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	"PEOPLE CAME KNOCKING AT my door, asking 'Are we going to die?' I didn't know but I felt a strong calling to find out." Bobbi Orsi '00 and her classmates in Pittsfield. Photo by Thom Kendall.

THE PITTSFIELD HOME OF BOBBI ORSI ’00 seems to welcome you with open arms. The front door of the cream-colored split-level on Longview Drive opens onto a plush-carpeted stair. A wall of photographs makes you feel as if you’re meeting the whole family: Orsis, Angellos, Rancourts, and DeBloises, handsome, dark-eyed Italian and French families who made their way to northwest Massachusetts and provided plenty of offspring to work in booming factories of Berkshire County.

There are baskets of dried flowers, cozy throws, an especially beautiful quilt displayed on a wall. Over a couch is a print of the church in Pittsfield’s Park Square where Orsi and her husband, John, were married 17 years ago.

It’s so very pleasant, and you want it to be an ordinary home in a quiet neighborhood, and so did Bobbi Orsi until 1997, when she learned that her yard was contaminated with chemicals. Through sliding glass doors, past the above-ground pool and the enclosed dog run that still stands in the back yard despite the fact that at the time of this visit, in the spring of 2000, the family no longer has a dog, an orange plastic construction fence is visible. On a neighboring property are backhoes scooping up dirt and pouring it into dumptrucks, and men in hardhats stabbbing at the earth with shovels. The rumble of the machines is audible through the glass. Two years ago the men and machines were in Orsi’s yard, she says. The property is free of toxins now, or so she’s been told, though the trees her father-in-law planted were cut down to make way for the machinery and the dog that used to live in the run died of liver cancer.

You take a seat in the den, joining a group of Orsi’s classmates in the UMass School of Nursing’s "R.N.-to-B.S." program — ten experienced nurses looking forward to receiving their bachelors’ degrees in May of 2000. All are Berkshire County residents, and all had years of experience as registered nurses before coming to UMass to get the academic part of their educations.

The nurses have gathered at Orsi’s house for a final review of the paper they’re submitting for a project in their Community Focus class. The title of the paper echoes the words on some hand-lettered posters leaning against the wall, leftovers from a forum the group helped organize several weeks earlier: "PCBs: Can We Live With Them?"

UNTIL THE UMASS NURSES GOT involved in Pittsfield in the fall of 1999, the question "PCBs: Can We Live With Them?" had gone surprisingly unasked in a town that had known for at least 20 years that it had a problem with polychlorinated biphenyls.

In 1977 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, citing evidence of a threat to public health, banned all use of PCBs in manufacturing. That same year, Tim Gray ’77, a Lee environmentalist and director of the Housatonic River Initiative, was one of a group of citizens who sampled the river for PCBs, and found them. "We took what we´d found to GE and the state department of environmental protection, and they told us we didn´t know what we were talking about, " Gray recalled this year. "A year later, the front page of the Berkshire Eagle announces to the world that they´ve found PCBs in the Houstatonic."

The General Electric Company, which over the course of 40 years had used tons of PCBs in its Pittsfield plant, stopped using them in 1976 in anticipation of the EPA ban. At the same time, though not necessarily for the same reason, GE was downsizing the plant, shuttering parts of the 247-acre "campus" in what would be a years-long transition from what residents recall as a golden era — when the company employed three of every four workers in Pittsfield — to the current workforce of a few hundred.

At the time of their invention in the 1930s, PCBs were hailed as miracle chemicals, versatile enough for use as lubricants, sealants, and paint additives, and so non-flammable that they could be used in high-heat industrial applications. They also proved also to be notoriously persistent. PCBs collect in the fatty tissues of fish, causing fears of toxicity as people eat the fish they’ve caught and the ducks they’ve shot. There is fear, and evidence to support it, of links between PCBs and elevated rates of birth defects, learning disabilities, and low infant IQ.

PCBs are feared to permeate water, air, and soil — tons of which GE distributed in a goodwill gesture to thousands of GE workers building houses around the county in the boom years following the war. An 1992 internal memo identified neighborhoods where the company had delivered contaminated fill, and expressed concern about hazards to human health. The memo became public in 1996, when the EPA sued GE for all documents on its handling of PCBs in Pittsfield.

In short, the impact of PCBs has been a question in Pittsfield for years — a question that was seldom addressed but wouldn't go away, despite the fervent wish of many that it would. GE had no incentive to unearth adverse effects from chemicals it had generated and dispersed. Civic leaders had no incentive to publicize problems that could discourage economic revitalization.

Residents, too, showed reluctance to dwell on what some perceived as a spike in breast and other cancers and non-Hodgkins lymphoma in their town — let alone the possibility that it might be the legacy of a popular company. But the question was becoming harder to suppress.

BOBBI ORSI WAS HEARTSICK AT the disclosure, in the wake of the 1996 EPA suit, that the property across the street was contaminated with PCBs. So were schools, playgrounds, and parks to which GE had trucked free fill. The state ordered the company to start cleaning up, and began hammering out a consent decree that would spell out the extent of its responsibility. It would mean years and even decades of disruption throughout the city.

In retrospect, Orsi says she wasn’t really surprised, and chides herself for having maintained the same "nonchalance" as nearly everyone else. Her own husband worked for GE. Company spokesmen consistently maintained they had had no knowledge of the dangers of PCBs until shortly before the EPA ban in 1977, and that current fears were exaggerated.

Even the physicians with whom she worked at the Berkshire Medical Center had seemed little concerned. Dr. Henry Tulgan, associate dean of this western branch of the UMass medical school, says that until very recently doctors just didn't think about linking symptoms with chemical exposure. The volume and pace of research makes it hard for local physicians to keep up, Tulgan says. Few doctors had any idea what symptoms of PCB poisoning would look like.

As for ordinary citizens, many felt they could do nothing and so didn't want to know, say the UMass nurses. Some still don’t.

"They're so concentrated on getting their yards cleaned up, so worried about their property values and the economic future of the city," says Eileen Rennie '00, a school nurse. "Their concern is, ‘Can we fish in the rivers?’ not ‘Is my pregnant daughter at risk?' or ‘Is there a chance my kid’s hyperactivity was caused by PCBs?'"

Gary Quadrozzi ’00, a psychiatric nurse at Berkshire Medical, thinks the reluctance to question goes back to loyalty, particularly among retirees. "Many people just don't want to say anything bad about GE," he says. "They have GE stock, good pensions. They'll tell you, ‘GE got me my car, my house, put my kids through college.' They don't want to say, ‘The hand that fed us is now biting us in the butt.'"

After the EPA actions of 1996, many residents did begin to question. In the absence of much public information on PCBs, Bobbi Orsi became the closest thing to a medical expert available, at least in her neighborhood.

Those neighbors began calling. Some were GE employees or retirees worried about exposure on the job. Others had never worked in the plant but were anxious about "background" contamination. Should they stop their children from playing on the riverbanks? Should they stop eating fish and waterfowl from the Housatonic River? Was it safe to garden? Drink tap water?

"They came knocking at my door and asking, ‘Are we at risk? Are we going to die of cancer?’" Orsi recalls. "I didn't know the answer to that. But I felt a strong calling to find out."

THUS BEGAN A NEW PHASE of Orsi's life, that of citizen health activist. In 1997, with fellow activist Mary Grace Brown, Orsi co-founded the Residents Environmental Action League, sassily acronymned GET REAL, as a local watchdog organization and PCB information clearinghouse.

The mission was to support Pittsfield residents "addressing issues of testing and assessing property values and health effects." The strategies were, first, organizing — GET REAL eventually worked with some 100 homeowners — and second, gathering information on clean-up standards and health effects.

There was ample information to gather. Studies were linking PCBs to an array of "neurotoxic" conditions — developmental disorders, attention-deficit disorder, learning disabilities, immunological problems, reproductive problems, endocrinological imbalances — as well as many kinds of cancer. Massive accidental exposures in Asia showed extreme health impacts, but studies nearer home — from the PCB-laden Great Lakes and downstream from GE plants in upstate New York, for example — suggested subtler threats from "bio-accumulation" of PCBs in the food chain.

UMass biology professor Robert Zoeller, who has served on EPA committees on PCBs and endocrine disruption, says "the evidence is very strong" for a link between PCBs and learning and behavioral disorders. "One thing that's really concerned me a lot is that PCB contamination is always framed in terms of cancer," says Zoeller. "That's a mistake." Zoeller is deeply concerned by evidence that PCBs are transmitted during pregnancy and through breast milk. But full-scale "dot-connecting" research linking industrial chemicals to disease and developmental disorders is barely in its infancy," he says.

"I think of the first studies linking diet and lifestyle to heart disease," says Zoeller. "Even to get the funding is going to be difficult."

The information that GET REAL was assembling could be overwhelming even to physicians, says Orsi: "Get a scientist and a physician in the same room, and you'll find their language is not the same," she says. It seemed increasingly clear there existed "a big gap between what physicians and nurses out here knew, and what was known."

And thus entered the UMass School of Nursing — as a way to help disseminate what was known. In 1999, Orsi was in the last leg of her B.S. program. She’d been awarded SON’s Peace and Responsibility Award for co-founding GET REAL. Now, two credits shy of her degree, she began to see a role for SON in Pittsfield.

ORSI APPROACHED FACULTY MEMBER Micheline Asselin ’74, her teacher in a class called Community Focus, and suggested a class project involving health education in Pittsfield. Asselin liked the idea. So did other RN-to-BS students, many of whom had ties to Pittsfield. Kim Murdock ’00 had a personal brush with the PCB scare when her neighborhood was tested. Eileen Rennie had gingerly broached the subject with her father, who’d worked with electrical transformers at GE and subsequently had a bout with skin cancer. "He never wanted to talk about it," says Rennie. "He´s very loyal to GE."

Gary Quadrozzi, who grew up in Pittsfield and is an avid canoeist on the Housatonic, has a sister who was a trainer for GE. "She would watch employees pick up screws that were covered with oil that contained PCBs and put them in their mouths," he says. "A few years later she ran into a man whom she´d worked with, and she asked him how he was doing, and he said, ´Oh, not so good. I lost part of my tongue to cancer.´"

The project also received the blessing of the school's dean, Eileen Breslin.

"Florence Nightingale said the role of the nurse is to put the patient in the best environment to heal," said Breslin last year. "Helping people identify the health issues in their community is inherent in the role of the nurse."

The dean says she wasn’t aware at the time that the company whose toxic legacy her students were taking on was headed by perhaps the single most powerful and prestigious alumnus of UMass, Jack Welch ’57. But she’d have given the green light anyway, she says.

"There are always two sides to every story," says Breslin. "Part of what nurses do is make sure both sides are brought to the community."

As for Orsi, she says she’s never been out to slay the giant company. She’s tried to steer clear of "rebellious" groups who want to make GE pay and pay, and to keep the focus on health concerns as they affect her neighbors.

LATE IN 1999, IN COOPERATION with GET REAL and other area groups, the nurses in Asselin’s class launched two forums in Pittsfield — one for residents and one for medical professionals. On a frosty morning in October, over a hundred people turned out at the Crowne Plaza hotel in downtown Pittsfield for the professionals’ session.

A city councilman said a few words of introduction. Jan Schlichtmann ’71, the tenacious attorney whose campaign against corporate polluters was chronicled in the book A Civil Action, gave the keynote speech. In the presentations that followed, EPA scientists, DPH officials, and others did their best to summarize everything they knew about PCBs.

Doctors and nurses who’d reported on a pre-survey that they knew little about PCB contamination wrote on post-event evaluations that they’d gained a wealth of knowledge. Dr. Tulgan of Berkshire Medical praised the nurses for going into greater depth than had the state of Massachusetts, and for making chemical contamination part of the thinking of some of his colleagues.

Orsi fretted later that some of the doctors may have come only for professional credit. Asked this year if she felt the event had had a lasting effect on doctors, she answered, "I don´t know if they´ve actually changed their practice, so much as they have the information."

What's next for Pittsfield and for the nurses? Negotiations continue, but the cleanup companies with which GE has contracted also continue to remove, contain, or cap sources of contamination. (Orsi’s property was one of the first 17 to be cleaned.) The city will use some of a million-dollar settlement between GE and the state attorney general’s office for environmental health education; Orsi is one of four local citizens chosen to oversee this fund.

The nurses of the R.N.-to-B.S. class of 2000, says Micheline Asselin, gained knowledge not only of polychlorinated biphenyls but of how to reach out to a community that isn't sure how to help itself. Most remain in Berkshire County: one in obstetrical nursing, another in psychiatric care, others in pediatric medicine — all specialties in which awareness of neurotoxicity is an asset.

"They will be vociferous on this issue," Asselin says. She also says that as long as suceeding classes of students are interested, UMass will remain a presence in Pittsfield.

Orsi, too, expects to continue to work with UMass nursing students. Her current project is bringing experts on fetal and infant development to address local doctors. "Physicians tend to listen to other doctors more than to nurses," she says. She’s broadened the mission of GET REAL to include environmental health in general, and helped found a resource library providing public information on Lyme disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer´s as well as PCBs. And with her husband, who has now retired from GE, she is part of a gruelling new lawuit pending against the company.

BUT THE DAYS OF THREE and four meetings a week are past for now. She is able to spend more time with her son, Christopher, 13. She’s resumed gardening, though she now grows only flowers, not vegetables, in soil that she still has suspicions about.

She shows a visitor around her "recovering" yard with its flowering shrubs and statuary, picnic table and barbeque pit. She ignores an oily sheen in the water of the pond behind her house, which was also cleaned as part of the GE settlement, and peers into the reeds for frogs. The Orsis recently got a new beagle puppy, a sign that the family who lost a dog to liver cancer a few years ago is ready to move on.

Her words now sound the cautious optimism of someone who feels life is beginning to return to normal.

"There is a move in the health professions to become more environmentally conscious," says Orsi. "We´re training a whole generation of health providers to be more aware. This is a trend we´re seeing in this little piece of the world anyway."

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