“The Death List”

by:  Jamie Paparich

In 1992, Spokesman-Review reporter Julie Titone published an article titled “Canadian Company Suspected in Illnesses,” shining a light on a small group of women in Northport, Washington. These women were determined to prove that the high rate of autoimmune diseases in their community stemmed from chronic exposure to heavy metal toxins released by Teck Cominco, a Canadian smelter located just seven miles upriver.

The article began in Naomi Palm’s kitchen, where she, Faye Jackman, and Kay Paparich huddled around a table. In front of Naomi were handwritten notes from a health survey the women had conducted. Naomi called it their “death list.”

The Death List: Alarming Numbers in a Small Town

The list contained 45 names of residents who had died from similar autoimmune diseases and another 163 living residents suffering from the same illnesses. In a town of only 375 people, the findings were alarming.

After years of being dismissed by state agencies, these women decided to take matters into their own hands. They spent months knocking on doors, making phone calls, and gathering around Naomi’s kitchen table to compile the health information they collected. Their findings confirmed their worst fears: something was profoundly wrong.

Health Clusters: Evidence of a Crisis

The survey revealed alarming patterns. Along Mitchell Road, seven families lived within a one-mile radius. Fifteen children in those families had been diagnosed with rare inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. At the time, the national diagnosis rate for these diseases was about 1 in 100,000. In Northport, it was 4% of the population.

The findings across the Columbia River and Mitchell Road, along Waneta Road, were equally shocking. Of six families surveyed, nine residents had suffered brain aneurysms, three had brain tumors, and three others had ulcerative colitis. Nationally, brain aneurysms affect about 8 in 100,000 people. In Northport, it was 2.4% of the population.

The remaining survey participants reported cancers, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and other autoimmune disorders. The small community was gripped by fear—fear that was well-founded.

The Air and the River: Routes of Exposure

With push pins, highlighters, and a hand-drawn map of the town and the surrounding farms, the women mapped out the different illnesses collected from their survey, in an attempt to understand if there was a common denominator. The common denominator quickly became clear.  It was the air.  The residents impacted the most lived in the Upper Columbia River valley. Most of the smelter’s toxic air emissions from their smokestacks admittedly and visibly would get trapped within the valley walls.

At the time, these women didn’t know that Teck had also been dumping 450 tons of slag A DAY directly into the Columbia River since 1940. Slag is a byproduct of the smelting process that resembles black sand and is full of heavy metal toxins. The Columbia River begins to encounter many more bends just as it crosses the US border and flows through the Upper Columbia River Valley and the town of Northport, causing the speed of the river flow to decrease due to the combined effect of slower water on the inside of each bend, causing the smelter’s slag to start to settle on the banks and the bottom of the river.

Air Monitoring: Promises and Failures

Two months after the 1992 article, the Washington State Department of Ecology began air monitoring in the area, revealing arsenic levels 200 times and cadmium levels 18 times higher than national safety standards. Ecology warned that long-term monitoring was needed, and Teck agreed, placing an air monitor near Sheep Creek from 1999 to 2009.

Teck had promised their new KIVCET smelter, operational in late 1997, would reduce arsenic, cadmium, and lead emissions by over 90%. Early monitoring in 1997 and 1998 in Trail, B.C., and later at Sheep Creek in 1999 and 2000, showed reductions as high as 93%. However, Teck’s own documents revealed the KIVCET smelter was only used briefly for testing until mid-2000. The 2000 BC Emissions Inventory omitted KIVCET data, as Teck admitted no air or emissions monitoring had been conducted on it until 2001.

This raises questions: How did Teck report a 93% drop in toxins before the KIVCET was fully operational? Their production and ore inventory don’t align with such reductions using the older smelter, especially with no KIVCET monitoring before 2001.

Who is Protecting Us?

The article ended with one of the women in Naomi’s kitchen, Kay Paparich, voicing her concern for future generations of Northport residents, “It’s too late for my children because they’ve already got these problems, but what about the little ones coming up?”

“The little ones”, that Kay was so concerned about in 1992, are now suffering from the same illnesses that these women agonized over in Naomi’s kitchen 32 years ago. And so are those little ones little ones, and so on. Three generations, now moving into the fourth, suffering the impacts our State agencies and the Canadian smelter had been aware of since as far back as the 1933 Trail Smelter case filed by Northport farmers.

Fast forward 19 years, Kay Paparich’s granddaughter realized the community concerns were still falling on deaf ears. So, with the assistance of Citizens for a Clean Columbia, she conducted another community health survey of past and present Northport residents. She was adamant that past residents be included in the survey since continuous low-level exposure to these toxins accumulates over time, leading to a cumulative effect in the body’s bones and organs. The body has a limited ability to excrete these metals, causing a gradual increase in body burden. Bioaccumulation eventually crosses a threshold where symptoms become apparent and diagnosable, which can take decades. This is what triggered the 1992 survey, as many of the residents, who had been born and raised and lived in Northport as far back as 1940, had similar bioaccumulation levels, which caused a large portion of the population to start experiencing symptoms and receiving diagnoses for these rare illnesses around this time. The 1992 survey had not included residents who had left the area.

The results of the 2009–2011 community survey confirmed residents continued to be diagnosed with the same health issues, but cases of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease had steadily increased. The most surprising pattern found in survey responses was that impacted past and present residents mentioned that their children were being diagnosed with the same autoimmune illnesses, as well as new ones, yet many of them had never lived in Northport or had even visited the area. This indicated that bioaccumulation had caused a change in the DNA of those impacted by chronic exposure.

The survey results, specifically the extremely high number of diagnosed cases of ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, caught the attention of Dr. Korzenik, Director of the Crohn’s and Colitis Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and one of the leading IBD researchers in the country. With the assistance of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Korzenik and his team conducted their own community survey. 119 current Northport residents participated, and 17 residents had confirmed cases of either Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis.  Dr. Korzenik stated;

“That’s about 10 to 15 times what we’d expect to see in a population the size of Northport. I’m not aware of any other cluster like it.”

The EPA reached an agreement with Teck in 2006, in which Teck agreed to fund a remedial investigation of the Upper Columbia River site, which the EPA would oversee. Based on the questionable results of the studies Teck had completed, the EPA conducted a Human Health Risk Assessment released in 2021. Still, they did not conduct current air monitoring in the area.

All of the studies conducted in the area, as far back as 1931, have forensically and scientifically confirmed that the primary source of contamination is from Teck’s aerial dispersion of heavy metal toxins, through their smoke stacks. EPA project manager Laura Buelow stated;

“The data shows that the soil became contaminated from historical smelting operations at the Trail smelter, specifically the metals coming out of the smelter stacks.”

Ecology’s 2017 evaluation of the past air monitoring conducted in the area concluded that to ensure the safety of residents, long-term air monitoring should be conducted in and around Northport.

Ecology’s above recommendation, along with a petition signed by 100 Northport residents, and the opinion of the Northeast Tri-County Health District, was not enough to persuade the EPA to conduct current air monitoring studies to include in their Human Health Risk Assessment.

The EPA informed Northport residents that after much consideration further air monitoring of the area would not be done.  Cami Grandinetti, a manager in EPA’s remedial cleanup program, said;

“From our evaluation of data collected in 1999 to 2009 we believe that the risk to you from the outdoor air in Northport is low.”

The data they evaluated was the falsified data Teck provided. The results of past air monitoring of the area done correctly by Ecology, along with the health clusters of autoimmune diseases spanning three generations of residents, and the fact that community members continue to be diagnosed with the same autoimmune diseases, seem to prove otherwise.

Fighting for Justice: The Women of Northport

Naomi, Faye, and Kay’s 1992 survey and assessment, conducted with shoe leather, thumbtacks, phone calls, and a hand-drawn map around a kitchen table, proved to be much more accurate than the results of the EPA’s multi-year, extensive HHRA and the ongoing RI/FS being conducted by Teck. Their assessments and investigations lacked the single most important component that made those women’s discoveries so important: common sense.

A Legacy of Advocacy

I am Kay Paparich’s granddaughter. Before she passed away from Parkinson’s disease, she gave me her worn, folded “death list,” determined that the names on it would never be forgotten.

Since then, I have added hundreds of names from emails and letters sent by past and present residents, as well as their children and grandchildren. I won’t let them be forgotten either.

To everyone who has shared your stories: I hear you, and I am adding your voices to this growing archive of pain, perseverance, and hope. Together, we carry on the fight for justice for Northport.

Northport, WA Slideshow