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Event: Public meeting held at 19:30 in Camelford Hall, Clease Road, Camelford PL32 9PE to discuss the Draft Report of the COT Subgroup on the Lowermoor Water Pollution Incident

Date: 17 February 2005

Chairman: Professor Frank Woods CBE

In attendance: Professor Kevin Chipman, Professor Stephan Strobel, Dr Lesley Rushton OBE, Dr Anita Thomas, Mr Peter Smith, Mr Douglas Cross, Ms Frances Pollitt, Mr Khandu Mistry, Mr Malcolm Brandt, Mr James Powell, Ms Sarah Fisher (Press Officer), Kabir Gobim (Recording Technician), John Fallon (Public Address system) Audience included: Paul Tyler CBE MP, Dan Rogerson (Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for North Cornwall, Ms Anderson, N Neale, Robin Penna, S Davey, W E Chapman, M Beal-Toms, N M Jones, N Evans, Sybil V Griffiths, R Gibbons, B Pentecost, R E Newman, Judith Young, J Stockton, Peggy & John Molesworth, Ray Bowler, Sarah Almond, Melanie Shelton, David Bloye, Dr J Lunny, J Spratt, Dr Anthony Nash, Dr D Miles, Mrs Miles, Pat Owens, T Chadwick, Mr & Mrs Ian & Ro Clewes, Carole Wyatt, June Hills

020 7404 1400 [email protected] www.wordwave.co.uk Smith Bernal WordWave, 190 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2AG CHAIRMAN: This meeting is part of the 12-week consultation period which takes

place and is taking place following the publication of our draft report,

which appeared towards the end of last month.

The Lowermoor subgroup, most of whom are sitting at this table, was

set up as part of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food,

Consumer Products and the Environment. And we started the

substantive work in January 2002, meeting on 19 occasions, and you

will recall that we held our first public meeting in Camelford in April

2002.

We had two terms of reference. The first was to advise on whether

the exposure to chemicals resulting from the 1988 Lowermoor water

pollution incident has caused or might be expected to cause delayed

or persistent harm to human health. And secondly, to advise whether

the existing programme of monitoring and research into the human

health effects of the incident should be continued and whether or not

it should be modified in any way and to make recommendations.

Those of you who have looked at our report I think will realise that we

carried out a wide-ranging investigation, using and seeking

information from as many sources as possible, including the

commissioning of studies carried out by outside contractors. And you

will hear a little more about that later. These sources of information

are listed in section 12 of chapter 2 of our report. And we are of the

opinion that this is the most comprehensive report into the health

effects of the 1988 pollution incident that is in existence.

Now, this meeting is going to be in two main parts. I am not going to

say any more by way of introduction. We are now going to have a

number, a small number, of brief presentations by outside contractors

and also by members of the committee. The purpose of that is to set www.wordwave.co.uk 1

out some key points, not all of the key points, but some of the key

points that are very germane to the way in which we have tackled the

problem that we were faced with. And we would also hope that these

would provide some sort of structure upon which you could hang your

questions, because once my colleagues have given their

presentations, I am then going to throw this meeting open to your

questions. And I wish to remind you and I will continue to remind you

throughout this evening that this report is a consultation document.

This is not necessarily the final form of that document because what

people say to us, write to us or convey to us may well change the

content of our report. I think it must be clear to you that any

interpretation we put on information that is given to us may be looked

upon in a slightly different way by others. And indeed, from past

experience it is possible to find that there is further information which

at the time of writing that report was not available to us.

Now, I am now going to go straight into the presentations. I’ve been

reminded that I have to tell you that if you have a mobile telephone, it

would be rather nice if you turned it off because I am assured by the

electronic experts that if it goes off, so will all of these things.

The first of our papers is given by Mr Brandt of Black and Veatch.

Now these are the gentlemen who helped us a great deal by

modelling certain aspects of water quality - this being a very important

aspect of our work - because we needed to know the range of

exposures in relation to the quantity of toxicants present in the water.

And I am going to ask Mr Brandt to start this off.

MALCOLM BRANDT: Thank you. I don’t know how I’m going to juggle three things but we’ll

see how we go. I’ll start off with a brief overview of the system. The www.wordwave.co.uk 2

water, raw water, is derived from Crowdy reservoir, comes into

Lowermoor treatment works where it is pre-treated with chemicals. It

then -- the raw water flocculates and settles out in the settlement

tanks. There is often a little bit of carry over, so then there is further

removal of solids in the sand filters. It is then disinfected, usually with

chlorine, before it enters the contact tank where it has usually up to

about 30 minutes contact time for it to work effectively. The final

water then transfers into a storage reservoir, which acts as a buffer to

manage the difference between supply and demand. The water then

finally enters the distribution system.

The part of our brief was to look at the components of the system

where the aluminium was actually accidentally dumped. Traditionally

it would be -- normally it would enter the system at the head of the

system, head of the treatment works. So our objectives were, we

were asked to model the hydraulics of the incident, with these

following objectives. That is, investigate the extent of the mixing,

which is essentially the dilution of the alum within the treatment

works; predict the peak concentrations of the aluminium in the water

leaving the works and simulate the spread of that aluminium through

the network.

Although we refer to alum, in fact we only modelled at the aluminium

concentration and we did not model secondary contamination --

secondary chemical reactions that could have contributed to the

contamination within the distribution system. Our approach was for

the contact tank, we used CFD modelling, that is computational fluid

dynamics. It’s a 3D modelling technique widely used in the

engineering industry, an example being it’s extensively used in

aeroplane design and car design, usually looking at the air flows. We www.wordwave.co.uk 3

use it in the water industry to analyse the hydraulic performance of

facilities, e.g. the circulation of water in storage tanks, which is exactly

the use that we’re using it here. We also modelled the storage

reservoir using the same technique. For the trunk main network, we

used a hydraulic network analysis model that we had been involved

with in 1993. And this is a method of tracking water quality problems

through a distribution system.

To give you a little bit of background, we started off with the contact

tank, to give you a few details of it. It comprises the inlet; there are

four effective sections - the water is mixed in these sections; there are

baffles, which were installed at a later stage. This tank, we believe,

was used -- had a prior life, probably as a storage reservoir, not as a

contact tank. It therefore has this chamber in here through which

there are two holes, and these two holes are fundamental to the

performance of that tank.

The alum was discharged at the head of the fourth section and the

outlet, which is a high level outlet, is at the end of the fourth section.

Just a point to note, there is also -- on the records there is a low-level

washout for that tank. This slide looks a bit messy but it just

demonstrates the complexity of the flow patterns. I won’t try to

describe what’s actually happening here; but the complexity of the

flow patterns in the early chambers and the intense mixing that is

going on. By the time it gets into the last two sections, you’re getting

more into what we’d call plug flow. So this is the -- I’ll run through the

simulation of it; it’s a three hour simulation of the incident.

The time 0 is 5.00pm when the incident started. The concentration

increases with time at the maximum of 40 minutes, the time when

they stopped discharging. And the concentration; as you can see as www.wordwave.co.uk 4

the time progresses, the concentration at the outlet is reducing. The

other point to make is that the colour indicates the significant, shall

we say, concentration of aluminium at the bottom of the tank.

So the conclusions are that the aluminium does sink to the bottom of

the tank and spreads, and it spreads upstream against the flow of

water. The holes in the tank, which I was talking about, which is

there’s one there, which is this cross-section here, that’s the hole, it is

showing how the aluminium and the water are mixing and that’s a

significant hydraulic characteristic of this tank.

The other key point is the concentration at the outlet falls rapidly after

the discharge ends. Up to the end of the discharge, the concentration

is at about 1500 mg per litre as aluminium but that concentration falls

rapidly as you will see on the profile later. We used a similar

technique for the storage reservoir; going through the main

characteristics, there's a high-level bell mouth entry into the tank and

there’s a low-level outlet into distribution from the tank.

Going through this simulation in the same way, this is a 24-hour

simulation. Again you will see the aluminium concentration

increasing. A few points to note. After about 700 minutes, that’s

nearly 12 hours, the water level starts dropping. Up until that time the

supply and demand were pretty well balanced. The other point to

note is that the scale here is different to the previous slide. We’re

replicating the maximum discharge concentration into distribution,

which is about 325 mg per litre. Just to tie the two analyses together,

the concentration profile from the contact tank was the input data for

the concentration profile into the storage reservoir.

A few points here. The peak concentration at 325 mg per litre of

aluminium, as modelled, entered the distribution system at 8.40 pm www.wordwave.co.uk 5

on 6 July. That is three hours after the tanker stopped discharging

into the contact tank. There is a corresponding increase in acidity

related to the aluminium. The consequence of that is that there was

an increased risk of soluble iron, lead and copper in the water flow.

The greatest risk will in fact be in the consumer’s premises where you

have lead communication and service pipes, lead fittings in copper

pipes, copper pipes and copper storage tanks.

Another way of looking at this data of the profile into distribution,

which I showed before, is that 60% of the aluminium discharged at

the works is still in the tanks at the works after six hours. That’s 11

o’clock at night on the first day. And 12 hours after the incident, that’s

5.00 am, you’ve still got 25% of the aluminium is in the works.

Going on to the trunk main model, this is the system. The model we

had was only the trunk main models, i.e. it did not include some of

the, what we call facilities, like storage reservoirs and pumping

stations, and it did not include the smaller distribution pipe work

beyond the major storage, which is Delabole and Rockhead. The

model does not model the impact of St Endellion and other storage

reservoirs and that is a significant restraint in the modelling.

The model drags the concentration from Lowermoor, it takes the

profile out of the contact tank and it drags that profile to the ends of

the system. This is the output from the St Teath and Helstone part of

the analysis. All the outputs are shown on the posters around the hall

if you want to look at individual plots.

There are two points to note here. This point we call off the 9 inch is

close to Lowermoor, it is just downstream of Camelford. This profile

is the concentration profile essentially coming out of the reservoir and

obviously it replicates it. Its peak is at about 11.30 pm, so at that www.wordwave.co.uk 6

point the peak is passing here, some three hours after the peak starts

to leave the treatment works. The second point to note is that at this

point, the Delabole, well we label it for a particular reason, but not of

any great note, but it feeds into St Teath. The concentration at that

point has gone through the Delabole reservoir, so it has been diluted.

It has been held back, it has been retained in that storage reservoir

and therefore the peak is lower but it also, as the water coming

through this way has been delayed some 12 hours from when the

water -- when the peak passes that point. These two points are

connected by smaller diameter pipe work, so you would actually end

up with a mixing at that point.

So in conclusion, we have simulated the mixing of the aluminium in

the tanks to predict peak concentrations and to get some idea of the

duration of the incident. At the works, it was 56,000 mg per litre of

aluminium discharged and at that point by the time it came out of

Lowermoor it was about 325 mg per litre, and it will be lower in the

distribution system, as I have explained.

We have then looked at the times that the slug at the different

locations and as I said, out of the works the peak is at about three

hours after the incident ended. By the time it gets to Delabole

reservoir it’s midnight on 6-7 July and it gets into St Endellion

reservoir some day and a half later. The big caution for distribution

system that we want you to take home is that the contamination will

be delayed and dispersed and probably extended by what is going on

in the distribution system. I’ve explained what happens in the

reservoir. The local mains also have a similar delaying and retarding

effect and also, and very significantly, what is going on in consumer’s

plumbing and how they use the storage in their houses. Thank you. www.wordwave.co.uk 7

CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Mr Brandt. As I said at the beginning, I’d much

prefer my colleagues to give these short papers as a basis for your

questioning and if you can save up your questions until the end I’d be

most grateful because then I will throw this open to general

discussion.

Now, the next short paper is going to be given by Dr Lesley Rushton,

who is going to deal with the population studies that are detailed in

our report. Dr Rushton is an epidemiologist, in other words she is an

expert on these matters.

LESLEY RUSHTON: Thank you very much. I’m going to talk -- we’ve now sort of moved

away from what happened in the water to looking at some of the

studies. And in a minute, Anita’s going to talk to you about actually

what people said to us when they came and talked to us or wrote to

us. So we’re coming on to talk a little bit about the health side of

things.

I’m just going to say a few words about some of the studies that have

been carried out since the incident which we’ve had a look at. Most

of these are published or are in reports which were made available to

us, so they are in the public domain. And these are studies of the

population as a whole, both within the area that was contaminated but

also in comparison areas. So as I’ve said on the first bullet point

here, there are several studies, and they’ve investigated a variety of

health problems in the population.

Some of these have been surveys; so e.g. there was a survey shortly

after the incident, which was a self-completion questionnaire survey

of people who lived in the area which was contaminated, compared www.wordwave.co.uk 8

with another group that lived in a different area. And it asked about

what people felt, what sort of symptoms they’d had and also had they

noticed characteristics about the water and so on.

Other studies have used more routine data that’s available, such as

was the treatment or the use of hospitals in the area different? What

were the patterns? Other studies have looked at whether in fact the

deaths of the population in the area show any patterns, say compared

with another area. And there have also been studies that have

looked at cancer and in particular, leukaemia.

Now, as I say, most of these studies have compared a population

defined as living in or exposed, if you like, in some way to the

contaminated water, with some other population. And these have

varied depending on the studies. Sometimes they’ve been an area

close to here but not getting the same water supply. Sometimes

they’ve been wider populations like the whole of Cornwall or even the

whole of England and Wales. So e.g. you might compare the death

rates in this area. Are they the same as you’d expect if you had the

same death rates as say England and Wales as a whole? Now, in

the report, we have described the findings from each of these

published studies. We’ve also done a critique of these studies, which

I’ll come on to in a minute. But just briefly, some of the results.

In the symptom survey, perhaps as you’d expect, people who

experienced the contaminated water self-reported far more -- a much

larger percentage of various symptoms, such as ulcerated mouths,

such as feeling nauseous, such as having gastro-intestinal problems,

compared with a control group. Studies of the hospital treatment

rates have shown that they have gone up slightly over the years for

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the people who live in this area. But then so have the others -- so

have rates in many areas.

Death and cancer rates though, as a whole, have been shown to be

lower in the population defined as living in the contaminated area

compared with other areas. There has been a particular concern

about leukaemias rising from concern about a small cluster of

leukaemias in children. So there have been several studies on

leukaemia. One has shown that generally, if you look at the total

population, the incidence of leukaemia is slightly lower than, say, the

whole of Cornwall or the whole of England and Wales.

A special study that was done of the children found no association

with living in the contaminated area but did show an association with

the children being more infected with certain childhood illnesses in

the period before the leukaemias were developed. And this is not an

unusual finding. Leukaemia is one of these diseases which tends to

cluster and one of the theories about childhood leukaemia is that

there is an infection, if you like, association. And that seems to be

borne out in that particular study.

Now, none of these studies are perfect and in our report we’ve tried to

give a criticism of each of these. I think it’s worth saying though that

none of them are easy to carry out and in particular, a lot of them

have had to follow up people for a very long time. So the people who

have done these studies have had to get data on people for quite a

length of time after the particular incident. They have also had to

collect quite a lot of data, which has maybe not been as complete as

it could have been.

I think it’s worth saying that none of them have good, what I might

call, exposure data. Most of them have not got any data on exactly www.wordwave.co.uk 10

what everybody drank or ate at that particular time or later. They’ve

relied on residence usually and defined living in the contaminated

area by say postcode. So we feel that in many of these studies there

is the potential for people to be misclassified if you like, put in the

wrong group. I think an important consideration is that these studies

have not been able to study the many holiday makers who we know

were in the area at the time of the contamination incident. So that is,

if you like, a big gap in our knowledge. We don’t know, apart from the

few people who came and talked to us said they were on holiday in

the area, we don’t really know what happened to that population of

holiday makers.

The other thing is, I’ve mentioned the data, but these are studies

which tend to use routine data, so they’re not able to gather

information on other potential causes of the diseases. So e.g. they

won’t know if somebody was already ill when the contamination

happened. They won’t know if somebody’s working in a dangerous

job, for example, that has risks.

With all these limitations though, I think, on the whole the population

studies do not show a major increased risk. Having said that, they

are not very subtle studies. They are not able to look at subtle

effects, they’re rather all or none type studies. So obviously, death is

rather an extreme health outcome. They’re not able to look at some

of the less extreme causes of ill health.

I am now going to hand you over to Anita, who’s going to summarise

some of the very helpful information we had from people like

yourselves and others in the area who came to give us evidence.

www.wordwave.co.uk 11

ANITA THOMAS: Thank you very much, Lesley. What I’m going to talk about is the

information that you gave us. And the very first thing that the

subgroup would like to say to you about that is thank you. Because

at no small personal cost to many of yourselves, 54 of you gave us

time in 35 hours of semi-structured interviews to come and relate to

us what it was like at the time in Camelford and how you have felt

since. And that’s been very important to us in a number of respects.

In addition to that, 59 of you wrote in to us, some with a great deal of

very detailed information, which was very helpful.

You spoke to us generally about what it was like to be in Camelford at

the time. And there was some very important information in there for

us about the variability, in terms of where you lived and what sort of

water experience you had at the time. And timing was quite important

there as well as a corroborative set of evidence about what the water

looked like and the time of day, and indeed the day on which you had

these experiences.

The other part of the information that you gave us dealt with health

effects that you reported, and these fell into two groups. They

concerned both adults and children, and they fell into an acute group

and a chronic group.

When we talk about the acute group of reported health effects, what

we mean are those that occurred within the first 14 days or so, and

these were the sort of things referred to by my colleague Lesley

already, in terms of sore mouth, ulceration, nausea, diarrhoea,

sickness and skin irritation. Those we term the acute health effects.

But you also told us about some other things. You told us about

illnesses, some of which you felt were still ongoing at the present

time, and these included complaints about joints, either swelling or www.wordwave.co.uk 12

continuing pain. A set of symptoms which were very similar in terms

of difficulties with memory, difficulties with co-ordination of movement

and difficulties in maintaining mental concentration.

A third group was concerned about different forms of cancer and their

incidence after the incident itself.

And a fourth group was concerned with thyroid disease.

A fifth group was concerned with effects on the nails of the fingers

and toes.

This list is not exhaustive but it covers the main areas of symptoms

which many of you reported to us.

I’d like particularly to mention, in preparation for the next speaker, the

effects that you felt in terms of nerves and brain. Some of the studies

that will be referred to later concern studies of neurological

functioning; how people behaved; how they felt able to make their

brain work when looking at certain sorts of tests.

And we came across four studies in this area; they all had

shortcomings and it was difficult for us to interpret them. So we

asked an expert called Professor Rugg, who used to work in the UK

but now works in America, and he gave us an opinion on all of those

four studies. And his opinion was that it was not easy to link the

effects shown in the studies to the contamination because of

problems which are listed in the report but include things like

ascertaining who had received exactly what in terms of contamination

over what period of time. And that was a difficulty. Nevertheless, his

overall opinion was that there were subtle effects shown in the tests,

and the subgroup have concluded that they wish to recommend

further research in that area.

I’ll now hand over to my colleague Professor Chipman. www.wordwave.co.uk 13

KEVIN CHIPMAN: Thank you very much and good evening. And thank you very much

for coming along this evening.

I’m going to just give some information about the possible toxic

effects of some of the chemicals and I’m also going to say something

about the ways in which we can assess risk of harm. So we’re going

to look at the ways in which we gathered information to assess the

possibility of harm.

And I just wanted to highlight at the beginning that there are two

components to this. First of all we need to know about the hazard,

which is shown here. In other words, what sort of adverse effects

might the chemicals cause? How potent are they? And then we

need to know about the exposure. What was the dose and for how

long were people exposed? And by putting those two together that

helps us then to establish the likelihood of harm.

I’m just going to say something about how we gathered the

information on hazard. Some of this information comes from human

exposures.

So for example with aluminium, there has been exposure through the

use of anti-acid medication and through kidney dialysis, and we have

been looking then for evidence of harm and asking the question, is

there a dose that is safe; that produces no adverse effect?

Some other information, of course, can come from animal studies.

So again we can ask, what organs are affected by the chemicals?

What is the dose that is safe? And we need to focus also on both

short-term and long-term exposure so that we can relate it to the

incident.

www.wordwave.co.uk 14

So let’s now have a look at the potential for adverse effects, and first

of all I’d like just to have a look at the possibility of the immediate

effects of short-term, relatively high exposures that occurred. And we

concluded that the chemicals probably did cause some of those

immediate effects. So in particular, exposures to, for example,

copper, zinc sulphate and perhaps the combinations of these,

probably did contribute to some of the symptoms such as the effects

on the intestine, the stomach and also the ulcers.

What about the possibility of delayed or persistent effects on health?

Well, I’m showing you here just some information that focuses on

aluminium. There’s no doubt that aluminium is hazardous. It can

cause toxicity. In particular, in animal studies, it’s been shown to

affect various organs, including the brain, the liver, kidney, bone and

the developing embryo. So it’s certainly a hazardous chemical, but if

it’s taken in the drink, only small amounts are absorbed from the

intestine and get to the organs, and we clear it from the body very

quickly. And it’s been estimated that the maximum safe dose for

long-term intake of this aluminium is actually quite close to that sort of

dose that one would achieve with the antacids. So the long term

exposure to aluminium was much lower than the safe dose, and

therefore delayed or persistent harm from aluminium is not expected.

What I would say is that in bottle-fed children, certainly in babies, the

dose may well have been higher compared to adults. And therefore

the subgroup considered that the risk, although unlikely, from

aluminium and other metal exposures such as lead, was the greatest

for bottle-fed infants, and that is why we have recommended and

highlighted that as a group for further studies. I’ll come back to this

point later. www.wordwave.co.uk 15

We also, of course, looked at contaminants other than aluminium and

looked, for example, at effects from lead, copper, zinc, etc, and we

considered also the combined effects of these various metals. Again

these metals may well have contributed. They’re expected to have

contributed to the immediate effects, for example, as I mentioned

earlier, on the intestine. But again with these compounds, the

delayed or persistent effects could not be explained.

We gave particular attention to certain types of disorders. In

particular, there’s been concern about cancer, and it’s encouraging

that the toxicology evidence on these chemical contaminants

generally did not give reason for concern about cancers, and that

relates to the information that you heard from my colleague earlier.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the possibility that aluminium

may be associated with Alzheimer’s disease. But more recent

information is now showing that there is not an association. The

evidence does not suggest that aluminium causes Alzheimer’s

disease.

We looked very closely at thyroid effects. There really was no

evidence to suggest that any of the contaminants concerned could

have affected the thyroid.

Having said that, there were gaps in knowledge and we recognised

that there really were needs for further studies, and I’ve listed the

main three studies here that we recommend are needed.

First of all, the effects that you heard earlier, for example, on memory.

So we’re recommending further studies to explore these possibilities.

Child development; very important, especially with those children who

were bottle fed at the time, as I mentioned earlier. And also we heard

a lot of reports about joint problems, which we could not relate to any www.wordwave.co.uk 16

of the chemical exposures, but we recommend that there should be

further studies to try to explain these many reports.

Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Well now, those presentations are brief, and you will

know from your study of the size of this report that they touch on only

a very small amount of what appears between these covers. But we

want those presentations to act as a stimulus to your questions and I

am now throwing this discussion open to you. The members of the

committee - apart from one who cannot be with us today, she is

abroad - are obviously very willing to answer within their own areas of

expertise.

So, now it’s up to you. Sir?

MR GIBBONS: You showed a brief thing about where the water went and he said it

didn’t get to Delabole treatment works until the 7th.

I came home with my son on 6 July at 9.00 pm and it had reached

Tintagel at 9.00 pm or before. We drunk it at 9.00 pm. The first

cupful I drunk burnt all my chest and I thought it was my old hiatus

hernia problem playing up. I said to my wife about the pain that I was

suffering. I carried on. I drunk the cup of coffee down. My son went

to bed. He drunk a cup with me. He didn’t notice anything. I had

another cupful at 10.00 pm and again, burning sensation in the chest.

I couldn’t make it out. I thought, “My old hiatus hernia problem

playing up”. Drunk it the next day; eight and ten cups of coffee a day

for four weeks until I collapsed.

I went to the doctors. I’ll make this brief. I went to the doctors. They

bent my joints and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you; go away”. I www.wordwave.co.uk 17

got worse. I started to shake uncontrollably. I couldn’t co-ordinate

anything. I was dropping things. My doctors took my blood in the

end. I had to complain - seven or eight times going back to the

doctors - how ill I was. They took my blood and sent it away and it

came back off the Richter scale in heavy metals they told me.

Deemed to be a dirty NHS phial they put the blood in. So that shut

the first report on my blood down.

They said, “Wait two weeks, take his blood again and resubmit it”.

They did that and it was still high. That was deemed to be normal by

my local doctors. And the third one; I had dropped and I kept going

back to my doctors because I was so ill. I was in a terrible state. All

my skin had broken out. My chest. And all I got from Dr Jarvis and

Dr Garrod in Tintagel was, “If you keep complaining, Mr Gibbons,

we’ll ask you to leave the surgery”. So I said, “Don’t ask me to leave

the surgery,” I said, “I’m leaving and I’m going back to my doctor in

Camelford I used to be under, Dr Richard Newman”.

So I went back under Dr Richard Newman and he saw how ill I was

and after a short -- three months of being under him, he put me on

Valium to slow me down to pick me up - that was his words.

Then I was sent - I’ll speed through this quickly because there’s loads

of people wanting to talk. I was sent to different doctors. The first

one was a bone biopsy -- a bone scan. They told me, “You’ve got

osteoporosis in the bones”. What I shouldn’t have, a young man of

41; osteoporosis. Another doctor told me I’ve got osteoarthritis.

Then I was sent to Dr Ruth [Fremantle-White(?)], St Lawrence’s

Hospital. She done a controlled test of six people in the infected area

and six people outside. The six people she done in the infected area,

two came out with massive brain damage. I was one and another www.wordwave.co.uk 18

lady was one. She asked for more funding to do more research in the

infected area but the health authority denied her more funding. They

shut her down.

I was sent to London to see another brain specialist and he came out

with the same brain damage, the massive brain damage.

I’ve been haemorrhaging every month for 16½ years, losing, over a

five to seven day period - I’d be going to the toilet and passing blood -

I’ve been losing two and three pints of blood every month for 16½

years. I’ve been for two barium enema examinations and they can’t

find anything wrong there at all. One in the first year of the poisoning,

after drinking high concentrations of aluminium. In 1988 I had a

barium enema and I’ve had one in 2004 and they can’t find any

problem there. So I’m haemorrhaging from inside somewhere.

My nails are all decaying. I have to go to a chiropodist to have my

toenail cut back because it’s all deformed. That’s that.

Now we’ll speed on to the report.

He said the water on the chart -- they didn’t take in the Rock Head

treatment works, what holds the water what feeds the Delabole down

to Port Isaac, down to Tintagel and down to Boscastle. The report

that [(inaudible)] said, “We didn’t look into that”.

My legal team -- I’ve read through this report and they’ve got a

biochemist to read the report, on page 42, on 7 July, the next day

after the poisoning and they said, “Report shows no contamination

from the water whatsoever”. It’s 0, 0, 0 -- the highest one there,

Boscastle service reservoir was 1.09 and it goes on, 8 July, 9 July, 10

July. These are manufactured reports by the ex-Tory government

who’s in charge of the water supply at the time. These have been

manufactured, these reports. They’re all 0. 1.68 was the highest www.wordwave.co.uk 19

there; 1.32. The EC limit’s 200 ppm. And it goes on all through --

conveniently this -- they fed the leading doctors and professors who’s

looked into this report -- they’ve fed them wrong data on where the

aluminium came out.

Someone has manufactured these reports because they’re all 0, 0, 0,

0. There’s no peaks. There’s no troughs. They’re all 0s. 0, 0, 0, 0,

0. This is right -- part of August -- 4 August. Where did the

aluminium go? Twenty tons? Twenty thousand litres? And it got to

my place at 9.00 pm. And he’s saying it didn’t -- the troughs didn’t get

to other areas, like Tintagel, Boscastle and Rock, till 7 July. Well, it’s

a lie. And it rushed -- it rushed straight through to the system,

through Camelford, straight up to the header tanks at Rock Head. It

was stored there and it poisoned all the area.

There’s builders in Tintagel building new houses and they was using

concrete mixers and mix up the concrete. They laid the floors down

and went away and come back the next day and the concrete hadn’t

gone off. And they couldn’t make it out.

CHAIRMAN: [(several inaudible words)] some more questions now, please.

MR GIBBONS: It’s all right. Let me just finish on one report. Let me just finish on one

report. I’ve got to read one report, that’s all.

FEMALE SPEAKER: [(several inaudible words)]

MR GIBBONS: I’ve got to -- this is important.

CHAIRMAN: The point that is actually important -- www.wordwave.co.uk 20

MR GIBBONS: So, we’re saying that they’re all 0, 0, 0, right? This has come through

from the Pennon Group, who owns South West Water now. I’ve got

to put my glasses on to read this.

Date and time,

“11 July 1994. Mr Gibbons, Harlyn, Castle View, Tintagel, retained sample. Aluminium [this is after one pollution after another we had at our house] -- Aluminium, 450. Aluminium, 720. Aluminium, 260. Aluminium, 26. Iron, rusty iron, 16,700; 30,800; 11,400. Magnesium 1300 -- manganese, I mean, 1300 -- 3900, 1260. Sulphate 22, 24, 24. [this is in 1994] Zinc 340, 10,070, 280”

This is from South West Water. The Pennon Group, who took over a

decaying water main, they’ve had to replace half of it in plastic piping

now and gouge all the pipes out and line all the pipes to stop this

problem. But this was still going on in 1994. People were being

poisoned in 1994. We’ve got results here for aluminium -- I mean it

doesn’t show in the report here. Who’s misled all these leading

doctors and professors with these false reports? 0, 0, 0. Twenty tons

of aluminium goes in the system and it gives us peaks and troughs

there and we’ve drunk this stuff. I drunk it -- about eight and ten cups

of coffee for four weeks until I collapsed.

And I was sent to a kidney specialist and he said to me, “You’ve got a

sort of kidney damage, Mr Gibbons. You’ve got to come off all your

tablets. If you don’t, your kidneys won’t heal up”. When I saw the

cover-up here, I went to that same doctor in Plymouth and got all my

documentation from his secretary, come home and read it. Nothing

about kidney damage. So I phoned up to Dr Hutton at Plymouth

Hospital and spoke to his secretary. I said, “Can I speak to

Dr Hutton, it’s Mr Gibbons”. “Yes,” she said, “He’s right here, I’ll hand

www.wordwave.co.uk 21

the phone over, Mr Gibbons”. There was a pause, she come back

and she said, “I’m sorry”, she said, “He won’t speak to you”. I said, “I

know why he won’t speak to me”, I said, “He’s pulled this kidney

damage report on me”.

That’s the end of the story. I think we’ll say no more.

CHAIRMAN: Mr Gibbons, I’m sure you’ll realise that we cannot, at a public meeting

like this, discuss your medical history and I’m not going to discuss

your medical history with --

MR GIBBONS: [(several inaudible words)] Where did the aluminium go?

CHAIRMAN: We’re not going to discuss your medical history with you. The point --

the point that Mr Grant Brandt was making - and by the way, Mr Grant

is an independent consultant, he is not employed by either South

West Water or those who now own the company - the point which is

actually important that he is making is that if a substantial amount of a

toxicant is put into a reservoir - as happened in this case -

downstream from that reservoir, in a complex pipe network, the time

at which those toxicants reach the mains outside various houses and

in various settlements, villages and towns will not be instantaneous

with the time at which the toxicant was dumped into the reservoir.

That is the main point of this.

MR GIBBONS: [(several inaudible words)]

CHAIRMAN: Well, Mr Gibbons --

www.wordwave.co.uk 22

MR GIBBONS It got to Tintagel by 9.00 pm --

MALE SPEAKER: [(several inaudible words)]

CHAIRMAN: Yes please, sir, if you would.

MALE SPEAKER: I’d like to know something about the -- the contact tank - the baffles in

a contact tank.

First of all, do the baffles reach right from the floor to the ceiling of the

tank?

JAMES POWELL: We asked this question and we were told categorically that the tank --

the baffles went to the floor of the tank and they checked it.

MALE SPEAKER: Do they go to the top of the tank, though?

JAMES POWELL: They go to the top, yes. They’re full depth.

MALE SPEAKER: Because there was a report about the tank being full of sludge up to

the top of the baffles, which would greatly affect the timing of the

distribution of this slug of contaminant.

CHAIRMAN: Yes. Indeed, you’re right, sir. There was such a report and that

report was given to this committee, although when we interrogated

South West Water on this point [laughter] -- I’m sorry, by

“interrogated” I mean asked questions of them. When we asked

questions of them they told us that there was no evidence that there

www.wordwave.co.uk 23

was a big build up of sludge. But my colleague Mr Cross has some

opinions about this.

MALE SPEAKER: If you’d been here, would you have (several inaudible words)?

CHAIRMAN: Pardon.

MALE SPEAKER: If you were one of us, would you believe what South West Water told

you when you asked them the question?

CHAIRMAN: Well, you know very well that I can’t answer that.

MALE SPEAKER: I know, but I can ask it.

CHAIRMAN: Would you let me finish, please?

You know very well that I can’t answer that question. I am not one of

you. I am an independent observer of these matters and my job is to

correlate what information is given to us. That is the information that

was given to us, and at the prompting of my colleague Mr Cross, who

is one of your representatives, we interrogated - and I’m going to use

that word again - them further on this point and they persist in their

view that there was not a substantial build-up of sludge in that tank.

MALE SPEAKER: But nobody checked it, did they?

CHAIRMAN: Well --

JAMES POWELL: They did. www.wordwave.co.uk 24

MALE SPEAKER: Did they? Did somebody go and check it?

MALE SPEAKER: It was four days -- it was in the system for four days before they even

found there was (several inaudible words) --

NIGEL JONES: There appears to be evidence that there may have been sludge up to

the outlet pipe; approximately half to one metre of sludge. It also

brings up the question of what was in the detritus in the tank and also

the detritus in the pipes. Which, I may suggest, must have been

hundreds of tons throughout North Cornwall; which was released in

varying amounts by the acid in the pipes over a period of time,

amongst which the detritus contains the spores of uranium, which it

filters out from the water catchment from the moors. Uranium

remains a large unanswered question.

CHAIRMAN: Well, this question of whether or not somebody checked whether a

sediment existed in the tank is impossible for us to answer. Douglas

Cross went into this in some detail because, as you quite rightly

surmise - I’m trying to read your mind at the moment - whether or not

that tank was partially filled with other material makes a considerable

difference to the sort of calculations that Mr Brandt and his colleagues

did for us, because obviously it would alter the volume into which the

aluminium sulphate was discharged.

Madam.

MALE SPEAKER: May I ask the (several inaudible words) that he is -- that the Water

Board is interrogated and not us. It would be more helpful. www.wordwave.co.uk 25

CHAIRMAN: Well, I -- niceties of English usage (inaudible) but obviously I am not

in a position to use interrogation in its classical sense. I am using

interrogation to mean that the asking of direct questions and we have

asked those direct questions and in this case more than once and

more than one of us.

Madam.

SARAH ALMOND: The gentleman said -- I’m trying to speak to that gentleman there,

please. You said that it was actually put in there at 5.00 am, yes?

MALE SPEAKER: No, 5.00 in -- about 9 minutes --

JUNE HILLS: On what date?

MALE SPEAKER: On 6 July.

FEMALE SPEAKER: 9.00 pm in the evening on --

MALCOLM BRANDT: Sorry, I think it was about 5.09 pm, or was it 5.03 pm, in the evening

of 6 July.

JUNE HILLS: Of 6 July. No, no, because on the 6 July, on that morning, my

daughter got up to go to school. She was the first one to go into the

bathroom and she said to me -- and that was at 8 o’clock, 7.45 on

6 July, in the morning, and she said to me, she called out to me, she

said, “Mum, do not put any of the water in your mouth, I’ve just

www.wordwave.co.uk 26

cleaned my teeth and it’s burnt my mouth”. So, I’m sorry, that is not

right.

DOUGLAS CROSS: Professor Woods, can I (several inaudible words) answer that?

CHAIRMAN: Yes.

DOUGLAS CROSS: Sorry, I really have to answer what the lady just said there. The

Minister -- the Water Minister at the time, a certain Mr Michael

Howard, declared that there were problems; I quote, “with the liming

devices at Lowermoor treatment works in January 1988”. That was

when he was notified. I also have spoken up before in public and

trotted out what I was told by an ex-South West Water Authority

employee in Port Isaac, but he will not go on record for fear of his

future employment prospects.

And this has also been said before in public, that in actual fact it was

general practice in the treatment works, not just at Lowermoor but all

over the place, for some workers on low wages in order to boost their

salaries to allow certain tanks to run low on certain chemicals,

knowing - as they did expertly - that the alarm bells would ring at

around 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock and that they would get a call out to go

and attend to the low levels in whatever tank it was, thus receiving

double or triple time payments to boost their low salaries. That was

general practice across many treatment plants across the whole of

the South West. And as to regard the detritus, there were South

West Water Authority employees busy clearing out the tanks and

flushing them out. So amongst them there must be a witness who is

holding it back as to what the level of the detritus in the tanks was. www.wordwave.co.uk 27

DOUGLAS CROSS: Can I just add, you know, it’s been said that there is some doubt

about this. I have recently, just in the last few days, found the notes I

made at the time and I was in a meeting with South West Water. I

was a member of the Lowermoor Incident Liaison Group.

We were told by a South West Water employee that he had been in

the tank and he had said that the sludge at the bottom was a metre

deep. Now I couldn’t understand that until these gentlemen’s models

actually showed me very recently precisely what happened.

The high level outlet is a metre above the bed of the tank, and what

the gentleman was telling us was that the sludge was up to that

outlet. And that came from South West Water Authority, not South

West Water plc.

CHAIRMAN: In terms of the time of delivery, if you look on page 32 of the report at

paragraph 3.6, the information given to this committee was that on

the afternoon of Wednesday 6 July 1988 the discharge started into

the chlorine contact tank at 5.03 pm and finished at 5.40 pm on that

day. Now, do you have any -- you say that that is wrong, Madam?

JUNE HILLS: That is wrong, yes.

CHAIRMAN: Where is the information then that you have in your possession that

proves that that is wrong?

JUNE HILLS: How can I have the information that proves it? I rang South West

Water that same morning on the same day and told them -- now this

was before the lunchtime, so I rang and I asked. I said that there was www.wordwave.co.uk 28

something wrong with the water and I was told, “Don’t worry, by

lunchtime it will be clear”.

Then I rang again in the afternoon because somebody told me that all

the fish had died. So I rang again and I was told, “Don’t drink it”. But

my daughter, she drank the -- she’d cleaned her teeth at 8 o’clock

that morning and it burnt her mouth.

CHAIRMAN: You see how important this is because if you are correct - and I’m not

doubting you - but if you have --

FEMALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking)

CHAIRMAN: Well, that’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is, if you are

correct and that there is information that proves that the discharge of

the aluminium sulphate into that tank took place at a different time,

that makes a substantial difference to the sort of calculations that Mr

Brandt and his colleagues have done with us. Douglas?

DOUGLAS CROSS: Yes, the Lawrence Report made it clear that in fact on the 6th the

liming pumps had broken down and therefore you would have got

more acid water through. However, it would not have been strong

enough to cause the sort of effect you’re speaking of unless --

JUNE HILLS: (several inaudible words) come out until you told me.

DOUGLAS CROSS: Okay, well, the only thing I can suggest --

FEMALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking) www.wordwave.co.uk 29

DOUGLAS CROSS: -- Is that the authority were rather surprised to find they were very low

in aluminium sulphate and it suggests that the dosing of aluminium

sulphate may have been excessive and then the lime plant broke

down as well on the 6th. We know it broke down on the 6th because

it is admitted. And one of the reasons they didn’t understand what

happened on this particular incident - the main incident - was they’d

already gone in and fixed the pump. So that may have been it.

We still don’t know what happened at the May Rose Farm swimming

pool two weeks before when the same sort of thing happened.

FEMALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking) May Rose Farm.

DOUGLAS CROSS: So they may be -- yeah -- they may be separate incidents. I’m sure,

having lived in the town, I know damn well that there was an awful lot

of these incidents but not as serious as this is.

JUNE HILLS: (overspeaking). I didn’t live in the town.

DOUGLAS CROSS: Yeah.

JUNE HILLS: I lived just outside in Helstone.

CHAIRMAN: But I repeat, this is the consultation period, and if someone has

information in relation to the time of this delivery, we would like to

know about it because the information given to us which is in the

report was on that date between those two different times. Sir.

www.wordwave.co.uk 30

MALE SPEAKER: You mentioned at the beginning health, but there seems to be nothing

in the report about the health of the sufferers. You don’t seem to

have made any recommendations about treatment or advice for the

people who have suffered. Why was that?

CHAIRMAN: No, sir. We were not -- that is not within our brief and we -- if you will

recall, those of you who gave us information in confidence - and I am

not going to identify you, you are not identified in this report and you

will not be identified - we made it clear that we were not there, nor are

we here to give individual medical advice. The value to us of

speaking with just over 120 of you - 50 or 60 we spoke with you face

to face and others very kindly wrote - is that you gave us some very

important initial information. You gave us a footprint, a map if you

like, of a pattern of disease and difficulty which gave us several lines

of investigation and also gave us some very important information.

I’ll give you one example, something which was invaluable to us. I’m

sure you’ve all read years ago soon after this incident that the quality

of the water was such that surely no one will have drunk it. Well, it is

perfectly clear, talking to a substantial number of you, that you did.

Some of you did drink it.

MR GIBBONS: Coffee disguised the taste. (several inaudible words) actually at the

time.

CHAIRMAN: Well, again, sir, I’m not discussing your drinking habits in relation to

coffee, but --

MALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking) www.wordwave.co.uk 31

CHAIRMAN: -- I will accept that a number of you -- yes, a number of you said that

coffee did disguise the taste and others of you were able to drink

what you said was substantial amounts of this water to dilute orange

squash. Madam, and then there are two other people behind you.

BRIDGET PENTECOST: We’re talking about a subject where there isn’t evidence of how

it affects people or how it is absorbed into the body and we keep

being asked why did we drink water that tasted disgusting. I was

very, very affected. I didn’t go on drinking water that was affected.

What I did was absorb it and it shows that in my bone biopsies. Now

whether I absorbed it in the water I was bathing in or in the showers,

those things have to be looked at.

We do not have the medical evidence or the proof of what aluminium,

copper and all the other things that were not looked at in this report,

how that affected what we were doing at the time or there’s nothing to

compare with.

CHAIRMAN: We do refer to a published paper which describes bone biopsies

taken from three individuals and those bone biopsies showed a line of

bone, a layer if you like of bone, which stained positive for aluminium.

And the conclusion reached by the author of the paper was that that

thin layer of aluminium most probably was derived from aluminium

taken in. And you will have heard Professor Chipman, my colleague -

he’s at the other end, not that end - who is our expert toxicologist, say

that indeed, although 98-99% of aluminium taken in by mouth by

humans and other mammals is not absorbed, 1-2% is absorbed.

We’re not saying it isn’t absorbed, a proportion of it is. www.wordwave.co.uk 32

MALE SPEAKER: It is absorbed.

CHAIRMAN: A proportion of it is absorbed, certainly, sir. Madam? The lady in

front of you with the spectacles. That’s it.

SYBIL GRIFFITHS: First of all, I’ll apologise for asking a question that you couldn’t

answer, but now I’m going to ask you a question that I hope you can

answer, that is that we, presumably, are supposed to be able to sort

of take on board the facts in this report and believe what we’re

reading, based on all the evidence that you’ve taken and so on.

Well, these three points that I want to make on that. Firstly, on page

15 it states that the period of contamination with high concentrations

of contaminants was short. And then a bit further down it states - just

about iron samples - that they exceeded the relevant 1984 WHO

guideline value. They rose in the month after the incident and then

remained high until the end of 1990. I don’t personally consider 2½

years a short period of time and my other point on what we can

believe and what we can’t believe is that a very well-established fact

is the name of the local secondary school and on page 127 it has

been written down wrongly six times.

Now, that is fact and if there are other mistakes in the report like the

very basic name of the secondary school, how can we trust anything

that we’re reading in this?

CHAIRMAN: Well, you’re talking about Sir James Smith School? Yes. We are

aware that it is down as Sir John Smith School. We are aware of

other typographical errors. www.wordwave.co.uk 33

I would ask you not to conclude that because typographical errors in

a draft report which is more than 400 pages long occur that casts any

doubt on the probity of the contents of the report, because it doesn’t.

SYBIL GRIFFITHS: (several inaudible words) my point is, how do we know what else in

here is typographical error? I only know that bit is because I know the

name of the school.

CHAIRMAN: Yes, all right. What is in here is the opinion of this committee and it is

based on those facts which we uncovered.

I said at the beginning of this evening that, to our knowledge, there is

no other description of this incident which is as complete as this. Do

you agree with that?

MALE SPEAKER: I do, you --

CHAIRMAN: No, I’m sorry, sir. I’m talking to this lady here. Just for a moment, all

right? I’ll come back to you. Do you agree with that, madam?

BRIDGET PENTECOST: I’m not sure. I mean there’s not enough evidence in the

scientific literature to -- because this poisoning is so unique. So I’m

not really sure that any conclusions can be drawn about long-term or

otherwise, particularly with foetuses -- if --

CHAIRMAN: Well, that is --

SARAH ALMOND: -- a brain in development is damaged, it’s going to cause a long-term

effect because if the brain isn’t developed properly that can only www.wordwave.co.uk 34

cause long-term effects and there’s not enough literature out there to

be able to say that it probably hasn’t caused.

CHAIRMAN: Well, if you will recall, that is exactly one of the points we make, that,

in the recommendations.

SARAH ALMOND: Yeah, (several inaudible words) bottle fed babies, but my six

week-old foetus wasn’t being bottle fed, he was still growing inside

me.

CHAIRMAN: Yes, we said under one year, actually. That we would suggest

monitoring of those who were under one year.

SARAH ALMOND: (overspeaking) actually classify here tonight that you actually mean

from conception onward not from birth onward because there’s a big

difference between -- most people take under one year to mean from

birth, they don’t take it to mean from conception.

CHAIRMAN: Well, I think the point you make is a very good one and there is

reference in this report to one study in relation to -- that has some

implications for development in utero and your point is a very good

one. But again the literature that we have available to us - you may

have different literature - is very deficient in relation to the particular

toxic incident that we’re talking about. But obviously we will bear that

in mind.

That is a very good suggestion of yours and when we come to

discuss this draft again at the end of the consultation period, we will

www.wordwave.co.uk 35

have some discussion of that. We are obviously making a record of

these discussions tonight. Sir?

MALE SPEAKER: Well, two things, quickly is - one that South West Water have told us

three days after the contamination it was safe to drink and that’s the

reason -- Radio Cornwall told us over the television that it was safe to

drink. Secondly, on page 108 you’ve got a nurse that you say has

been looking at hundreds of patients and she’s listed as for 23%

thyroid and 6% joints and muscles. And yet apparently you have

come to the conclusion that there’s nothing wrong with long-term for

thyroid but you’re going to look into the joints and muscles.

I was just wondering how you’ve come to that conclusion because

although I’m not going to give my medical out here, I’m quite

prepared for you to have my medical history.

From the age of 20 I’ve suffered with a certain problem and at the age

of 52 when I drank the water, it’s caused a lot more problems. So --

and also, hopefully, I’ve still got the metre of copper pipe that I took

from my house and I live in Port Isaac which apparently, according to

your experts there, we shouldn’t have had it until about the 9th or

something of July so … Somebody’s --

CHAIRMAN: Mrs McCardle’s(?) --

MALE SPEAKER: That’s it.

CHAIRMAN: -- information which is that to which you refer in paragraphs 547 to

550. Her conclusions were based on 31 individuals, which is a

relatively small number of individuals. Now, can I deal specifically www.wordwave.co.uk 36

with thyroid because this thyroid problem is something that individuals

have brought up with us --

MALE SPEAKER: (inaudible), chairman, 548.

CHAIRMAN: 550. I shall read out to you if you like.

MALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking)

CHAIRMAN: It says, “An interim report written [you wrote this with me] by Mrs

McCardle based on 31 people”. Although she saw 100 people,

unfortunately the paper that was written or the information that was

derived from those 100 people is no longer in existence. To go back

to your question, sir, which is much more important, in terms of the

thyroid problem, the difficulty is that the incidence of thyroid disease

in this country and particularly in this part of the United Kingdom is

very, very high indeed. It’s a very common -- if you look at thyroid

disease in general, the incidence is high and those who advise us in

terms of the design of studies and I’m going to refer you to my

colleague here, advise us that it would be very difficult in such a

population because of the high basic incidence of thyroid disease to

determine an effect on this contamination. Lesley?

LESLEY RUSHTON: Yes, I --

NIGEL EVANS: I’d just like to say I’ve only lived here for 20 years. I’m 67 years old. I

didn’t have the thyroid problem when I was where I was and I didn’t

www.wordwave.co.uk 37

have a thyroid problem until I drank the water, so … And you’re quite

in order to look at my medical history.

LESLEY RUSHTON: Well, there’s two or three points sort of in there. First of all, I suppose

I should have said when I spoke that it’s actually very difficult in any

one individual to say something that happened to you caused

something later on and that’s why you do these big population studies

because you’re looking then, if you like, at an estimation of a risk in a

population, you see whether it’s high or not. You still can’t go back to

the individuals in that population and say …

Quite often with these sort of chemical risks and things like that, it’s

really difficult to be able to say categorically, definitely because you

did that, because you drank that, because you ate that, this caused

that. All you can say is we think this hazard increased your risk. And

that’s not to say that for any individual who gets a disease that it’s not

obviously a major problem for them.

Going to Professor Wood’s discussion of thyroid, this is an area

where naturally there just happened to be a high proportion of thyroid

problems and they’re not necessarily - and I’m not a medic so I’m

going to get this wrong - over or under -- thanks. I am sitting next to a

medic though. Over or under thyroid problems and if you’ve got a

map of Britain you’d find there are other areas.

So, for example, probably you’ve all heard of Derbyshire neck where

people get, you know, this --

MALE SPEAKER: Goitre.

www.wordwave.co.uk 38

LESLEY RUSHTON: Goitre, yes, that’s it. And so there are areas where it’s partly to do

with the geographical and the nature of the geology and how much

natural iodine in.

And it’s interesting what you say about moving to an area because it

has been shown that people who live in areas with -- one area that’s

say one level of iodine and move to another, that then affects their

thyroid. And it’s really very complex and I think we felt that it would

be really difficult to disentangle a one incident, if you like, from all the

other things that are going to affect the incidence of thyroid problems

and I think this is one of the reasons why it wasn’t picked up.

The other reason - and I think perhaps Kevin can perhaps comment

on this - is that when you looked at the toxicity of these chemicals and

the mixture of chemicals, we didn’t find any overwhelming evidence

that any of them particularly affected the thyroid, whereas there were

one or two hints where, you know, joints and so on might be a

problem. That’s not to say there isn’t a problem with it, but we

weren’t able to find the evidence. I don’t know, Kevin?

KEVIN CHIPMAN: I specifically remember this point being raised when we visited last

time and so we really did give special attention to this. We looked to

see if we could find any association between the metal exposures

and thyroid and we really just could not find any association.

NIGEL EVANS: The medical profession was so astounded by what happened to me

that they actually, I understand, wrote up a report for an

endocrinologist because it was such an unusual thing to happen to

anybody that had been treated for one thing in the body to develop

this in the thyroid. And the only thing I can think of, it was six weeks www.wordwave.co.uk 39

after I drank the water that I went for the tests that they had to give

me for something else in my body, that created a problem that I didn’t

work for three years and took a sabbatical on the endocrine system.

That’s the reason why I asked the last time I came. I’ve only ever

been twice. It was for you to ask an endocrinologist on the panel to

look at the thyroid.

The thyroid is the first place in the body to recognise toxic materials

or anything. If you’ve got a sore throat, it’s because the thyroid’s

telling you there’s something wrong and that’s the first barrier -- you

don’t have to be a medical man to know that, sir. Anyway, thank you

very much.

CHAIRMAN: Mr Tyler

MR TYLER: Well, I’ll be as brief as I can. I hope everybody in the hall can agree

on one thing, which is that we should have had this report ten or

fifteen years ago. I think everybody would agree with me that and I

think we should at least give credit to this team in very difficult

circumstances that they may not have got all the answers but they’ve

taken us a step or two towards the answers.

But I want to ask two specific questions about, if you like, the trail

that’s gone cold. The section which relates to correspondence with

Dr Richard Newman makes it clear that had your group, chairman,

been able to see his report, his medical records - and this is

paragraphs 537 to 540 - I think they would have been extremely

helpful to your investigation.

Reference has already been made to the evidence of Mrs Jenny

McCardle, the trained nurse who was then practising in this area, and www.wordwave.co.uk 40

again her evidence of course is very helpful, although it’s a long time

since it was prepared.

What I find quite extraordinary - and I don’t know whether you’re in a

position to comment on this - is that in her case it said the final report

could not be located in the Health Authority file. Now given this was a

very, very high profile contamination of the most basic of all supplies,

the water supply, how can it be that the health authority cannot

provide the most meticulous records for everything that was provided

to them from the medical practitioners at the time?

Dr Richard Newman, sadly not practising in this area any longer and

living abroad, and Mrs McCardle who it said was only able to provide

you with her interim report.

I believe that the trail went cold because, frankly, the health

authorities in Cornwall were totally inadequate to their task, which

should have been to monitor very, very carefully indeed the health of

all ages - babies, unborn babies, right through to elderly people.

And I, as the representative for this area, feel that the community at

large has been let down, not just by the failure to investigate - which

is bad enough - I mean, this work should have been done, as I’ve

already said, 15 years ago, by the total failure of the health authorities

at the time to monitor one of the most serious contaminations that has

ever taken place in this country.

CHAIRMAN: I wonder if I might deal with your second point first, Mr Tyler. I think

that what is written in our report in relation to our wishing to see Mrs

McCardle’s report based on more than 100 individuals, that I think is

a small demonstration of the lengths to which we went in order to try

and dig out the information. www.wordwave.co.uk 41

We had and have no powers of compulsion. We are not that sort of

committee. We are not conducting that sort of investigation. All we

could do was to ask whether or not that report - which would have

been very helpful to us - was available and the answer that we got

was printed and is in the report.

So far as your first point is concerned, we were not able to speak

directly with Dr Newman. As you’ve already said, he does not live

any longer in the United Kingdom, but we were fortunate, through

contacts which Douglas Cross and others arranged, to have some

written contact with him and pose to him in writing those questions

which we directed at the other general practitioners with whom we

were able to meet face to face.

So far as when this work was done, we did the work when we were

asked to do it and we can’t comment.

There is a lady at the back whom I’ve ignored.

FEMALE SPEAKER: You keep mentioning that you only deal with facts. Well, this report of

yours to me is not fact because South West Water did not give you

the facts. Everybody I know who had water tested, the water was run

down the sink for at least 20 minutes before it was tested so that did

not give you a factual report on the analysis of that water. I, myself,

called out South West Water in 1991 for a test on my water because

it was coming out the tap like mud. They came and they turned on

the stop cock in the road and it ran down the road for half an hour and

then they sampled it when the water had turned clear. I’ve also in my

hand got a copy of the report that was in the newspaper at the time

over that incident.

www.wordwave.co.uk 42

So I suggest that your facts are not facts at all. They were just a

mishmash of things that you’ve dug up from I don’t know where, and

I’d like to know why Mr Peter Smith’s facts are not in here as a

homeopath.

CHAIRMAN: Well, madam, the figures that we have in this report are those figures

which were provided for us. If you have other information based on

analysis of water, which I believe you were talking about, which gives

an alternative set of facts, we would, of course, be very pleased to

see it because if that is the case, if what you are suggesting is right

and there are other figures which are different from those which were

provided to us, that alternative information would therefore alter any

conclusions that we have made.

And I ask you again, as I ask the whole of this audience and

everybody else that is involved, if you have additional information,

please let us have it.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, you’ve had the (inaudible) reports of the old South West Water.

You’ve had the report from the (several inaudible words)?

CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR GIBBONS: And you’ve read it. And it’s all 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.

CHAIRMAN: Indeed it is.

www.wordwave.co.uk 43

MR GIBBONS: (overspeaking) hundreds of thousands of times over the EEC limit,

hundreds of thousands of times over. It’s all 0, 0, 0. Are you blind?

Are you blind?

CHAIRMAN: I am somewhat short-sighted, sir, and have to wear these but I’m not

blind yet!

DOUGLAS CROSS: Richard, if you look at the modelling I think you’ll find much of the

answer. Yes, there were occasions when there was bad water

coming through afterwards - sometimes for quite a long time. But the

interesting thing is that all the South West Water’s samples were

taken after that main peak went through. They were too damned late.

That’s why the low readings you get.

MR GIBBONS: What, for a whole dozen?

DOUGLAS CROSS: No, there are --

MALE SPEAKER: (overspeaking)

DOUGLAS CROSS: There are occasions when there was stuff coming through. We all

know. We all got bad water on occasion for a long time.

MR GIBBONS: (several inaudible words). You are telling me all the misery -- they

took all the way through July -- (inaudible) early part of August were

all mis-readings?

DOUGLAS CROSS: No, I -- www.wordwave.co.uk 44

MR GIBBONS: They were all 0, 0, 0?

DOUGLAS CROSS: No, they all say something. It just depends where you start.

MR GIBBONS: I can’t believe this panel has been taken in by --

FRANK WOODS: Before you go, sir, you showed or referred to a report from Pennan(?)

which is the --

MR GIBBONS: Pennon Group, yes.

FRANK WOODS: Yes. Did you provide that for us?

MR GIBBONS: No, I’ve just checked (several inaudible words).

FRANK WOODS: Ah, I see.

MR GIBBONS : (several inaudible words) stuff that has gone missing.

FRANK WOODS: So would you --

MR GIBBONS: I’ll give you a copy.

FRANK WOODS: Excellent, sir, that is what I hoped you’d say.

CHAIRMAN: The gentleman right at the back.

www.wordwave.co.uk 45

MALE SPEAKER: You’ll have to forgive my ignorance because I’ve only come to this

really in the past 6 to 12 months because of the condition of my

stepson who has deteriorated in that time, so if I ask questions that

have already been asked in the past 15 years, I apologise. Firstly, to

possibly back up the gentleman over there about the comments about

his thyroid condition, my stepson has an under-active thyroid. He

doesn’t produce any growth hormone, he’s the fourth of five children.

When my wife was pregnant with him she was actually down here on

honeymoon between 4 July and 15 July 1988. Her other four

children, the three that were born previous to Matthew, and the child

that was born after, were not affected with any thyroid condition or

any other condition. There’s no history of it in either my wife’s family

or her ex-husband’s family.

The doctors that treat my stepson - one’s based in Yeovil Hospital

which is where I come from, the other is based up at BRI in Bristol

who’s the endocrinology doctor - when they were presented with the

possibility that these contaminants might have affected his growth

and development were fairly certain that, yes that would have

happened.

Obviously, I realise that you haven’t got any details of his medical

history and I’d be more than willing to provide the committee with

those.

I just made a couple of notes, watching the presentations earlier.

While I go through those, would it be possible for the first speaker,

your consultant, to bring up the water flow chart of the contact tank, at

all? If we could have a look at that, please?

CHAIRMAN: Yes, I’m sure you could. Press the buttons and (overspeaking). www.wordwave.co.uk 46

MALE SPEAKER: Whilst we’re waiting for that, the lady who was talking about the

population studies, I noticed that she was talking about hospital

admissions but there were no bullet points from GP referrals. Was

there any reason for that? Has it all been lost or something? I don’t

know.

The chemical effects, the professor - I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your

name, sir - you were speaking about aluminium as a separate issue

to the other contaminants. Would the aluminium have reacted with

those other contaminants to produce any of these effects? From the

small points you made it didn’t sound like any of that came through.

As for the contact tank, you’ve got a small water flow chart there.

Your consultant did mention -- he said that -- was it 6% of the

aluminium stayed in that tank for a while and some of it actually

flowed upstream in that tank. I was wondering, how would that be

possible?

From where the aluminium was put in at the bottom left of the

diagram there, through a small knowledge of hydrodynamics that I

have, it would possibly go round the corner of the bottom baffle -- the

bottom left hand corner. Possibly a small amount would flow

upstream past the second baffle, but it certainly wouldn’t get further

than that if that tank was full up. Where the outlet is, Mr Cross has

already mentioned this sludge was virtually up to the level of the

outlet. It would be quite easy for water flow to scour the bottom of

that tank and take all this stuff out. I don’t see how that amount of

aluminium stayed in that tank for so long accordingly to the flow

model.

www.wordwave.co.uk 47

Also, where your consultant said that it would have caught in the

reservoirs -- in Delabole reservoir or whichever one it was.

Obviously, when flow of water gets weak, it tends to drop whatever it

contains and when the flow gets weak, the contaminants or whatever

drop to the bottom of the reservoir as reverse pipes etc, etc. Every

time you get a flow out, it’s going to pick those up and carry them on

a bit further.

Eventually if, obviously, no taps are running, no toilets are being

flushed, no showers are being used, the final place it’s going to drop

all its contaminants is at the weakest part of the flow, which is the end

of consumers’ pipes. Were there any studies done at the time of

contaminants being held in the water flow, held in pipes in

consumer’s houses?

MALE SPEAKER: It was locked into the system for years.

CHAIRMAN: Sir, you’ve asked a lot of questions and we’ll try and answer them.

The first one, you’re talking about backward flow, in effect?

MALE SPEAKER: Yes.

CHAIRMAN: Does it happen?

MALE SPEAKER: I know it happens (overspeaking).

CHAIRMAN: Counter-intuitive?

www.wordwave.co.uk 48

MALE SPEAKER: I am surprised that (several inaudible words) take it. It (several

inaudible words) there for so long, you know, I don’t think (several

inaudible words).

JAMES POWELL: Well, perhaps I’ll answer that because I built that model. The answer

is that the aluminium sulphate is about 30% heavier than water, so it

sinks to the bottom quite rapidly and if you see on the next slide,

here, it’s not that turbulent in this region here. So once it’s sunk to

the bottom, before the fresh water, if you like, the uncontaminated

water, is simply displacing it over the top of it. So it will actually just --

as if you’d emptied a bucket of water on this floor, if it sort of fell out in

every direction on the floor.

And it’s only when it gets stuck to this region here where the water is

very, very turbulent and mixing up a lot, that causes most of the

mixing in the tank.

MALE SPEAKER: What was the (several inaudible words)? Do you know? Just out of

interest.

JAMES POWELL: Yes, the flow through tank is 62 litres per second compared with

about 6 litres a second, I believe or round about that, in terms of the

discharge of aluminium sulphate.

MALE SPEAKER: Because if you -- if you have a high flow -- I mean my knowledge is

confined to rivers, unfortunately, but if you have a high flow through a

channel --

JAMES POWELL: Not, sorry -- www.wordwave.co.uk 49

MALE SPEAKER: If you have a high flow through a channel, not only do you get eddies

at the sides of the flow, but you also have a scouring effect where

there is an eddy if you can imagine, you’ve got the current in the

middle of the water. You have an eddy around the sides of the water

but you also have a scouring effect coming off the bottom of the flow

and that would pick up an amount.

JAMES POWELL: That does happen to a certain extent, but you’ve got to remember

that this is a very high concentration being discharged into here in the

first place and so when you look at -- if you’re looking at what

happens to, say, 90% of the material which -- the aluminium sulphate

which has been put in, the majority of it is sinking to the bottom and

spreading out.

Yes, there is -- certainly, there is a certain amount of mixing occurring

along the front but it’s a relatively small proportion of the total amount

which was discharged into the tank.

MR GILBERT: How many gallons a day was there when it -- coming from the

safety(?) room across the whole of North Cornwall? How may

gallons per day were there coming from the safety, from that

(inaudible) tank?

CHAIRMAN: We do have information on the flow rate, Mr Gilbert.

JAMES POWELL: Can we give it to you afterwards?

www.wordwave.co.uk 50

CHAIRMAN: Yes, while he’s looking it up, Mr Gilbert, I want my colleague to

answer another question about the studies.

LESLEY RUSHTON: Yes, you were basically saying why hasn’t there been a study using

general practice records? Okay, I was -- first of all, general practice

records have been used in two of the studies, specific ones. One of

them was the study of pregnancy outcomes where they did look at

some of the records of GPs to get some of the information about

mothers’ obstetric history, then the other study that used general

practice records was the study that looked at infections for leukaemia.

For the leukaemia study and the infection data was an infection in

which the child was seen at the GP. So it wasn’t, you know, an

infection which never got to the GP, it used GP records.

I think a general point -- you’re quite right, there’s never been a whole

population study looking at reports and consultations with general

practitioners. I don’t know why but I can guess why, and the clue

comes from that study of the leukaemias, where if you read the

paper, it’s an ethical approval, sort of a data protection type issue,

and some of the GPs were unhappy about giving anonymised data

even, without the consent, the specific consent of the patients

concerned.

And as a result, that study has a major flaw in that in some of the

information from the GP they’re actually missing lots of information

because a lot of patients didn’t respond or refused.

So I guess that you’re going to have two problems if you try and do a

study of general practitioner records. One is this ethical data consent

problem and the second is a logistical problem.

www.wordwave.co.uk 51

At -- particularly at the time when this took place - and the records

that you want to look at are in 1988 and around about that - most of

the GPs would not have had computerised records. They will be

probably paper records, so you would have to go through all the

paper records of the patients and I guess that it’s a partly practical,

partly ethical, partly cost that nobody’s done a study, but there

certainly aren’t any, you know, in the public domain, nobody’s done a

big population study. You’re quite right.

CHAIRMAN: Your next question point, sir, which related to Professor Chipman,

and that was in effect whether there was any evidence of combination

toxicity, whereas a single toxicant may not have an effect, what -- two

or more might. Kevin, would you like to say something about that?

KEVIN CHIPMAN: Yes, you’re quite right. I mentioned it only very briefly. We certainly

did look at other metals, other exposures in addition to aluminium and

I did refer to some of those, particularly having the early effects on,

for example, the ulceration.

We also -- in the document you’ll find there is a section where we

looked at potential additive or synergistic effects between metals and

the main effect that we came across really was interactive effects on

inhibition of absorption from one metal to another - transport. That

was the main effect that we were able to isolate.

MALE SPEAKER: Do you think the aluminium would have reacted with the copper as

ions etc already in the pipes? This is basically what I was getting at.

www.wordwave.co.uk 52

KEVIN CHIPMAN: We didn’t find any evidence of biological interaction. I don’t know if

anyone wants to comment on a potential chemical interaction in the

pipes?

CHAIRMAN: Douglas?

DOUGLAS CROSS: I don’t think there is any chemical interaction, the problem is that we

just don’t know.

MALE SPEAKER: Have you looked into deaths of the original sufferers (several

inaudible words) aluminium?

CHAIRMAN: We have already mentioned, in fact Dr Rushton mentioned the

mortality study which is in fact --

MALE SPEAKER: No, but I’m saying, have you looked into the actual original sufferers

who went forward and tried to get a court case to High Court and was

denied? And there’s Mr and Mrs Scudder --

CHAIRMAN: Well, sir, I --

MALE SPEAKER: -- very (overspeaking).

CHAIRMAN: I’ve said it before, sir, I cannot discuss in an --

MALE SPEAKER: We will discuss it. They’re dead now.

CHAIRMAN: Sir, I cannot discuss. I cannot discuss in an open forum -- www.wordwave.co.uk 53

MALE SPEAKER: No --

CHAIRMAN: -- the health of anybody, either alive or dead.

MR GIBBONS: Why not? These are the sufferers that were (several inaudible words)

CHAIRMAN: You --

MR GIBBONS: -- these are the sufferers that have come from (inaudible), they’ve

died. They’ve -- (several inaudible words)

CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MALE SPEAKER: -- were diagnosed by doctors (several inaudible words) in (inaudible)

surgery --

CHAIRMAN: Mr Gibbons.

MR GIBBONS: (several inaudible words) and go to bed. (several inaudible words)

back to Delabole and (inaudible) was stone dead outside his gate.

CHAIRMAN: Mr Gibbons, I’m going to say this once more to you, I cannot and

neither can my colleagues in a public forum like this discuss the

health of any individual, either alive or dead, and that’s where it

stands until finally, sir, to deal with your question, we cannot discuss

the health of your stepson for the reason that I have just given. All I

will say to you is that there are certain threads that go through certain www.wordwave.co.uk 54

sorts of medical history, particularly in relation to autoimmunity and

disease which we will take note of, sir. And my colleague, Professor

Strobel, who is a paediatrician with a special interest in autoimmune

disorders is going to follow this up as part of our consultation.

This lady here.

CAROLE WYATT: Okay, thank you. Yes, it’s Carole Wyatt from St Minver . Now, I’ve

got two points to put to the panel. First of all, if I go on to -- it seems -

- it’s strange to be -- many of us who are -- who actually lost nails,

yeah? That your expert dismissed -- it -- it’s. Oh, I can’t say it.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s so airy.

CAROLE WYATT: Airy. It -- isn’t loss of nails a sign of metal poisoning? Now, I’ll give

you a little story. You may not have time, but I want you to hear it.

Now in 1994, the year of 1994, I was sent to London to see various

different doctors in different hospitals, to see South West Water’s

doctors. And I was asked to go to St Thomas’s Hospital, to go to the

dermatologist’s clinic or department. So we went there looking at the

nails. Anyway, this -- on this occasion I had a nail hanging off. So he

asked permission if he could remove the nail and if he could put it

under a microscope to test it to see if it was fungal.

So we waited and he came back and he had a look on his face and

he said, “Well, it’s not fungal”. I can’t remember the rest of what he

did say but it wasn’t fungal; but that was to prove the point that it

wasn’t fungus, nails were falling off. Okay?

Now, the second point I want to bring in. Now, I’ve read your report

and I’ve seen the list of doctors who’ve come forward which, to my www.wordwave.co.uk 55

surprise -- well, it isn’t my surprise that none of Rock, Camel Estuary

practice down at Rock, none of them have come forward to give their

evidence on sufferers, the local people. Now I know for a fact I went

there on several occasions, especially in the beginning in the July and

this one particular doctor ordered me out.

He shouted at me and he banged on his table and he told me to go

home and stop talking about the water. So after that, every time you

went, you wasn’t allowed to talk about the water. Of course, I just

had to say that I thought I was being ill because of the water and he

put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes and said he didn’t want

to know and he didn’t want to talk about it.

So that’s -- you’ve been ridiculed. And ever since then, I’ve had my

medical reports been off the computer totally and also since then, two

years, I’ve had things put on the computer, the medical records, such

as I drink and I smoke. Well, I don’t do any of them. I stopped

smoking 25 years ago, but it said I was a heavy smoker. And on

another occasion it said I stopped 10 years ago. It’s all lies and it

also said I was having a unit of drink once a week.

Well, with my kidney complaint I’ve had -- all the illnesses I’ve had the

only time I drink is on -- once a year on my birthday, once Christmas

and a wedding anniversary. I wouldn’t class that as one unit a week.

That’s all I’ve got to say. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you.

DOUGLAS CROSS: Can I ask a question?

CHAIRMAN: Yes, of course. www.wordwave.co.uk 56

DOUGLAS CROSS: I’d like to ask a question of the audience here. We’ve looked at these

various conditions pretty well in isolation, for example, nails. How

many people -- or maybe you know how many people had more than

one of the conditions, a group of symptoms?

Do we have a syndrome or do we have individual conditions each

person? All of you have mixtures of syndromes? And what would

they be?

CAROLE WYATT: (inaudible) vomiting and diarrhoea.

DOUGLAS CROSS: No, apart from the acute ones, the long-term things, nails falling off.

Do you have other conditions, long-term ones?

FEMALE SPEAKER: Yes, (several inaudible words) of thyroid in certain villages --

FEMALE SPEAKER: Yes.

FEMALE SPEAKER: -- like in my village where seven men died. That has never been

investigated. There’s never been a (inaudible) for us to go in and to

collect and then collate the information. And I notice that in here

there (several inaudible words). His report and everything -- all he

(inaudible) logic to it. We’ve not had access to it. And the other GPs

in the whole area haven’t had them. They’ve got no symptoms and

none of us have ever complained to them at all.

I’d like to ask the panel who interviewed the people (several inaudible

words), did they feel like the people came along and made up these

stories just because they didn’t belong to Dr Newman’s practice? www.wordwave.co.uk 57

Some them had to cross over to Dr Newman’s practice because they

were told to get out of their own doctors (inaudible).

FEMALE SPEAKER: Yes.

SYBIL GRIFFITHS: I am putting this forward because we have never had the money or

the allowance (inaudible). Everything’s been closed off (several

inaudible words) and I would like to ask why didn’t somebody check

up on all the medical evidence and the factual evidence and the

chemical evidence and all the stuff that we can’t get our hands on and

could never get our hands on?

It’s no good saying to somebody, “Go and find that evidence”. We’re

asking the water board to give us evidence and we’ve been (several

inaudible words). We need the money, we need the finances and we

need an honest person - just one honest person up there, out there,

anywhere to come on board with the whole community of people.

Animals are not influenced by the (inaudible). We are not liars, we

just want justice and the truth.

Please listen to us and give us a truthful report. Don’t give us what

you’re giving us here, please, not another. We’ve got (several

inaudible words).

CHAIRMAN: Mr Tyler has already alluded to the matter of information. You will

realise that this committee asked for information and asked for

individuals to come forward. We have no powers, nor do we wish to

have any powers or would wish to have any powers to compel

individuals.

www.wordwave.co.uk 58

The information in this report was given to us at our request and we

have no way of obtaining information from, for example, other general

practitioners. These are the general practitioners who came forward.

In relation to the point you made about nails, you have seen we’ve

quoted from Professor Burton’s report, and that is the only information

that was made available to us in relation to a group of individuals from

this area who were seen by then -- he was then plain Dr Burton --

CAROLE WYATT: The only person -- at that time, when one of the nails was hanging off,

was to go to St Thomas’s Hospital in London and see the

dermatologist whose name was Dr Wright(?) or Mr Wright I don’t

know. I mean, he will tell you and he was for the South West Water

doctors.

CHAIRMAN: Right, sir?

MALE SPEAKER: Just a brief question. You’ve just said in your brief you didn’t actually

have the power to, I mean, you mentioned the word ‘interrogate’

earlier, but I mean we all sort of laughed, but on the basis of this

committee, you didn’t have the power to forcibly elicit information

which has wrecked people’s lives here for 16 years. Would a genuine

public enquiry have had that power?

CHAIRMAN: Well, I am not a lawyer, sir. Nor are there lawyers on this committee,

but I am very well aware that there are people in this hall who wanted

to have a public enquiry and I am very well aware that the whole

matter of a possible public enquiry was, for example, discussed with

your member of parliament, Mr Tyler, who is with us this evening. We www.wordwave.co.uk 59

are not a public enquiry. We know our terms of reference and we

stuck to those terms of reference.

All I would say to you is that, obviously, if there is a public enquiry,

that is much more adversarial than the sort of investigation that we

have carried out. We asked for information and we did discover a

substantial amount of information which we are informed -- a lot of

this information was not available to you until this report was

published. Now, Mr Mazlyn Jones have you had your …?

NIGEL MAZLYN JONES: Thank you very much. I’ll try and be really quick because I

want to let everyone else speak. There is a couple of things that I’m

really quite keen to raise.

One is that there was an easily available mathematical and statistical

analysis that could have been done by the committee which doesn’t

appear -- I can’t find it in the report. It would have been a completely

anonymous procedure, not requiring -- not embarrassing anybody or

causing any anxiety in the public domain and it was simply this - to

look at the schools’ registers of attendance.

I’m speaking basically on behalf of my own two kids, one of whom

has top of the field dyslexia and is struggling to repeat his first year at

university in Bristol at the moment. But my daughter reminded me

that when they were children they were inordinately away from

school, as were many children, and it occurred to me there never has

been done a simple, very simple analysis of the school registers.

Now I did have a word with a retired teacher just the other day about

this and she said, “You’re joking. An awful lot of people would have

slung their files out”. But I put it to you, could that be put in train?

www.wordwave.co.uk 60

The other thing I’d like to mention is that there was a lot of talk

about -- I mean for instance Mr Tyler mentioned the local health

authority, and I’ve criticised them in the past, but I note that Dr Miles

is here this evening with us and maybe he’d like to answer.

Yourselves, as a committee, I have no doubt, having met you a

couple of times briefly, that you all are convinced of your own integrity

and independence, and yet to us here it does look as though there is

the invisible hand at work from 16 years from the very beginning

which sought to minimise this. Now you yourselves have discovered

some facts which you regard as important enough to warrant further

investigation. There are certainly -- we’ve definitely boiled it down

to -- it perhaps wasn’t the whole of North Cornwall but very much was

pockets which we can no longer identify. Now, it was a fact that the

National Poisons Unit were discouraged in the first month from

coming to Cornwall. Now we asked and never got answers as to who

made that recommendation.

Now, we also noted that the local – the doctors seeing all of us, who

were very discouraging, saying, “Oh, there, there, there, it’s not the

water. There are to be no long term health effects”. Now that diktat

came through the conduit, and in a way I feel sorry for slagging off the

local department of health, but by their own admission, it was over 3½

weeks before they even knew that we had problems up here, only 35

miles away. So that does represent a failure of duty on their behalf.

However, their bosses are the Department of Health. And again, this

word, the Department of Health, keeps cropping up because,

although each of you are convinced of your integrity, and I’m sure that

you all feel very independent, it does call into question the fact that

www.wordwave.co.uk 61

the Department of Health actually set up this committee. The

secretariat is appointed by the Department of Health.

The Department of Health -- Dr Waring, who I believe is qualified as a

surgeon, I’m not sure when he got his toxicology qualifications, but he

made that definitive statement which has caused us all to be in these

various meetings, including this one, for 16 years.

Now this has cost the public purse, let alone local anxiety, it has cost

the public purse a fortune. Person after person from Government has

admitted that lessons have been learned. This is an admission that

there were mistakes made. And that if you’re learning lessons, it’s

lessons about mistakes by definition.

So I say that the Department of Health in London has not been held

accountable. They have an awful lot of questions to answer, and Dr

Waring is notable by his complete absence in 16 years from public

availability.

Now the Department of Health in Cornwall has changed into the

North & East Cornwall Primary Healthcare Trust. And when you

came here to issue the draft report, your entire good work for two

years, your entire anonymity of, you know, making everything very

safe and confidential, you were usurped 48 hours before you arrived

to issue your report by the Department of Health, who are very fond

of calling you, not an investigative committee, but they are very fond

of quoting in public press that you are an inquiry. All the way through

I can pick up grammatically over the last 16 years an awful lot of spin,

and it’s taken us a while to realise where this is coming from.

The Department of Health recently call you an inquiry, thus giving you

powers to call witnesses, giving you power to look into – well you

know you don’t have those powers. There’s a lot of spin coming from www.wordwave.co.uk 62

the Department of Health. They used the North & East Cornwall

Primary Healthcare Trust as a conduit for that press release two

weeks ago.

I have been in touch with them. They realise they were used as a

conduit. They feel somewhat aggrieved about professionally being

used as a conduit to create the wrong impression, because in that

press release again the Department of Health trotted out a well-worn

phrase, “There are to be no long term health effects”.

Now the bottom line is that the doctors, whose bosses are Cornwall

and then the Department of Health in London -- when the patients

went to the doctors, the doctors worked under the diktat that they’ve

got from their bosses, who had got it from their bosses, who had got it

from somebody who was only a surgeon at the time.

So every one of us who has tried to say, “Do you think, doctor, that it

might be involved with the water?” has had the answer, “There, there,

now, there are to be no long term health effects. This has been

shown by people far more specialist than me. So there, there, there,

don’t worry, we’ll look into your problems”. But I say accountability

lies with the Department of Health. They have used people. They

have sought to minimise the events. They have used spin, and if they

think they’re going to get away with it by reducing the third remit,

which Michael Meacher promised to Mr Tyler here, which Mr Tyler

then promised to his constituents. And then it became the furore of

where is this third remit. I’ll tell you what the third remit was. That

was to look into the handling of the affair at the time.

Now, if they had looked into the handling of the affair at the time, I put

it to everyone else that the people who would have come up rather

badly in this would have been the Department of Health. So I say, www.wordwave.co.uk 63

Department of Health, come down out of your ivory tower, get

modern, get accountable, try using the word Sorry. We all make

mistakes. We own up to them. We’ve got the law on our backs to

make us own up to our mistakes. We are seeking to get truth,

accountability and transparency from what I suggest is a hidden

bunch of people in ivory towers. This inadvertently puts at question

your no doubt honestly felt independence. You are not viewed as

being fully independent. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN: What you are referring to is the, like the handling of this incident

initially, and can I just deal with the initial part first? In fact the third

term of reference read like this: “To examine the adequacy and

transparency of the process by which this incident and incidents of

this kind are investigated, with particular reference to the inclusion of

those most directly involved in the incident”. That is the exact

wording.

Now, you know that that is not one of our terms of reference.

NIGEL MAZLYN JONES: (several inaudible words)

CHAIRMAN: You know that that was not one of our terms of reference, and you

also know that if that was to be the subject of an investigation or an

inquiry as you call it, of the sort that we have carried out, the people

sitting at this table are not qualified to carry that out. And we have

stuck to those terms of reference that we were given. And this –

MAZLYNJONES: (several inaudible words)

www.wordwave.co.uk 64

CHAIRMAN: And – thank you – and this report only deals with those two terms of

reference. And, we can’t comment, nor will we comment, on matters

that are outside our terms of reference.

NIGEL MAZLYN JONES: (several inaudible words)

CHAIRMAN: Yes, you raise an interesting point. We have not made any inquiry as

to whether or not that information is still available.

NIGEL MAZLYN JONES: Didn’t it occur to you? It’s a terribly simple point.

CHAIRMAN: It is an interesting point. I’m not quite sure, and I’m thinking on my

feet, although I’m sitting, it’s not quite as simple because, of course,

school registers show who is there and who isn’t, and it is not

necessarily the case that if an individual child is not there, that their

absence is due to illness caused by a particular cause. But I will, I

will, Mr Jones, make sure, I will make –

NIGEL MAZLYN JONES: They bring in sick notes. (several inaudible words)

CHAIRMAN: Yes, yes, all right. Well, I will – I will make sure. This is the whole

beauty of this sort of meeting. I will make sure and see if this line of

investigation can be carried out, if the information is available. You

know from this report that a lot of information is no longer available.

It’s been destroyed. And if a study of this sort is possible, we will

obviously consider that as a further recommendation. You have –

you know, you’ve heard it here. That’s what we’ll do. So, gentleman

with the glasses? www.wordwave.co.uk 65

DAN ROGERSON: My question relates to the population studies, and I understand that

there are difficulties in comparing like areas. But I’m the prospective

parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats here in North

Cornwall, and potentially Paul’s successor. And therefore very

familiar with the electoral register and the huge turnover in population

over the last four years since the last general election, which

obviously interests me. But since 1988, there will be a huge turn over

in population.

I can understand - you mentioned Derbyshire neck and things like

that - where people moving into the area will be subject to the same

environmental conditions as those who have moved out of it, and

therefore there could be a constant – something which could be

mentioned over a constant period. However, something like this

incident which happened to a very specific group of people who

happened to be in the area for that week, for those couple of weeks.

Those people, many of them, will have moved on. And therefore how

can the population studies be robust in terms of measuring the people

who were affected?

CHAIRMAN: That’s a very good question. Dr Rushton will deal with it.

LESLEY RUSHTON: Well, I’ll try and – you’ve brought up a lot of very interesting points,

which I didn’t really have time to discuss, but they’re all absolutely

relevant. The population studies that are looking at say death records

or cancer registrations and so on, basically what they’ve done is to

identify from the electoral registers and so on the people who were

www.wordwave.co.uk 66

resident at the time in certain areas. And they’ve defined areas as in

a contaminated area and a comparison area and so on.

Now, there are flaws in that as well. They don’t include the holiday

makers. So all those holiday makers, they do not have data on those

individuals.

But nevertheless they have done – they attempt to define the

population. Now, in this country we are able to, because of our

National Health Service register that we have, that we have to have a

number, etc, we are able to trace the death records and cancer

registrations of those people as they progress over the years. So we

are able to look at the deaths by cause and we are able to compare

them, taking into account that maybe the age and sex sort of

numbers in -- the proportions in each group and the number of males

and females and so on might be different. But we are able to

compare them, say, with the sort of rates you might get in England

and Wales as a whole, or the whole of Cornwall. So you can do that.

But what you – the other major point that you’ve really made, which I

didn’t make too much of, but you’re quite right, is that first of all you

know nothing about the population before the incident in these

studies. You don’t know whether they were ill. You don’t know what

they do as a job. You don’t know whether they smoke. You don’t

know anything about them. All you’ve got is a person and you’ve got

a death record later on.

You have an estimate or some idea that they are exposed, because

you maybe have got the contaminated area defined by an area of

residents.

I think the other major point you’re noting is, though, that many of

these people will have moved out of the area. They will have done all www.wordwave.co.uk 67

sorts of things in the intervening year before they developed the

cancer or whatever. And again you won’t have any information on

those just by looking at the death records or the cancer incidence

records.

To do that, you would have to do a very different study, which would

be to go to people or proxy people. You can’t interview, obviously,

somebody who has died. You could potentially interview people who

have got cancer, but again you have to be careful how you treat

people, obviously, who are ill. But you could make an attempt to get

information about what happened to people, both before and after,

that you think might be relevant to the development of disease.

This is done sometimes in studies where you define some, for

example, some census studies where they – or birth cohorts, where

you follow up a cohort of people for a very long time and you collect

information at intervals.

But unless you do that, you can’t really absolutely say for certainty

that A causes B. All you can do is to say there seems to be an

excess or a deficit or it’s about the same, compared to another

population.

And that is one of the recommendations that we’ve made. We do feel

that there hasn’t been sufficient analysis of this data, for example, by

causes of – the different causes of cancer and the different causes of

death. And there is an opportunity to do this. There is also an

opportunity to do further analysis in the future, when the time has

elapsed. So that is one of our recommendations.

But having said that, the interpretation of the results is, as you have

really noted, difficult. Because you don’t know what happened to the

people who have emigrated or moved to different parts of the country. www.wordwave.co.uk 68

DOUG CROSS: They were supposed to be tagged. People who were exposed were

supposed to be tagged, under the scheme, so that they could monitor

them. What does that – does that involve National Insurance

numbers or what?

LESLEY RUSHTON: No, it’s a wonderful system, if you ever get – it started in – I’m sorry, I

know I’m going to get in trouble with the Chairman here. But, in fact,

they actually literally used to put a flag by the paper record. Now it’s

computerised. But basically, once a person has been identified as

part of a group that you want to study, and you’ve got the appropriate

ethical approval and so on, basically that flag, if you like, stays on

until you die, or you – and if you develop a cancer. And it’s a record

linkage system which has enabled the person who is doing the study

to be given a copy of the death certificate or a copy of the cancer

registration. And so it actually carries on until the whole group,

putting it frankly, dies.

DOUG CROSS: That’s only any use in the place where you’re flagged. I mean if you

move away –

LESLEY RUSHTON: No, no. No, no. No, no. Because it’s a national system and you

don’t change your National Health Service number as you move

around the country. Of course there are difficulties. If you emigrated

to Australia then we wouldn’t be able to follow your record and so on.

But as long as you stayed within the UK, then you would be – you

would pick up the record. It would be national.

www.wordwave.co.uk 69

DOUG CROSS: And this comes from birth, not some later age? You’re actually

identified by a flag at birth?

LESLEY RUSHTON: Well, for this particular study, the people are identified from the area

they lived in and then followed up. Sorry, it was rather a long answer.

DOUG CROSS: Thank you very much for that answer. So the point, just to clarify in

my mind, the groups that you’ve been looking at for your evidence

have been based then upon people who were living here at this time,

and following them, and not upon any – who’s in the geographical

area now, it’s been –

LESLEY RUSHTON: No, no. You’re quite right. That’s correct. Well, the studies that have

been published, in fact, there was a study in the British Medical

Journal.

CHAIRMAN: Can you wait for the microphone, because we are recording all this?

SARAH ALMOND: I started by saying, this might be a silly question, because I might

have just misunderstood what you were saying. But if I personally am

being monitored then as being a resident in this area from the time,

before the time, until now, would I have to have given my permission

for that? Or -- I mean I haven’t knowingly given my permission, to be

frank, so does that mean that I am actually not being monitored on

this national thing?

LESLEY RUSHTON: I’m not the person who is doing the study, so I haven’t got access to

the data at all, of course. I – www.wordwave.co.uk 70

CHAIRMAN: Dr Miles is the man. He will tell you. He’s there. Dr Miles.

DR MILES: All right, yeah, I’m happy to try and answer that, but my colleague,

Pat Owen, is the detailed expert. Maybe between the three we’ll do

it. The Clayton committee, when they came down, recommended

that residents’ records be flagged. And that was in 1990.

Approximately then, anyway. So we didn’t actually manage to

capture, for want of a better word, everybody who was resident in

July 1988. We were about 18 months late in doing that, because it

based on the case and recommendations.

All those people who were resident in the area now have their NHS

number, so to speak, as has been explained, marked in the central

register. And if one of two things happens to those people, either

they die or they develop cancer, then we are advised of that and that

helps to form the research material which is being published. And

that was part of the Clayton recommendation.

The flagging doesn’t do any more than measure those two things.

PAT OWEN: (several inaudible words) permission is given is via section – it’s a

sort of an Act that went through quite recently. That if the studies

were done before – the law sort of changed, and when we did it we

didn’t have to ask everybody’s permission. And there was a – studies

that were ongoing have a thing called a section 60 of an Act and I’ve

forgotten the exact Act. I apologise. And that allows us to carry on

with the study, even though we haven’t asked everyone’s permission.

Because it’s thought that in the good of things that we should carry

on, rather than have to go back and ask everybody’s permission. www.wordwave.co.uk 71

Because, exactly like Dr Rushton was saying, that would actually – it

means that we’d only be looking at a very small number. So the idea

is that we are allowed to look at the whole number, but through this

section 60, and we have to fill that in each year, to show that we’re

doing it in an ethical fashion.

(inaudible off mike comments)

PAT OWEN: No, we don’t – if children are born after the event, no they don’t get

flagged.

(inaudible off mike comments)

PAT OWEN: No, the ones that were born then, but if they didn’t receive – it’s only

to look at the ones that received the water.

(inaudible off mike comments)

SARAH ALMOND: Were foetus – were people -- were foetuses flagged?

CHAIRMAN: Well, given that the – we can go back and check that detail point.

But, given that the flagging took place in 1990, then it’s likely that

those who were in utero at the time formed part of this group. But I

don’t have that detail in my head at this moment, and we’re happy to

supply that point to the committee.

MALE SPEAKER: She’s asking, if she gives you her name and address, would you be

able to check? www.wordwave.co.uk 72

CHAIRMAN: Indeed, yes.

MALE SPEAKER: Are there, apart from cancer and death, are there any circumstances,

say I went to see a specialist over in, particularly Eltham, would he

automatically have access to the fact that I’ve got a tag?

PAT OWEN: No.

MALE SPEAKER: So it’s quite extreme circumstances that a doctor will get that

information?

PAT OWEN: Mm.

(inaudible off mike comments)

MALE SPEAKER: That brings to mind a few questions. First of all is that I understand

it’s not your fault and the fact that you brought in. But that’s – along

with the water testing people have talked about, and (inaudible) very

much after the event, the population (inaudible) already, in a couple

of years, has been significant. And the other thing is many people

here are reporting, not cancer or actually death, but lots of other

symptoms. And of course this – it wouldn’t be (inaudible) only comes

into play when it’s just cancer or –

LESLEY RUSHTON: That’s correct. That’s correct. It is a limited system and it just so

happens that because death records and cancer registrations are

pretty complete and systematically collected, and we all have an NHS www.wordwave.co.uk 73

number, that it’s possible to link them. What is much more difficult, is

to do studies of primary – you know, GP records. And in fact it’s only

in the last few years that most GPs have had computerised records,

and in the next couple of years there’s going to be a major push to

make sure there’s some kind of unified system. But if you look at –

and I’m looking at Anita, because I’m sure she can tell me as she’s a

GP, but there are lots of different systems at the moment, and so on.

And the unification of patient records from primary right through to

hospital, right through to cancer, hasn’t yet been achieved in this

country. And if it were, of course, it would make it a lot easier to see

the whole picture. But we’re not there yet, in the UK, and we certainly

weren’t there in 1988. So any study that has been done has --

(inaudible off mike comments)

FEMALE SPEAKER: Well, that’s not entirely so, because there have been some special

studies. So, for example, there was a survey immediately afterwards,

asking people what they felt and so on. There have been special

studies of children and so on. But they’ve had to be these special

ones. It isn’t – we don’t have the routine – and we certainly didn’t in

1988 have the routine data systems where you could just look them

up.

(inaudible off mike comments)

CHAIRMAN: Yes, well I can’t tell you what a public inquiry would or would not

allow. You would have to ask a lawyer that. As I said, we’re not

lawyers. We – this committee understands completely your

frustration. Because many of the individuals with whom we spoke www.wordwave.co.uk 74

would love to know if there was in place a system which would, firstly,

identify an exposed population, identify a non-exposed population for

comparison, and then over the years until now look at the rate at

which, or the incidence of, or the prevalence of, specific disorders.

You would like to know whether or not, for example, the diagnosis

Alzheimers disease is more common in the exposed/non-exposed

population. That is a question we asked. I’m afraid the information

does not exist which would allow us to draw any conclusions

whatsoever on that. And the same applies to certain other major

diagnosis.

(inaudible off mike comments)

SYBIL GRIFFITHS: Page 105, where Dr Nash is quoted, and you actually say, “There

was no indication among the practice’s patients of cognitive

impairment as a result of the incident”. Now Dr Nash shared the

practice with Dr Newman, and I know amongst Dr Newman’s patients

there were definitely cases of cognitive impairment. I actually

reported at the meeting we had, I think two plus years ago, in the

council offices here. Problems I had with co-ordination, with hand

eye co-ordination and perception. And I have been particularly

interested in the problems that children may have.

I have recently been doing a course, the Reveve(?) method, in

London, which is a technique devised in Israel seven years ago to

help children with dyslexia and learning problems. And it actually is a

series of exercises that is devised to retrain another part of the brain

to take over from the area of the brain that isn’t working correctly or is

impaired. www.wordwave.co.uk 75

Now, I thought -- over the years I have done lots of detoxes and

various things, and I thought that the problems I had back in 1989

were because it was very close to the incident. I was very shocked

last December, December 2004, when we are in the middle of a

weekend course, and we were going over exercises, and I’m going to

demonstrate here. We were asked to actually make large letters in

the air and we had to focus on a pen as we were making the letters.

And the lady who devised the technique herself came up to me and

stopped me. And she said, “Sybil, you’re obviously having terrible

problems concentrating on focusing”. She said, “Your face,” you

know, “you’re really finding it hard”. And I said, “Yes, I am”. And she

stopped me and she said, “You’re not to do this. You’ll have to

actually go with one of the other people involved in the course and let

them take you through it”.

Now, this came as a terrible shock to me, but it actually reinforced

things that I know I still have problems with today. With written

documents, if I have to concentrate, I am exhausted afterwards. And

the fact that I had to focus so hard on that pen was taking so much

more energy than for the normal person. And I’m talking now of,

what, 15 years after this initial thing happened. I am a teacher by

profession. It’s knocked me sideways. And I was actually doing this

course in the hope that you would find problems with the children

here, and learning problems with the adults. And that I could come

back to Cornwall, and I could actually help treat those people.

And I would like to know what you have done to look into this side of

our problems?

www.wordwave.co.uk 76

CHAIRMAN: You will find in the report a discussion of the neuropsychological

investigations that were published by, for example, Dr Altman and

others. And you will also find a recommendation from us, based on

the expert advice that Professor Rugg gave us. Professor Rugg is at

the University of California, at the Irvine Campus, but he was in

London at the time when he advised us. Rugg is an expert in these

matters and believes that however you may criticise the structure of

those investigations, for example, Altman’s investigation, there is

sufficient information in Altman’s results and in the other

neuropsychological investigations, to justify our suggesting, which we

do strongly in this report, that if it is possible to devise a better study

of individuals who were exposed and not exposed, in terms of

neuropsychological aspects of their problems, that that study should

be carried out.

And that is one of our recommendations, and it will remain one of our

recommendations. And you know, madam, we cannot and we will not

discuss your case specifically, and I will have to use generalisations,

but we are well aware, in our discussions with individuals, and also

our consideration of the literature, given also expert outside advice,

that there are a population within the exposed area who do indeed –

did indeed and do indeed suffer from neuropsychological problems.

And we hope that an expert may advise us – be able to advise us on

the ideal structure of a future study.

Our discussions with Altmann, and it’s mentioned in the report,

Altmann told us quite frankly that he was not able to do the ideal

study. We hope that we may be able to see an ideal study done, but

our recommendations will have to be followed through by the relevant

minister. Mr Tyler? www.wordwave.co.uk 77

(inaudible off mike comments)

CHAIRMAN: No, no, no. I’m asking you to ask a question.

MR TYLER: Well, it’s relevant to follow up that particular point. I wonder whether,

at this stage in the evening, you could indicate to us what happens

next. Because one of the major advantages of the inquiry that you

have undertaken, which would not have been of course the case in a

public inquiry, is that you have produced a draft report, and there is

now consultation. And I hope very much that everybody here, who

still has -- I know some people have medical records that may be of

relevance to the inquiry, will make them available. And if anybody

has any other evidence - and some has come up this evening - I hope

it will still be made available. Because this is not the last word. You

have not put on the table a fait accompli and said this is it. And that, I

think, is, if I may use the expression in this context, very healthy. But

what I wanted really to do was to take up your last point about your

recommendations. What is the view of you, Chairman, and your

panel, as to what now will happen to your recommendations? The

particular one that you were referring to just now, about the

neuropsychological effects. I note in particular in paragraph 826 that

in a series of tests at St Lawrence’s Hospital it was reported that 75%

of a group of individuals from the area supplied with the contaminated

water had significant memory deficit of some kind. Now that is a very

high figure, even to a layman like me. And therefore, I entirely

endorse your recommendation. But what I’m worried about is, is this

www.wordwave.co.uk 78

recommendation going to be followed through or is it going to be

forgotten as so many other of these issues have over the years?

CHAIRMAN: Well, to take your first point first, we are just over two weeks into a

consultation. It says in large letters, on the front of this report, "A

Draft for Consultation”. This committee is open to and wishes to

receive any suggestions, discussions, new information, new

interpretations of that evidence that we have discussed in the report.

And this is not the final report. I am going to say that once more.

This is not the final report.

Once the consultation period of 12 weeks is over, this committee will

convene and look at all of the responses. And the final report will be

written, taking into consideration those responses. For example, Mr

Gibbons tonight, although I see he has now left us, referred to some

water analyses that so far as I can see and detect, this committee has

not seen. And if he has those bits of information, that is the sort of

information that this committee wants to see. Because if they are in

fact new and they are different to those which were provided to us by

private individuals, but also by South West Water and their

successors, that will, as I said in the relevant part of this meeting,

alter the sort of information that Mr Bryant and his colleagues have

available to them, in relation to looking at the time course of the

spread of the contamination through the system.

So far as the future of our recommendations are concerned, Mr Tyler

will know that a committee like this can only make recommendations.

It is up to the relevant minister to look at those recommendations and

make the decision as to whether or not they will be followed through.

It must be obvious to all of you that these recommendations mean -- if www.wordwave.co.uk 79

the relevant studies can be properly constructed, it means the

spending of money. But in our opinion, and we feel very strongly -

and I think the strength of our opinion does come out from the

wording - we feel very strongly that these studies should be

conducted if it is possible to construct a proper study in each of those

cases. And we will be pressing as much as we can for those studies

to be done. And indeed, sir, we would – from what the gentleman

behind you was saying, and from what I know, you are retiring, sir,

from your seat. But perhaps the gentleman is going to follow you. If

he does, we would obviously look to him to be a conduit to put

pressure on the relevant…good. Sir?

RAY BOWLER: This is a point that’s not been covered at all this evening. It’s a

question I raised when Michael Meacher came to visit us. And I think

it could be significant, and it cropped up for me around the time of the

leukemia class, and the announcement that we had three children at

the school with leukemia. I had, by chance, subscribed to New

Scientist around that time, and the very first issue I got had an article

about a paper that was being published by a team from Oxford. I’m

not quite sure whether it was the university or some other institute

who were commissioned to do a study in the Camelford area within

the first week, and the timing of this is quite significant, to see what

the effects of the uranium found in the water pipes might have on

people.

Now, uranium has not been mentioned as one of the contaminants in

this. It does exist naturally in our rocks and normally, in very small

quantities, passes through us with no ill effects. However, the

uranium that lay in the sludge in the pipes was stripped out and www.wordwave.co.uk 80

almost certainly in cocktail with the other metals, and was delivered to

people’s taps in an acidic form that may well be absorbed by the

body, and it may well have been a factor in the bones of those

children who have leukemia, albeit small quantities, irradiating their

bone marrow.

Now, I’m only a lay person, but this string of events seems quite

significant to me. I did raise it at the time I got the article with the

headmistress of the school and also with two people who were

researching the leukemia cluster. One of them – I heard of neither of

them ever again, but it’s something that needs to be considered.

What happened to the uranium?

CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Mr Cross?

DOUGLAS CROSS: Well, I’ve got the paper here. It’s mentioned extensively in the report,

but in conjunction with lead. The comment at the end of the abstract

is, “The accumulation of the uranium in such residues” - and they’re

talking about residues in the pipes - “and its potential for acute

mobilisation requires further study”. It hasn’t been done.

RAY BOWLER: But this team came and did a study. They didn’t publish their paper

until after the court case had passed.

DOUGLAS CROSS: This is 1995?

RAY BOWLER: I don’t know. I don’t remember (inaudible off mike) had this article.

But I thought the timing of it was very significant. I also think it’s very

interesting, if this team were commissioned within the first week, and www.wordwave.co.uk 81

yet the area health authority were not officially informed until 3½ or 4

weeks after the event, then who was commissioning this team to do

the study? It must have been of considerable import for people to go

about that.

DOUGLAS CROSS: I don’t know, but one of the important things is the people who were

helping them. One of them was Virginia Murray who is the head of

the Poisons Unit in London.

RAY BOWLER: I did look at that, and I’m not absolutely sure it’s the same study,

but --

CHAIRMAN: Have you got the copy of the New Scientist?

RAY BOWLER: I do have a copy of the New Scientist, but not here.

CHAIRMAN: Could you send it to us?

RAY BOWLER: Yes, sure.

CHAIRMAN: Because, then we would be able to perhaps cross correlate it with our

database, and we’ll look into it.

RAY BOWLER: By sheer chance, it happened to be 1 April, the date on the issue.

CHAIRMAN: We can’t comment on that. Sir?

RAY BOWLER: (several inaudible words) in terms of you said about the need for any

new evidence, particularly medical evidence. I was one of the ones www.wordwave.co.uk 82

fortunate enough to give evidence to the committee. I believe, my

memory may be failing me, but I believe we had a form and we gave

permission for you to look at our personal medical records from our

GP. Was that taken up with any of us or was it a case there wasn’t

time?

LESLEY RUSHTON: We haven’t taken –

CHAIRMAN: The answer is no, sir. We did not do that. Well, just think about it.

We would have a major problem in the design of such a study and the

carrying through of such a study. We did in fact look at that in some

detail, or consider it in committee. We would need to have an

exposed – we would need to have an exposed population and a non-

exposed population. We would again run into the difficulty that it was

estimated that there were 8,000 individuals who were transient

visitors to the area during that time, who we would have been virtually

unable to trace. And we decided that such a study on a small scale -

we had some small scale data - with self-selected individuals -- it’s no

criticism of you. You select yourself if you came forward.

MALE SPEAKER: (inaudible off mike) Number one, I don’t think it would have been too

much trouble to go to the trouble of getting the records of 54 or even

100 of us, but –

CHAIRMAN: I don’t think that would be big enough, sir, that’s the point.

MALE SPEAKER: No, but my ancillary question there is, I accept that statistically 100

means nothing. www.wordwave.co.uk 83

CHAIRMAN: It doesn’t, no.

MALE SPEAKER: I doesn’t mean anything. In other words you’ve wasted a lot of time

and money, doing something that doesn’t mean anything.

CHAIRMAN: We haven’t wasted any time, sir. And I never think I waste money,

particularly in an inquiry like this. Because no such time speaking to

individuals who are concerned is either time wasted or money

wasted. I have said once this evening, I’m going to repeat myself,

that the conversations that we had with people were invaluable to us,

absolutely invaluable. And the whole of this committee agrees that is

the case.

Because if you conduct an investigation of this sort, there is

absolutely no substitute for talking to the people who are involved, not

just relying on what is written about the people who are involved. And

I have already given you the example that the proposition that nobody

could possibly have drunk the water because of the nature of the

contamination and the taste of that water, and that was a proposition,

you only have to look at the contemporary documents to see that in

writing. That was clearly not the case. And that one piece of

information was of vital importance to us, because no investigation of

this sort means anything unless you can make some sort of estimate

of the amount of toxicant that people were exposed to and the length

of time that they were exposed to that particular toxic compound.

And that one clue, amongst others, was very important.

www.wordwave.co.uk 84

MALE SPEAKER: (several inaudible words) I accept that. And I read in the report it was

invaluable. And I think we all appreciate the work you’ve done within

the brief that the committee had. But at the same time, in the report,

to an outsider looking at this now, it almost invalidates all that by

saying it’s such a small number of people it doesn’t really mean

anything.

CHAIRMAN: Well, it does not mean a great deal statistically, sir, but we did not do

it in order to construct a statistical cohort. We did it in order to obtain

an impression, a footprint, an outline map, a skeleton, of what was

going on, and you can only do that by talking to people. We have

some experience of doing this before, sir, in other circumstances.

Now, it’s 10.15 pm. I am prepared to stay here all night if necessary.

But I think perhaps if we can have a few final questions and then I will

make a final plea to you. Sir?

MALE SPEAKER: I have one or two thoughts concerning the aluminium levels. I realise

that aluminium isn’t a very toxic substance by most people’s

recollection, simply because it forms such an insoluble hydroxide. In

this respect the other elements that also form these very, very, non-

soluble precipitates are iron and manganese.

The iron and manganese are treated routinely – have always been

treated routinely in North Cornwall, because they present such a

problem. They turbid waters. And I believe what they add is some

sort of polyphosphate or something that keeps the iron and

manganese in solution, rather than falling out as a precipitate. And

what crossed my mind is that whether maybe the polyphosphate can

also do the same to aluminium? By preventing it from falling out as a www.wordwave.co.uk 85

precipitate, it retains it in solution through and enables you to absorb

it in the gut.

Further to this, following upon the pollution incident, the pipes are in

such a bad state due to corrosion that there was an enormous

amount of iron and manganese problem that was being routinely

treated, presumably by probably very large quantities of

polyphosphate. And I believe the aluminium pollution, although it

wasn’t at such high levels initially, it went on and on and on, at the

same time as polyphosphate being added on and on and on.

So although at the acute time people probably didn’t drink the water

very much when it was very acute, because as you said, it wasn’t

very nice.

But long after the event the water was quite tolerable and it also had

been treated by polyphosphates, and it may well have contained

aluminium that would not precipitate in the stomach, would pass

through.

CHAIRMAN: Well, let’s see if Professor Chipman can comment on that?

KEVIN CHIPMAN: You’re absolutely correct. The form of the salt is very important in

terms of absorption. And what we did, we looked at the extent of

absorption for different types of salts, and in the final assessment we

took the sort of worst-case situation, and the exact value of uptake

that was estimated I don’t recall precisely. It’s in the document. But

we did look at the differences between the solubility of different salts.

And you’re absolutely right, there are differences in that.

Has any study been done on the effect of aluminium and

polyphosphate? You mentioned orange juice as enabling the www.wordwave.co.uk 86

aluminium to pass through a bit better. Well, I would imagine that

polyphosphate, designed as it is to prevent these particular metal

oxides from forming, might be particularly effective in this respect.

Yes, in terms of the orange juice, it’s the citrate that forms that really

does enhance absorption. I think your point is very good. We should

look specifically at the polyphosphate, just to see if there is any

alteration of the absorption. So I think that’s very valuable information

for us to look at.

MALE SPEAKER: At the local primary school, it was recommended to mask the taste of

the water with orange juice (several inaudible words).

KEVIN CHIPMAN: Yes, we’re aware of that. We are aware of that, yes. And we took

that into account.

CHAIRMAN: But we’ll follow up your point about polyphosphates. The gentleman

behind you?

MALE SPEAKER: Yes, I’m surprised that the role of the police hasn’t been mentioned

tonight, because I was interviewed by the police, sort of I’d imagine

around two weeks after the incident.

CHAIRMAN: Yes?

MALE SPEAKER: And they took water samples from me. Unfortunately I gave them all

the samples I had. And apparently they don’t keep records after ten

years. But you would think with the seriousness of the event that

there ought to have been some records kept. www.wordwave.co.uk 87

CHAIRMAN: We were aware, sir, from information we derived from individuals, that

the police did conduct an inquiry and indeed did ask questions about

their health. And they asked a substantial number of people.

Unfortunately, as it says in the report, the results of those

investigations are no longer available because the records are

destroyed, and I can’t remember whether it was 10 or 12 years

afterwards. Frances?

FRANCES POLLITT: That’s the information that the committee had. I have recently heard

that actually South West Water have a copy of all those police

records and we’re trying to get the legal permission to be able to

access those records and have a look at them, so that for the final

report we will have been able to look at those records.

DOUG CROSS: Can I add a rider to that? I have correspondence from the Chief

Constable of Cornwall about a year ago saying that they had made

an investigation into the incident and they found there were no

criminal implications, and therefore they dropped it.

CHAIRMAN: However, we will look at what is in this report if we can get the legal

permission to see it. One final question, please?

BRIDGET PENTECOST: We seem to have experts; Dr Rugg is an expert, and to my

knowledge there’s no experts in what we’re talking about. Because

how can they be experts if they’ve never had the experience? I am

not aware that anybody was poisoned with this amount of aluminium

anywhere before, plus all the other stuff and chemicals and etc that www.wordwave.co.uk 88

was in the water. So I would like to ask where his expertise comes

from in dealing with our case?

CHAIRMAN: Who is this?

BRIDGET PENTECOST: Dr Rugg?

CHAIRMAN: Dr Rugg – Professor Rugg is –

BRIDGET PENTECOST: Professor Rugg, then?

CHAIRMAN: Is Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California at

the Irvine Campus, and before that was a Professor in London.

Professor Rugg is an expert in the design of neuropsychological

studies and their interpretation and indeed, has provided expert

opinion on other reports that have been written. For example, about

the neuropsychological effects of organophospate insecticides. And

Rugg is acknowledged to be a considerable expert so far as the

subtle interpretation of the results of these tests. And as such we are

taking notice of what he says. Because he is the one that

recommends that we recommend that further investigation should be

done of these neuropsychological effects. And we are going to make

that recommendation.

BRIDGET PENTECOST: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN: Well now, you have shown remarkable stamina, and I thank you very

much for your attendance and for your excellent questions. We have www.wordwave.co.uk 89

a list now, our secretary has been writing busily, and we have a list of

matters that we wish to follow up and we will be contacting certain

individuals, for example, we will want your copy of the New Scientist,

if we could, so we can look at that in relation to our database. And

we will be taking notice of what you say.

If after this meeting, either you or anybody that you know of or speak

with, who was involved in this incident, can remember or has

information that you think would be helpful to us, we would like to see

it.

(inaudible off mike comments)

CHAIRMAN: Well, we will. If necessary we can place another advertisement. But

as I said, the next stage is for us to wait until the end of the

consultation period, and then this committee will convene again and

we will discuss in detail all those facts and interpretations that have

been brought to our attention. And that will form the basis of the final

report. We are available. You know how to get in touch with us. If

any of you want further copies of this report, they are available and

we will gladly give you more copies to read. So far the consultation

period has only lasted just over two weeks and there’s a lot of

information in here to consider. Can I thank you very much for your

attendance, and you know where we are. Come and speak with us or

write to us or telephone us, as the case may be. Thank you very

much indeed.

NIGEL JONES: I’m sure that there are many of us who would like to thank you

yourselves for your ongoing deliberations and wish you all the best. www.wordwave.co.uk 90

CHAIRMAN: Thank you.

www.wordwave.co.uk 91