A Fight for Racial Justice
In her first meeting with an NRDC attorney, in 2007, Sheila Holt-Orsted was asked if she had any documentation that could be of help in what ultimately became a groundbreaking environmental lawsuit. Luckily, she came prepared. "I had every paper I could muster," recalls Holt-Orsted. "I opened up this suitcase, and he said, 'Wow.'"
After nearly 10 years of legal battles, Holt-Orsted has triumphed in one of the nation's most blatant cases of environmental injustice. For years, she and her family endured grave health threats from toxic chemicals in their drinking water. Now a court has awarded them compensation for the damage they suffered.
The gravity of Holt-Orsted's situation began to dawn on her in 2003, when she returned home to Tennessee for Christmas to learn that her father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Within months, her mother was diagnosed with cervical polyps, and then she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. Holt-Orsted soon discovered that her relatives were among several similarly affected families who lived on Eno Road in a historically black section of rural Dickson County. She also discovered that the well water her family had been drinking for decades was contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) -- a toxic chemical that the federal government lists as a probable human carcinogen and that had seeped into their water from a city landfill adjacent to the family farm. Holt-Orsted eventually learned that other families in Dickson County had been warned about the well water contamination and given access to a municipal water supply -- except those families had been told about the danger 10 years before her own family was switched to a municipal source. The main difference between the two groups? Race.
Her family filed a civil rights suit with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a case that is still pending. But Holt-Orsted also reached out to NRDC. It was clear, explains attorney Michael Wall, who worked on the litigation, that the case had profound implications in the larger fight for environmental justice. In 2007, Holt-Orsted and NRDC filed a second suit to compel the city of Dickson, the county, and several corporate manufacturers to take responsibility for the cleanup and to compensate her family for the damage caused to their health. Now that a legal victory has been secured, NRDC plans to help monitor the cleanup process. "No one in Dickson County -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- should ever experience what happened to the Holt family," Wall says.