Community belief in contaminated water attaches to whoever was responsible for it

Evidence

Mernin’s illness, of course, proved nothing about the cause of the Woburn leukemias. All the same, speculation naturally arose in Woburn—the irony was too striking—that he had gotten the disease from the water he himself had failed to shut off. Mernin entered the hospital for an aggressive round of chemotherapy. That summer, after Mernin’s first hospitalization, Reverend Bruce Young encountered him one morning at the Woburn post office. Reverend Young knew Mernin quite well, having served with him on several city committees. “It’s touched me, too,” Mernin told the preacher. “There were an awful lot of sick kids.” — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 2095

Categorization

• SHARE: The dazed city engineer who insisted Well G was drilled in 1974 when everyone knew it was 1964, then got the same leukemia he’d failed to prevent — a detail only a true litigation or environmental-history obsessive would savor.
• FICTION: A man consumed by the exact catastrophe he waved through — the bureaucratic negligence and literal poisoning of the negligent, is a ready-made novelistic engine.
• XREF: connects to: Proving liability requires tracing contaminants through groundwater to their destination — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 994; A trivial illegal dumping incident triggered discovery of a major water contamination case — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 131; Major polluter inaction gives others moral cover for inaction — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2931 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• A trivial illegal dumping incident triggered discovery of a major water contamination case #expands (1.00) — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 131
• Withholding chemical data from exposed communities weakens their remedies #qualifies (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 161
• Explaining away environmental causes shifts blame onto the victim’s constitution. #qualifies (0.85)
• Major polluter inaction gives others moral cover for inaction #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2931
• People seen as breaking moral boundaries are reframed as symbolic pollution to be purged #qualifies (0.80) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 633
• People delegate action to proxies partly to escape moral responsibility for harm #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 127
• Interference with other beings’ responsibilities constitutes environmental injustice #complicates (0.80) — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 22
• Groundwater contamination was reframed as a conservation problem in the early 1960s #complicates (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 409
• Misrecognition and political exclusion structurally block poor communities’ participation in environmental decisions #complicates (0.75) — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 248
• A community first learned of a proposed incinerator from an outside activist, not officials #complicates (0.75) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 57
• Corporate privatization of water and seeds erodes local communities’ decision-making power #complicates (0.75) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 223