The research at Argonne uncovered what happened to the Ottawa women’s lawsuits after Catherine Donohue won her test case. Many fought on with Grossman’s help after that victory in court – though the small pot of money available meant the payouts were not high; those who did claim were paid only a few hundred dollars each. Charlotte received $300 ($5,000), a negligible sum that made Al Purcell ‘very angry’; it paid for the amputation of her arm and that was about it. Others received nothing; Marie was taken to lunch when she went to Argonne and said, ‘This is the most we’ll probably ever get.’ Some dropped their cases: the Glacinski sisters and Helen Munch were among them. Perhaps they’d joined forces for Catherine, and upon her death the fight went out of them. There was very little money anyway; maybe, in the end, it did not seem worth it. It was the judgment they had fought for, and that they had achieved.
As for the companies, eventually the law caught up with them – though by then the damage had been done. In 1979, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the former USRC site in Orange had unacceptable, environmentally hazardous levels of radioactivity: twenty times higher than was safe. There was widespread contamination – and not just of the site, but in those locations where the company had dumped its radioactive waste as landfill. Almost 750 homes had been built on top of that waste; they too needed decontamination. More than 200 acres of land were affected in Orange, some to a depth of more than 15 feet.
The EPA ordered the corporate successor of USRC to perform the clean-up work, but it declined, except for agreeing to erect a new security fence (even this they did not see through; the EPA was forced to complete it). The courts were not forgiving; in 1991 the New Jersey Supreme Court found USRC ‘forever’ liable for the contamination and declared the firm had had ‘constructive knowledge’ about the dangers at the time it operated there. Residents sued the firm; after seven years, the cases were eventually settled out of court, costing the company some $14.2 million (almost $24 million) in damages. It reportedly cost the government $144 million ($209 million) to clean up radium-contaminated sites across New Jersey and New York.
As for Radium Dial, despite the wartime boom, it went bust in 1943. The building it left behind in the centre of Ottawa, however, had a legacy that lasted far beyond that. A meat-locker company later operated in its basement: its employees died of cancer, while a family who purchased meat there found that ‘every brother got colon cancer within six months of each other’. The building itself was knocked down in 1968. ‘They just hauled it down,’ remembered Peg Looney’s niece Darlene, ‘and used it as fill, everywhere.’ The waste from the building was dumped around town, including alongside a school field. Later studies showed an above-average cancer rate near the factory as well as across town; people found their pet dogs didn’t live to maturity and that the local wildlife developed distressing tumours. ‘I noted,’ said another niece of Peg, ‘that nearly one person in each household of that neighbourhood [where I grew up] had cancer.’ Another resident remarked: ‘There aren’t many families not affected.’
Yet the town officials, in a reprise of their attitude towards Catherine and her friends, did not address the evident problem. When film-maker Carole Langer made a documentary, Radium City, which highlighted the town’s radioactivity, the mayor declared, ‘That lady is trying to destroy us.’ He ordered ‘everybody not to go to [see] it’.
‘Well,’ said Marie’s daughter-in-law Dolores, ‘that was the wrong thing to say. Because it filled up the whole [showing] and they had to have another one.’ The film was shown to a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 500 residents.
‘People were divided,’ recalled Darlene. ‘There were people that didn’t want to hear about it; they didn’t want to believe it. And then there were people who were like, “OK, let’s get this cleaned up.”’
In the end, they did get it cleaned up. The EPA stepped in and funds were found to begin tackling the dangerous legacy of radioactivity that Radium Dial left Ottawa. As in Orange, the damage plunged many feet deep into the earth. It was an operation that would take decades; in 2015, the clean-up was still going on.
The Center for Human Radiobiology (CHR) studied the dial-painters for decades. Its scientists came to learn that radium was a wily, tenacious element. With a half-life of 1,600 years, it had plenty of time to make itself known in those it had infiltrated, inflicting its own, special damage across the decades. As the researchers followed the women through the years, they witnessed what the long-term effects of internal radiation really were.
For the dial-painters who had survived did not escape unscathed – far from it. Some women were stricken early but then endured a half-life for decades; one Waterbury girl was bedridden for fifty years. The older the women were when they dial-painted, and the fewer years they worked, the less likely they were to die in the early stages – so they lived on, but the radium lived with them: a marriage from which there was no divorce.
Many suffered significant bone changes and fractures; most lost all their teeth. There were unusually large numbers who developed bone cancer, leukaemia and anaemia; some were given blood transfusions for years. The radium honeycombed the women’s bones so that, for example, Charlotte Purcell later developed osteoporosis throughout her spine and suffered a partial collapse of her vertebrae. Like Grace Fryer before her, she ultimately wore a back brace.
Marie Rossiter had at least six leg operations – her swollen legs began turning black – and in the end she had her leg amputated. ‘She said,’ remembered Dolores, ‘“Take it off! Right now! I don’t want to go home and think about it.”’
Marie’s remaining leg had a metal bar through it from her knee to her ankle; she became, in her words, ‘crippled up’ – but it still didn’t slow her down. She was the life and soul of the care home she later lived in, whizzing about in her wheelchair.
Having studied these long-term effects of radiation, the CHR scientists – who had, at first, been looking for a magic threshold of radiation exposure, under which no harm was done – ultimately came to agree with Martland, who had warned decades before that ‘the normal radioactivity of the human body should not be increased’.
It is impossible to say how many dial-painters were killed by their work: so many were misdiagnosed or never traced that the records simply do not exist. Sometimes the cancer that former workers suffered later in life was never attributed to the job they did in their teens, though it came as a direct result. And the deaths, too, were only one part of it; how many women were crippled or suffered the unique pain of childlessness as a result of their poisoning is also unknown.