Deadly Water

Suing over poisoned wells

One of the first victims was Jimmy Anderson, then 3, who developed leukemia in 1971 and died in 1981. Within a year after Jimmy's illness began, Michael Zona, 7, succumbed. He lived a block from the Andersons in Woburn, Mass., a tidy community of 36,000 just a dozen miles north of Boston. In 1980 Roland Gamache, 32, was struck by the disease. He lived next door to the Zonas. In all, 19 cases of leukemia, five of them fatal so far, were reported between 1969 and 1983 within six blocks of the Anderson house in what became known as Woburn's "leukemia...

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