She quickly won acclaim, including a Robert F. Kennedy award for writing about the plight of Navajo uranium miners.
Kay won two national awards for the TCE series — the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi award for Public Service, and the Scripps-Howard Edward J. Meeman Award, for reporting on conservation and environment. She was also Arizona’s Journalist of the Year — the same year she was hired as the environmental reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. Kay would report on the environment in San Francisco for 35 more years.
The southside cleanup, and the pain for the families affected, continues today. But without Jane Kay’s groundbreaking work, the suffering and damage could have been far greater.
Why did the Arizona Daily Star take a closer look at the water distribution system, and at public officials' statements that no one consumed excessive amounts of TCE? And then survey neighborhoods to document health effects?
"Because nobody else did," Kay wrote.
As a part of The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art's ongoing exhibit, "Living with Injury," representing the environmental justice movement that grew on the south side after the Star's disclosures, Kay came to Tucson last month and spoke about her work. Forty years later, hearing her inspired me all over again.
I’ve been a journalist for 56 years and an editor, off and on, for about half a century. Jane Kay’s Tucson TCE stories are among the most consequential, the most difficult to bring to light and the best-reported that I’ve ever edited. Her dedication, determination, reporting skills, personal standards and ethics are at the highest level of the profession.
I’m proud of the Star for its role in telling this huge story.
