September 17, 1970
Page 32397
IMPACT ON HUMAN BEINGS OF DAY-TO-DAY EXPOSURE TO POLLUTION
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Subcommittee en Air and Water Pollution has long been fearful of the unhealthy impact on human beings of day-to-day exposure to pollution. There is strong evidence that regular exposure to even low levels of pollution aggravates a host of human ailments.
Good Housekeeping magazine for August contains an account of how pollution affects health in a very personal way. The article, written by Charles and Bonnie Remsberg, is entitled "The First Victims."
I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE FIRST VICTIMS
(By Charles and Bonnie Remsberg)
(EDITOR'S NOTE – Every day Americans are bombarded with alarming facts and figures about pollution. In recent months we have learned that: the last traces of clear air anywhere in the United States vanished 7 years ago ... more than 90,000,000 of us today drink water that is unfit ... the DDT concentration in mothers' milk has become so high that it could not be sold commercially ... the incidence of chronic bronchitis and emphysema – two pollution-related diseases – is doubling every 5 years . . the average man, woman, and child in this country throws away more than 5 pounds of refuse every day ... world population is expected to double, with domestic, municipal, and industrial wastes skyrocketing along with it, in less than 30 years.
(Too often it is possible to shrug off the urgency of these facts by viewing them as worries for the distant future. Recently Good Housekeeping sent reporters Charles and Bonnie Remsberg on a cross-country investigation, searching for families who know that pollution is not just a future threat because their lives already have been seriously damaged by it.
(In large towns and small, in all parts of the Nation, the Remsbergs found people whose health, livelihoods, dreams for children, and zest for living are currently being radically altered by the sudden or gradual intrusion of pollution. Here are the stories of just three such families. They are among the first victims of a growing world epidemic, the plague of pollution. The rest of us, scientists say, are or soon will be affected in ways no less alarming.)
I
One night a little more than a year ago, Mrs. Rose Mallon heard choking from the bedroom where her four-year-old twin daughters, Dorothy and Donna, sleep. "I ran in," she recalls, "and found blood all over Dorothy's face. Her hair was matted – the bed, mattress, everything was covered with blood. She was strangling in it."
Frantically, Mrs. Mallon pulled large lumps of blood out of the panicked child's mouth and discovered that fresh and clotted blood was erupting from broken sores on Dorothy's inner cheeks. Eventually the bleeding stopped. But it returned without warning off and on during the summer, remembers Mrs. Mallon, a dark-haired, weary-looking woman. "I started taking Dorothy to bed with me to be sure I'd hear her choking, and we both would wake up covered with blood."
At about the same time, Dorothy's gums and those of her twin swelled until they nearly covered the little girls' teeth. For days they could not eat because of the pain of chewing. Last spring Donna, too, suffered an attack of bleeding cheek sores. Both sisters have been subject to mysterious fevers for more than a year.
"So much has happened to the twins," says Mrs. Mallon, "it's hard to remember they're still so young." Sometimes they can play outdoors for no more than 30 minutes before they slump to the ground, exhausted. Once Dorothy sobbed that her legs hurt too much to walk, and her mother had to carry her into the house. Frequently they have aches in their joints so severe that they cry, and they massage their knuckles and knees like arthritics. At times, too, the children have needed medication for sleep because of intense abdominal pains.
What is wrong with Dorothy and Donna is the air they breathe. With their parents and seven older brothers and sisters they live in a new $25,000 home on a quiet, tree-lined street on the far southeast side of Chicago, the nation's second-most polluted city (New York is first). From their street they can watch traffic whizzing by on an interstate skyway, and plumes of blue, red, white, gray, yellow and black smoke rising from a nearby asphalt batching plant, a smelter, four steel mills, two electric power plants, two public school incinerators, a coke plant, a chemical company and a municipal garbage incinerator.
Night and day, foul odors, dust and chemical poisons, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, iron oxides and dozens more, spew from the traffic and from the smokestacks ringing the Mallon neighborhood – and invisibly enter the lungs and blood streams of the twins, their family and neighbors.
Three years ago, when Chicago policeman Thomas Mallon moved his family to the neighborhood, few laymen were aware of the human dangers of polluted air. As longtime residents of the city's industrialized south side, the Mallons had learned to accept smoke and acrid smells as normal. Months after their move, however, as plant production in the area increased and more smoke-emitting industries started up, pollution began to take on grimmer overtones.
Some of the older Mallon youngsters, who range in age from nine to 16, complained of dizzy spells and developed mild rashes. They sometimes seemed listless and they tired easily. Under certain atmospheric and wind conditions, an intermittent sulfur-like stench– "like a hundred matches being lighted in your face," says Mrs. Mallon – swept through the house and caused members of the family, guests and neighbors to vomit repeatedly. Other odors were so strong that on several occasions the Mallons thought their house was on fire. Neighbors complained of runny noses and nosebleeds, burning eyes, coughing, sleeplessness. Then in May last year. Donna and Dorothy, previously in good health, came down with severe symptoms almost simultaneously.
"They ran a fever of 102 that wouldn't go down no matter what I did," recalls Mrs. Mallon. "They broke out in a rash that left little white scars. The itching almost drove them wild. Their legs, their eyes, their stomachs – everything hurt so bad they just lay around as though they were half dead. At first I thought it was the flu. Then Dorothy's mouth started bleeding."
Since then the twins have been in and out of the hospital, but exhaustive, costly tests and a search of medical literature have disclosed no disease, allergy or congenital condition to explain their recurring symptoms. "All the symptoms suggest that the twins are reacting to a variety of chemical 'insults' to their systems," says an expert on environmental health. But, he explains. present knowledge and technology are insufficient to determine precisely which pollutants are affecting the children – and how. "We haven't the vaguest notion of what all they – or any of us – are breathing," he told us. "Science comes up with 500 to 700 new chemicals a year, and many of these end up polluting the air. They mix entirely new compounds. Nobody knows how the vast majority affect us or how they interact in our bodies. For the most part we don't even have tests that can detect their presence in our systems."
"We know," says the twins' doctor, "that when the girls are away from their neighborhood, wherever the air is better, their symptoms disappear without medication. And we know that other children in the area suffer many of the same symptoms, although not as severely." Also, studies in Buffalo, N.Y., and other cities show that hospital admissions of youngsters with many of the same ailments – especially respiratory distresses and skin disorders – increase markedly on days of high pollution. In Los Angeles, the air is considered so harmful that some schools keep children in from recess on smoggy days.
"People say we should move," sighs Mrs. Mallon, "but dirty air is everywhere. You can't just leave the problem to somebody else forever. Sooner or later you have to stand and fight."
And so she goes door to door urging people to complain about the polluted air. But she often finds apathy, indifference, hostility. One person tells her, "No smoke, no paychecks." Others say, "You're not going to get clean air, so why bother?"
"People don't want to get involved," she says, "I guess they'd rather breathe this stuff and let it kill them."
With the help of some concerned neighbors and interested outsiders, Mrs. Mallon has managed to bring one polluter in the area to court. But for the most part, she has found the machinery of city government unaggressive in fighting against pollution.
As this is written, the city administration is talking of "waging war" on pollution with "tough" new ordinances, but behind the headline-making statements is a dismal track record. Chicago's pollution-control department is understaffed, underfinanced and politically dominated. Air pollution in the city frequently rises beyond the level Federal authorities consider hazardous to health, but antipollution ordinances are unenforced. Some of the major polluters are operating under long-term special exemptions from "clean air" standards, while their contribution to the city's air contamination continues to mount. When nationally recognized medical authorities announced last November that Chicago's air quality was contributing to a significant increase in the city's death rate, industry-oriented Mayor Richard Daley pooh-poohed the findings as "exaggerated." City councilmen have told complaining constituents that to crack aown hard on polluting industries would be irresponsible.
A regional planning commission report states that, in the Chicago area, as in most U.S. cities, new pollution sources are developing faster than old ones are being brought under control, and a top state expert states that no abatement is likely for at least another 30 years.
Meanwhile, with no medication available to ease her children's plight, Mrs. Mallon keeps the twins indoors as much as possible. Even so, her doctor told us, "It is hard to believe that those kids are going to develop normally." Already, their mother reports, their experiences have "made nervous wrecks of them."
Dorothy and Donna often are afraid to go outside their house because they can see the smokestacks and that makes them cry. "They don't play with dolls," Mrs. Mallon says. "They play 'Pollution.' pretending to write letters to the mayor, or calling up mad to the pollution inspectors or going to court with different papers." Now and then they look outside and ask, "Mommy, why does bad air hurt us?"
Their mother has some questions of her own.
"What right do polluters have to take people's lives into their own hands?" she asks. "God gave us clean air, clean water to drink. What right do these people have to take this all away from us?"
II
The clear lake lapping the backyard of his home was the center of 18-year-old Fred Compton's world that summer of 1965. "Fred and his two brothers were spending half their lives diving, waterskiing, swimming," remembers his slender, soft-spoken mother, Virginia. "We were so happy to have that lake because we didn't have to worry about the boys being out in cars."
When Virginia and the elder Fred Compton, then a junior-high-school history teacher, bought the ranch-style house in Winter Park, Fla., they had expected scenic Lake Spier to be a source of recreation for the whole family. But for their eldest son, Fred, it had become something more. "Fred wanted to be a marine biologist," explains his father. "He loved to hunt for new fish specimens in the lake. He'd follow the fish right down into holes or into the weeds on the bottom."
It was a lovely setting. The rain-washed streets drained, by design, into the lake, which was surrounded by well-fertilized green lawns. Thriving orange groves dotted the nearby landscape, and even the area's septic tanks, made necessary by a population that outgrew the city sewer system, were hidden well below ground.
The last Saturday that August, Fred spent all day snorkeling in the lake, "trying to cram in as much as he could before he left home for college," Mrs. Compton recalls. Saturday and again Sunday after church he complained of a headache, "a blazing band of pain from temple to temple" that grew steadily worse.
On Monday, although he had an injection at the doctor's office, the pain was still so excruciating it made him vomit. The doctor ordered him into the hospital. Massive doses of penicillin, steroids, cortisone and antibiotics did not affect him. His temperature climbed relentlessly. Late Tuesday, the day he was to have left for college, he clutched his mother's hand and gasped. “Mom. I can't see you! I'm blind!" That night, delirious with fever, he lurched from the bed, jerking the intravenous tubes from his arm and smearing blood all over the room. By Wednesday morning, he was in a coma and struggling for every breath. Doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy and inserted a respirator tube into his throat, but his lungs were becoming paralyzed. Saturday morning, at about three o'clock, he died.
"At first the doctors told us it was a virus, then spinal meningitis," says Fred's father. Tests after an autopsy, however, led to a startling discovery. Lodged in the boy's brain, a local pathologist found, were hundreds of strange microscopic, one-celled parasites – live naegleria amoebas. Fred had fallen victim to a rarely diagnosed, incurable disease of the central nervous system: primary amoebic meningo-encephalitis. And, as experts later reconstructed the circumstances, it became apparent that the lake that had been so much of Fred's life had quietly harbored the cause of his death.
A combination of pollutants – seepage from the underground septic tanks, lawn fertilizer, pesticide and fertilizer residue from the orange groves, automobile drippings, leaves and other materials from the street – were being washed by rain into the lake. There they had built up over the years, adding enough nutrient material on which organisms could feed, to dangerously distort the lake's delicately balanced ecology.
This is the deadly chain these nutrients create. They produce abnormal quantities of weeds on the lake bottom. The nutrients themselves, plus decaying organic matter from the weeds, provide food for unusually large armies of certain bacteria which, in turn, arouse the deadly naegleria amoeba from its dormant state and serve as its food. One or more of these amoebas rushed up Fred's nose as he dove among the weeds. It then bore into a nerve and, using the nerve as a passageway, migrated into his brain cavity. There the amoebas multiplied and brought his swift and agonizing death.
Soon after their own loss, the Comptons learned that Fred had not been the first in the area to die under such bizarre circumstances.
In chance encounters with two other sets of parents, they discovered that two boys had died in 1962 from the same disease, one of them after swimming in Lake Spier.
"No public announcement about the disease or any warning about the lakes had been made," Mr. Compton recalls. Yet the pathologist who diagnosed the disease said privately that water samples taken from the area's lakes showed the amoeba to be widespread.
"Fred's mother and I met with city officials and county health-department doctors and pleaded that they ban swimming or at least make some official statement about the potential danger," says Compton. "Nothing happened. I think the city fathers were afraid it would lower property values on the lake fronts, and a town with many lakes that calls itself 'the Venice of America' doesn't want that."
It was 1968 before a detailed news account of the amoeba threat finally made the papers in neighboring Orlando. By then, the deadly parasite had claimed the lives of two more teen-age swimmers.
In Texas and Virginia, in Australia, Czechoslovakia and the British Isles, there have been other deaths from the disease. According to experts, other victims undoubtedly have been mis-diagnosed throughout the U.S. because the amoeba is hard to detect and doctors often are unfamiliar with its symptoms.
"As pollution of waters in all parts of the country by sewage and other nutrients increases, the danger of an epidemic mounts," one scientist told us.
"The proliferation of the amoeba is just one small example of the changes pollution is bringing to our environment," we were told. "Many changes and what they mean to us may not be clear for years yet. But this we know: Pollution does not have to be gross and overwhelming to be serious. When man 'mixes in' with nature, he affects the normal balance of things – and the result is often
tragic."
Not long after Fred's death, "to get away from the lake," the Comptons and their two surviving sons moved to Mount Dora, a little town 25 miles north of Winter Park. Compton opened a real estate office and set about trying to fight the pollution of lakes in that area as a city councilman.
"Back in Winter Park," says Mrs. Compton, "not much has changed."
At this writing, a county pollution-control official says his agency is seeking funds with which to study and correct some of the pollution problems relating to the area's waterways. But meantime, lawns around Lake Spier are still kept green with fertilizer, and streets still drain into the water. An anti-pollution adviser to the Governor told us there is nothing in state law and no legal measures proposed to stop those sources of contamination.
Pending promised new sewer lines, septic tanks still serve the families around Lake Spier and an estimated one-half of the other families in surrounding Orange County.
Weeds that provide additional food for the bacteria still grow in the city's chain of lakes. On some of the lakes, city crews cut off and harvest the tops in a $125,000-a-year "weed control" program. Often new weeds are able to generate from clippings that drop to the bottom. On some of Orange County's lakes, says the pollution officer, weeds are sprayed with chemicals, which cause them to crumple to the bottom where, through decay, they "offer more food for the bacteria, give rise to leeches and other undesirable life and make it difficult for fish to breed."
According to the Governor's adviser, there are 39 separate government agencies in Florida that are supposed to "deal" with the aquatic weed problem, "but there is only fragmented research and development and no coordination. The problem gets bigger by at least 30 percent every year."
County pollution-and-health officials say they conduct no regular testing for the presence of the naegleria amoeba in local waters because they lack the necessary manpower, money, equipment.
On hot summer days, youngsters still ski, swim and dive in Lake Spier, which carries no warning of danger. And in Palm Cemetery, a headstone carved with a fishing rod and a fish marks the grave of young Fred Compton, who had hoped the lake would help him become a marine biologist.
III
"Red" Allen first spotted the oil as he steered his old fishing boat through the gathering darkness toward the Santa Barbara, Calif., harbor. "It was running in big, black tide-rips on the ocean surface." he remembers. "I tried to dodge around them, but as I got closer in, the oil got so thick I couldn't keep out of the stuff."
The harbor, ordinarily a scene of tranquil picture-postcard beauty against a backdrop of gentle mountains, was in uproar. Vainly, workmen were struggling to blockade the entrance against tides of tarry crude oil sweeping in from the sea. Oil-company maintenance boat crews were frantically spreading straw and chemicals on the water in a desperate attempt to absorb or break up the oil.
Birds caught in the goo were washing helplessly against jagged rocks, and many were drowning.
Fishermen, angry at being doused with waves of oil churned by a passing maintenance boat, were trying to hurl sharks onto its decks. The gagging stink of oil hung thick in the ocean air.
When Allen finally dropped anchor in a "lake of oil" inside the harbor and went home, "My boots were filled with oil, my clothes and boat were black, it was even in my hair." He told his wife, Josie, "People can't imagine what kind of tragedy is happening here."
For more than 30 years, Forrest "Red" Allen, a ruddy-faced 51-year-old grandfather, has been gill-net fishing from the same boat his father had used before him, the 38-foot Vincent-K. His main catches come from two seasonal runs of barracuda along the coast and through the scenic Santa Barbara Channel, which stretches 25 miles wide between the shore and a string of islands.
The first of those runs, normally his most lucrative season, was about to begin that evening in February, 1989, when the oil reached Santa Barbara harbor. About a week earlier, a well being drilled in the ocean floor by Union Oil Company from a platform in Federal waters five and a half miles out in the channel had suddenly "blown wild." Thousands of gallons of crude oil had surged out of control to the surface and spread toward shore at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.
Critics of offshore oil operations had warned before the drilling began that undersea technology is not advanced enough to prevent such catastrophes. But officials of the oil company and the U.S. Department of Interior, which leases out the publicly owned drilling sites, had promised that nothing detrimental would happen. By the time the big leak was reported plugged eleven and a half days after it erupted, however, an estimated 2,000,000 gallons of oil had spurted out; oil slicks covered more than 800 square miles of ocean off Santa Barbara; more than 30 miles of beaches were fouled; thousands of birds were dead or dying, and baby sea lions were starving on the channel islands because their mothers' breasts were so caked with oil they could not nurse.
And Red and Josie Allen, along with his fellow fishermen and their families (many of whom were already deeply in debt for costly fishing gear), were abruptly cut off from their livelihoods.
"Spotters," the pilots of small planes who normally locate schools of fish up and down the coast for the commercial fleet, couldn't see through the oil on the surface. When Red took the Vincent-K out in hopes of discovering some fishing place the spotters had missed, he found oil fouling the big kelp beds where the barracuda hide. "Putting a net down in that stuff would ruin it." he explains, "and a net costs $3,000." Anyway, by the time they were brought up through the scum, the fish would have been unsalable. "You just had to sit there with dead birds floating ail around you."
His fellow fishermen fared no better. Lobster men, for example, found their traps on the ocean bottom filled with tarry oil and straw and their buoys soaked beyond salvaging. Trap lines were cut by oil skimmers trying to clean the ocean surface. Crab fishermen found their catch suffocated because the oil covered their gills.
Weeks dragged by and the oil remained on the waters. Red went out time and again, even when the expenses of running the boat began to pinch hard – and always he came back empty handed. Before long, the Allens had exhausted their savings and were forced into debt. "We were so discouraged every time he came back." says Mrs. Alien. "We wondered if it was ever going to be over."
It was not until May, three months after the well blew, that the ocean was clean enough for Red to lay his nets again. By then the barracuda were gone.
Based on previous years' averages, that episode cost Red at least $5,300 – about half a normal year's income. Now, more than a year later, he and other fishermen claim that their incomes are still running below normal, for oil continues to ooze from fissures opened in the ocean floor by drilling. Last December a ruptured pipeline added to the flow when "safety" devices failed to function properly. Allen still sometimes finds kelp beds clogged. At times chemicals used by oil workers to break up oil slicks around the drilling platforms seem to destroy the nighttime luminescence of organisms on the ocean surface, and Allen depends upon this "fire" to guide him to the fish after dark. Yet, as this is written, Allen and his colleagues have been unable to win settlements from the oil company for any of their lost profits.
Several groups of aroused Santa Barbarans and elected officials are trying to prohibit further drilling and pumping in the channel. They are heartened that responsive California authorities have declared a moratorium on all such operations in state waters, which extend three miles out from the shore. But at this writing, lawsuits, proposed legislation, appeals from the state administration and citizens' petitions to government agencies and the President have produced no tangible results to stop pollution originating in Federal waters.
Federal officials have refused to hold public hearings on the matter even though public waters are involved. They would just "stir up the natives," said one bureaucrat. Instead, the Interior Department, under pressure from the politically powerful oil companies, has arbitrarily cleared the way for more drilling and pumping. There are now 13 oil-rig platforms dotting the channel horizon. If all Federal leases off Santa Barbara are exploited fully, there could eventually be more than 4,000 wells sunk there, threatening the channel with an estimated four major oil-drilling blowouts every year, plus countless possible spills from production accidents – a prospect from which the ocean's life might never recover.
As subsequent well leaks, pipeline breaks and tanker accidents in waters off Louisiana, Florida, Massachusetts and Alaska have shown, Santa Barbara is only one coastline area threatened by offshore oil. Worldwide, an estimated 284,000,000 gallons of oil a year empty into the sea.
In Red Allen's world, oil is only one encroaching pollutant. As he travels the coastal waters, he notices kelp beds dying and fish beginning to move in strange, erratic patterns. Some species seem to be disappearing, and the tiny animal life that he used to find in abundance on the ocean bottom seems to be diminishing, too. Recently he caught a grotesquely misshapen sardine, its spawn matted and hard instead of jellylike. Another fisherman showed him a sea bass blinded by deformity. "You can tell there's something in the water that's hurting them." Red says.
Scientists say that these fishermen are beginning to see the long-range by-products of raw, inadequately treated sewage and industrial wastes pouring into the sea from rivers and coastal cities, and of DDT and other pesticides washing down from farmlands and citrus groves. Added are the components of smog that drifts up from cities like Los Angeles and settles into the water.
Red Allen worries that he will be unable to fish if things get worse. He knows, too, that we all depend, for most of our oxygen on the microscopic phytoplankton that live in the ocean. Water pollutants are killing these tiny organisms, some scientists say, and air pollution is shutting out some of the sunlight they need for their vital work. "Fishing used to be more than just a
way to make a living," Allen remembers. "You'd go out and the ocean was like something new, something young. Everything smelled fresh and looked clean. You'd go up the coast and you'd hear big flocks of birds squawking as they fed on bait. It was all alive."
It was men like Red Allen, fishermen toughened by years on the sea, who, on the night the oil poured into Santa Barbara harbor, stood on the wharf and wept.
Significant victories against pollution will be hard won and, unless the mood of those in power changes radically, long in coming. For, despite all the rhetoric and the political exploitation of the issue, there is little indication that the leaders in industry and government – indeed, even average citizens – are yet fully committed to cleaning up the mess they've made and mending their ways in the future.
Much of industry, large and small, still drags its feet on meaningful reforms while mounting expensive propaganda campaigns to convince the public that real progress is being made.
For all of President Nixon's promises to save the environment "now or never," objective analysts warn that his proposals for cleaning our air and water are, so far, too vaguely drawn, too underfinanced and too soft on enforcement to get the massive job done. Columnist Michael Harrington has predicted that, on pollution, Nixon will soon create the same public "credibility gap" that President Johnson suffered concerning the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam.
As for state and local governments "there is very little evidence," says Senator Edmund Muskie, a leader in the anti-pollution fight, that with rare exceptions "they are doing anything" about pollution. At all levels of government, the bureaucrats who are supposed to regulate polluters often are, in fact, controlled by them.
Anti-pollution laws already on the books – and some have been there since the last century – are still largely unenforced and for the most part too toothless to be meaningful. It is a reflection of our national priorities on the subject that a businessman whose company is, through pollution, quite literally helping bring the end of the world is still safer from prosecution and punishment than the ghetto kid who holds up a candy store.
We ordinary citizens aren't changing very fast, either. Most of us would still rather buy phosphate detergents, unreturnable bottles, high-powered lawn fertilizer, extra cars and the latest electrical gadget than to sacrifice their "convenience" and "luxury" – even though increased demand for electricity, for example, usually means more toxic smoke pouring from some power plant; and phosphates, once they wash down our drains, end up causing useful life to die in a river or lake somewhere. We still vote down bond issues to improve antiquated sewer systems. And many of us still choose to ignore the fact that population increase is, in the long run, one of the greatest problems of all. "We have met the enemy," one observer puts it, "and the enemy is us."
Some experts say that America won't make the total social commitment, won't generate the lasting dedication and unremitting pressure that is necessary to stop pollution in time. We shall know very soon.
If present trends continue, some scientists predict that:
By 1980 the pollution problems of some major cities will be unsolvable.
By 1982 or 1988, an air pollution catastrophe will kill thousands in some U.S. city.
By the mid-1980s, if not before, every man, woman and child in the hemisphere will have to wear a breathing helmet to survive outdoors. Most animals and plants will be dead.
By the end of the '80s, the U.S. will begin to experience major ecological breakdowns of
its soil and water. Plagues of new diseases – which humans cannot resist and which our medicines cannot cure – will rage.
By 1990, those of us who are left will be living in doomed cities.
Within a generation, it may be all over for man.
Discussing pollution the other day, our 10-year-old daughter said, "If we don't stop it, it's going to stop us." The first victims have already fallen.