Original subtitles

For many years now, there's been a story I just can't stop thinking about.

And it's not a film script, or a play.

It's something much, much closer to home.

It was about ten years ago now.

I just had a lot of time on my hands, and I just found myself, you know,

scrolling through a few things.

And then stumbled across this story.

of a man who claimed that the people of Wales were being poisoned.

And I thought, what?

The man behind the claims was Douglas Gowan, a farming consultant who spent

almost half a century investigating a potential chemical scandal in Wales.

I get a call from South Wales.

The farmer there has some dead cattle.

I just wanted to know what on earth was going on.

The more I was reading about this story, the more concerned I was getting.

But also I'm thinking, why is there not more about this? I keep coming up

against sort of dead ends.

It just didn't make sense.

So I managed to kind of make contact.

And he said to me, if I wanted to find out the truth, I'd have to get to him

quick because he had weeks to live.

There you go.

Can you tell me what led to starting to find this out?

So I got a camera and interviewed Douglas Gowan for two days.

I sat in front of him and he told me the story of his life and of his battle to

get the truth out there.

And within a very short time afterwards, he was dead and I was left with it.

What he told me made my blood run cold.

They had dumped huge amounts of industrial chemicals all around Wales.

Some of the worst contaminants known to man.

The chemicals are poisonous and may cause cancer. Douglas Gowan's story

involved massive transnational companies.

There was no regulation at the time. They could dump it wherever they wanted

to. Potential cover-ups.

This can affect our water supply, the environment, the food chains at total

risk. We think it causes cancers and certain species are going to be wiped

out. It was so shocking that I thought, it can't be true.

What has definitely happened in animal population is now happening in the human

population.

But the more I dug into it, the more people I found with evidence to support

his claims.

This case is full of Douglas's entire life's work.

They always dumped in the middle of the night when it's things that shouldn't be

dumped.

They were aware of toxicity of this product early, early on.

Now, I'm teaming up with them to find out, was Douglas right?

And if so, who's in danger now?

If he is to be believed, there is something out there in the forest. There

is something in our bodies that can turn against us and tear us apart. But it's

not like it is in a horror film.

It's invisible.

It's a silent killer.

It's buried, isn't it?

But it's going to come back.

I was born in Wales, lived here most of my life.

And I care deeply about it.

My family all grew up in Port Talbot, but there was a period of time where my

dad got a job in Newport.

So I lived in Newport up to the age of five.

In fact, here is... a picture of me as a bonnie baby and what a bobby dazzler

i am there i appear to be holding a box of matches what was wrong with my

parents why is a small child holding a box of matches um but yeah there's my

mum and dad so from 1969 to 1974 you know i was going around doing all the

things that kids in newport were doing i guess

And around the time I was being pushed around Newport in my buggy, Douglas was

here too, working for the Farmers' Union, investigating incidents of

pollution.

67 is the beginning of the story.

I get a call from Grose Find, small village, six miles outside

of Cardiff, and there's a farmer there called Willem.

Gwilym is in tears, takes me out onto a pasture, and there's a

stream running down the side of this pasture, and there's dead crayfish,

dead little sticklebacks, and I see this calf lying on

the grass, three legs, no tail, no genitalia.

piteous look on his face.

It was a life-changing moment.

Douglas believed that the cattle were being poisoned, and he thought he knew

how.

The farm was next door to one of a network of disused quarries, converted

into dumps for commercial waste.

He said industrial chemicals, polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, now

known to be highly toxic carcinogens, had been illegally dumped here and were

getting out.

I wanted to know who was responsible, and I wanted those people to be held

accountable.

That was the beginning of a journey that has come over 50 years.

I just thought, this can't be true. It's too big. It's too scary. The

implications of it are too serious.

Douglas died two months after I met him.

And for the past ten years, his warnings have been eating away at me.

Now, I want to find out, once and for all, if he was right all along.

So I'm heading now into the Grosswein, the site of the Brofisken

quarry next to the farm Douglas came to and that started the whole

journey for Douglas.

He had no idea that what was about to happen to him was going to change in the

course of his life.

Brofisken. It covered a four acre site.

It was A huge hole in the ground.

According to Douglas, thousands of tons of chemical waste were dumped here, on a

site which today is covered by grass and surrounded by houses.

The farmer has now passed away, but Douglas knew another family who lived in

Grosswein, and they've agreed to speak to me.

Hello. Hello. Hello, I'm Michael.

Nice to meet you. I'm Lynette, referred to as the Busybody.

Hello, Lynette, lovely to meet you. Lynette and her family moved here in the

1970s, shortly after the tip was closed.

The dumping that was happening, people in the area, did people talk about it?

Yes, and labour across the road.

He was complaining about respiratory problems and the fact that he'd seen 45

-gallon drums 90 foot up in the air.

Exploding. Exploding. Wow. And various fires over there.

Obviously, there's something very peculiar down in that quarry. But people

didn't know at that point what it was that was in there.

Nobody seemed to know why it was happening.

At the time when you moved here, what was it like in the area? How built up

was it? How different to now was it? This was the only sort of new houses

estate. And this was the only estate there. And at the end of the houses

there was a public footpath and there began the fields and the woods. Yeah.

The quarry's the other side of it there.

And that was the sort of our play area.

You used to go and play around there? Oh yeah, the woods over there, it was a

great play area. It was fantastic.

So at what point did you hear about PCBs?

Douglas told me. And it was Douglas who said to me at one point, Lynette, you

need to get your boys tested.

And did you get, have you been tested? I followed through on it, yeah, at the

time. And the results came through with a note from the GP.

PCBs, 1.7. You're expected to be between 0.4 and 1.2.

Flag is above average. And they made a note, long half-life.

Exposure could have been an environment from some years ago.

Well, that was already 20 years after I was last in the quarry.

Do they make any recommendations?

No. The question of whether they have any carcinogenic effect on you is luck

of the draw, pretty much.

What can you do?

Before I met Douglas, I'd never really heard about PCBs.

PCBs were first known about back in the 1920s.

He told me the PCBs were once considered a scientific marvel.

There's a multitude of uses using the same basic chemical.

Heat resistant, almost indestructible.

And used in everything from lipstick...

to white goods they all have benzene rings with chlorine atoms but because

they take so long to break down now they're most commonly known as the

godfather of forever chemicals britain has finally woken up to the danger of a

chemical called polychlorinated biphenyl the effect of these chemicals may not be

immediate but that doesn't diminish their severity we now know pcbs can

damage cells dna and the immune system with potentially devastating effects.

Even small amounts are known to cause disfiguring skin diseases, retard

children's growth and cause cancer. The Agency for Research on Cancer says it

now has enough evidence to declare PCBs a definite human carcinogen. They get

into our bodies through food, water, air and contact with our skin.

Feeding fish have now sent the toxins through the food chain. And like

smoking, there is no safe level for exposure.

PCBs do not degrade.

I'm going to call it a poison.

But you see, unlike, say, cyanide, which is an instant and dramatic killer,

generally speaking, you don't get a level of dose that's going to cause you

to seize up and die.

If they get into your tissues, they build up.

They were banned in the UK in the 1980s.

But by then, they'd spilled out into the environment.

What worried Douglas most was the safety of the animals and the people living

near areas where PCB waste had been dumped.

I think there's a need for analysis that's going to help actually define the

hotspots of PCB problems in the future.

It was clear Douglas became more and more obsessed by this.

And for me, exploring his story, I've become more and more obsessed by it as

well.

And just the nature of having to kind of investigate it and do your own detective

work means that you get drawn into it more and more.

A little while after I started researching Douglas' story and speaking

about it publicly, I had a phone call from my agent saying, these people have

been in touch and they want to talk to you about a man called Douglas Gowan,

this man called Dan and his wife Lucy.

This case is full of Douglas' entire life's work.

Dan and Lucy are environmental journalists who made a podcast looking

into Douglas' claims.

How did you get all this?

Douglas died.

So this person inherited all of his documents and didn't really want them.

And there was no one else to take it. Right.

There's a lot of it. I'm reading these every day and I still am only just

beginning to understand them.

This wasn't left in any sort of order. It's just a man's evidence and it's

internal official documents.

This was a court transcript that was never made public, a witness statement.

This was never published, a secret government report.

Wow.

I remember thinking, my God, this is huge.

This was an allegation of an environmental disaster.

In Douglas's avalanche of information, one name comes up again and again and

again.

The global chemical giant, Monsanto.

best known as a market leader in weed killer and for developing genetically

modified seeds.

All PCBs in America were produced by Monsanto.

98% in the UK were produced by Monsanto. I would say 70

% in Europe were produced by Monsanto.

And, believe it or not...

their UK production hub was a stone's throw from my childhood home in

Newport.

And with production comes waste.

Newport was producing a third of the world's PCBs.

First of all, they were discharging directly into the Severn and Severn

Estuary.

Then they dumped into the sewers.

They would stop from doing that, and so they had to find another solution.

Their answer was to bury their waste in a series of quarries across South Wales.

One of them was just 10 miles from Bruffiskin, Tealloyd.

at the edge of the village of Anisthi.

Hello, you wouldn't happen to know where there are two Jans, would you?

That's us, yes.

Over the time that I've been looking into this, I've become aware there are

other people out there trying to make... people accountable and trying to find

out the truth.

The two Jans, as they're known locally, are independent councillors

who live close to the former dump site which closed in the 70s.

People have been complaining about it ever since and they've been ignored.

Nobody has listened to them.

Like Douglas.

They've spent years trying to get to the bottom of whether the chemicals buried

near their homes could be leaking out and putting them at risk.

Since the 70s, people have been kind of aware that there's an issue here and

concerns and worries about it.

When the lorries were coming up in the middle of the night, and they always

dumped in the middle of the night when it's things that shouldn't be dumped, in

the morning, people got up and there was jelly on the road where the lorries had

gone. we know even now we don't know what the jelly was but they knew they

were picking it up and up in the quarry when the children were going up and

playing because children will be children were playing in the corner oh

my goodness yes and they would be paddling in this jelly

where

are you taking me now right we're heading for the progressive club a

little gathering of people They've all got concerns about out of the quarry.

Their recent conversations in the community have uncovered something

alarming.

Mandy lives just below the quarry and Mandy's got an issue with your dog.

I lost a dog four months ago, wasn't it? Yeah. She had cancer of the spleen and

we always walked up the quarry, you know, the woodland.

My neighbour, a few doors up, had the same problem. Her dog had cancer of the

spleen. There was one in the cottage just at the end of the street and their

dog had cancer of the spleen.

The three dogs always walked up in this woodland.

It just seems to me a coincidence that they've all had the same type of cancer.

Is there more than the three that you're talking about?

There's another gentleman.

He's had three young dogs.

He first noticed...

that the dogs were sort of losing hair, and they gradually became sicker and

sicker, and he sort of took them to the vet.

Each of them have died of cancer.

Obviously, animals can get cancer, but you can't help but go, well, there's

something not right here. And given that, it makes you question sort of

everything.

I can understand why people feel afraid, with so little certainty about whether

it's the chemicals from the tip making their animals sick.

It was that fear that drove Douglas to confront Monsanto.

He told me that in 1971, he traveled to the United States to meet their chief

scientific officer.

I said, do you have any idea?

of actual toxicity levels.

He said, no.

I was appalled.

How could one of the most influential manufacturing companies in the world not

have any idea of the toxicity of the products?

Douglas traveled several times to the United States to meet with Monsanto.

He was convinced they were hiding the dangers of PCBs.

I want to find out if he was right.

So I'm heading to Anniston in Alabama.

We're in Anniston now.

Uh-huh.

Like Newport.

aniston was home to one of monsanto's largest factories until the 1970s

so this is where the monsanto plant just

across the road there is where they first started producing pcbs

and this field across here that's behind the fences there's

thousands and thousands of tons of pcbs dumped in there

As well as burying it, the company spent decades dumping PCB waste into local

waterways.

I've been told about a resident who, like Douglas, started to become

concerned about chemical contamination in the 1970s.

How long have you lived here, Dave?

I was born and raised here.

As a child, community activist Dave Baker spent hours playing in the creek

beside the plant.

Did you know that there was, like, anything unhealthy about it? No, not

when I was younger. Matter of fact, that's where I learned how to swim.

Right, in that creek. Yeah, and that's where people were getting baptized.

What was the first time where you started to understand that there was

something maybe dangerous about what was happening here?

My brother that died at 16, 17, he got sick.

He had cancer, and then they had a brain tumor.

It was really sad for me and for my mother.

And I never will forget hearing my mother pray one night after she left the

emergency room hospital.

She said, God, take my son.

I'm tired of seeing him suffer.

And at that point, they knew it was cancer and a brain tumor, but they

didn't know why he had this. No.

It was scary, but it was during that time I learned a lot about the

contamination and what was going on.

But people died all over my street.

So would you be okay to show me some of the places? Yeah, I'll take you, no

problem.

Dave remembers that although Monsanto didn't publicly admit there was a

problem... They started to buy up homes around the plant, often paying well over

the odds.

There was houses all there.

Behind that fence?

Seventy houses.

People lived there for years.

So they were tearing down the houses because of the contamination?

Yes, and a lot of them. They had to take the furniture and burn it up before they

take the houses down.

People here have told me that Monsanto bought and demolished about a hundred

properties, but the effects of the dumping was still being felt.

The residents of Anniston had had enough.

In 1993, the whole town sued Monsanto for chemical contamination.

It was one of the largest single-town lawsuits in U.S. history.

Come with me. Thank you. Have a seat. One of the attorneys working on the case

was Donald Stewart.

What was the aim in your mind of what you were trying to achieve through that

case? Our initial effort was to make sure that we got property damages for

the people whose property had been contaminated by PCBs. What did you

actually do to show?

We did air sampling. We did soil sampling.

We had toxicologists that talked about the risk.

We had epidemiologists that talked about the studies that had been done and the

potential harm to these people.

And we ultimately settled the case for $300 million.

Wow. I mean, over the period of time,

that you were working on this case, at what point did Monsanto, if ever,

officially take responsibility for what they were doing?

I'd like to say that they came to the table because they felt like they had

done something wrong in the community.

But this company's pretty smart.

We found documents.

Michael, that indicated that they were aware of the toxicity of this product

early, early on.

And this is an internal Monsanto document from 49.

It says, prolonged exposure will lead to systemic toxic effects.

Wow.

Here's a 1951 document from a Monsanto employee.

He indicates quite a history of skin troubles, liver troubles, including some

fatal cases.

Here is a document about a test that was being done in lab animals.

The two-year rat study, and of course they fed the rats a huge amount of PCBs,

but what effect it had.

And Monsanto had asked them...

to modify that particular report.

So slightly tumorigenic was changed to does not appear to be carcinogenic.

Wow.

So, I mean, I've been talking to people in the area and the stories that, you

know, that I'm hearing about the effects on the community, if Monsanto knew

that's potentially the effect that what they would... doing could have on

people, and they're dumping it in these areas, how could they possibly think

that they could get away with that?

If you look at this area, there's working people, okay?

And there were people that... Pardon me.

It wouldn't affect the fight.

I wouldn't be able to fight back.

Pardon me.

I mean, it's very powerful to hear that.

Particularly as well, you don't expect attorneys and lawyers to be, you know...

breaking down in tears.

To hear and to see the evidence that Monsanto knew that what they were doing

was dangerous to the environment, to people, as early as, like, the 50s.

That is unforgivable.

It also seems to directly contradict what Douglas said Monsanto's chief

scientific officer told him.

I said, but surely you do precautionary science?

Ah, he said, I wish we could.

I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, precautionary science takes a lot of time.

And the need for PCBs in products is a constant evolving situation.

So in order for us to take advantage of the marketplace, we have to

react to it immediately.

Douglas's probing didn't go unnoticed.

Internal memos disclosed during the lawsuit reveal how Monsanto saw Douglas

as a threat.

Monsanto have found me, I think, frustrating because I don't go away and

I also don't change my story.

Memos describe ways to discredit Gowan and silence him.

One likely motivation was profit.

They later wrote, we can't afford to lose one dollar of business.

But in their court case, the residents of Anniston proved that Monsanto's drive

for profit was at the expense of their health.

There is a body of scientific literature now, and I do not believe

that I'm being alarmist in saying it's going to affect human health.

Douglas told me the PCBs build up in the body.

And because they take so long to break down, they don't just affect one

lifetime. They can be passed from mother to child.

So now I'm going to meet a lady called Dr. Angela Martin, who's a pediatrician

working in the Anniston area. She has treated children from this area for many

years.

Over the last two decades, Angela has been seeing a high number of children

with birth defects and developmental delays.

Can PCB levels be passed on to children?

We believe it can through transplacental transfer from the mom and

moms breastfeeding their babies. It can be transferred that way.

Okay. And what have been some of the most extreme

effects that you've seen on children or babies?

Well, babies born with their intestines out of the body. Really?

And one had Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, where he had all kinds of

seizures. He could just sit at you, blink in his eyes, and have seizures.

One of the cases I saw, the baby was born without eyes, and he's over a year

old and can't sit up, and the cycle continues.

Yeah. And, I mean, I suppose, you know, extreme cases like that

could happen anyway, but is it your feeling that this is connected to the

contamination in the area from Monsanto?

Well, I think there has to be a connection.

Why are we seeing so much of a rare thing?

Yeah. Why?

I was sort of half expecting to get here and to find a community that had gone

through terrible things but then had won this case and all this money had poured

in there and now they're kind of living a different life and that is not what's

happening here.

Even though this court case was won and it made Monsanto accountable and they

paid out huge amounts of money, I mean, this problem has not gone away.

It has not gone away.

It's been over 50 years since PCBs were last produced and dumped here.

By the early 70s, the US government was becoming more aware of the dangers and

preparing a nationwide ban.

With the writing on the wall, Monsanto stopped production in Anniston in 1972.

This has been mind-blowing as a trip.

You know, this community is still living with this stuff. Yeah.

Well, I'm almost kind of scared to tell you what we've been doing in the last

hour. I cannot believe we haven't seen this before. And it's partly because

there are so many memos.

We just found in 1972, after Monsanto decided PCBs are a worldwide problem

and they are an environmental danger, a risk to human health, and we're going to

shut down Anniston. After they shut down Anniston itself, because it's sort of

risky, I found proposals to increase capacity to make

5 million more kilograms of PCBs a year at one of their plants.

I couldn't believe this. I honestly didn't think this was real.

It's obviously Newport.

Really?

They're doing it in Newport because the legal risk in America is so much. And

then the government in the UK told the industry, we're not going to put any

restrictions on importing MCPs.

So they begin importing from around the world to Newport, hundreds of tons of

PCPs. Knowing full well that they were...

They were shutting down Aniston because of the dangers of it. Exactly.

It's like a little bit of the corporate brain was just removed to not have to

ever worry about the dangers of what they're doing to people.

It's terrifying.

And I guess, like, you're having this experience in Aniston where you're

meeting the real human beings at the heart of this.

What's troubling me is that in Britain, in Wales...

I don't know if we fully know who those people are because no one's really

looked into this properly. That's the problem.

I do find it absolutely mind-blowing.

People in charge making these decisions in that place, knowing what they're

doing to the community here, seeing the effect on people.

How do you do that as a human being to other human beings?

How do you feel all right about making those choices, knowing what it's going

to do to people?

And then just going, well, we'll just do it to someone else instead.

If Aniston is anything to go by, I'm worried some people in Wales could be at

risk.

I was able to identify 14 quarries that I would say the contamination

was serious.

Douglas told me that he'd found 14 dump sites.

But in his papers, he only names five.

Could you show me, on a map of Wales, where are the places that Douglas said

there is danger?

We want to try and find the remaining sites Douglas was worried about.

And since Dan and Lucy released their podcast, people have been getting in

touch, concerned about historic dumping near where they live.

All around us, I think thousands of people are probably living near PCBs.

The scariest thing of all is that all of these are not declared contaminated land

apart from.

That's the only one that's actually officially designated contaminated.

That's actually quite an important point about that being designated

contaminated, because if it is officially given that label, that then

means that there's a responsibility for the authorities to do something about

it. I guess what we need to find out is, you know, what is really happening

behind these red dots?

We could test and find out if this stuff is still there today.

And whether it could be posing a danger today.

Yeah.

We're going to start our soil testing where Douglas did.

A brofiskin quarry.

The drums are still sitting there, but decaying. The chemicals slowly but

surely seeping into the groundwater beneath.

By the early 2000s, problems at the site put it firmly on the news agenda.

The Environment Agency already knows this is one of the most polluted sites

in the country.

At least 75 hazardous chemicals were dumped here.

Now they're contaminating ground and surface water.

Eventually, in 2011, after decades of campaigning, the quarry was capped with

clay to prevent PCBs from getting out.

Let me grab you, Ollies, just in case there is any pollution.

In charge of the soil testing is Dr Dave Megson.

an environmental chemist whose work focuses on pollution.

If we've got some specific boots on, it means you're not tracking it back to

your home and your loved ones afterwards as well. Yeah, yeah. And how often have

you been here to this site? Oh, goodness me, I've been here about a dozen times.

With us is environmental campaigner Reverend Paul Cawthorn, who has spent

the last ten years fighting to highlight the issue of toxic tips.

The first time I came here was just after a rainstorm and there was a very

strong chemical smell.

We've got our chemical testing equipment.

I'll do the dirty work, but... OK, good.

I can have, yeah, my most famous lab assistant ever to help me take some

samples. OK. Where are we taking our sample from, Paul? I think we can

probably go here. You can see the old stream bed.

Ah, perfect, yep. Now, what I normally do is take a... Reverend Paul first

began investigating contamination.

after a deathbed confession from a parishioner.

This old chap had worked in chemical dumping and wanted to get it off his

conscience. He'd been worrying about it for 30 years.

He told me in vivid terms about how a driver had got some of the crystals on

his hand and his hand had sort of broken out into a rash instantaneously.

He went to the site manager and said, what's going on here? And the site

manager had looked him straight in the eyes and said, you don't want to go

asking questions like that.

We're drawing on Paul's years of research to help identify which areas to

test.

Could I grab that sample container? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you very much.

Because the stuff was...

The PCBs were put into barrels, and then the barrels were put into the ground in

the quarry and then covered over. Yeah, in fact, I've got some... There's a

rather interesting picture from Telford.

Yeah, but that's exactly the kind of barrels that would have been dumped

here. And we think that in this site at Brofiskin, there was tonnes of that

stuff dumped in here. Yes, yeah.

And that is one heck of a lot of neurotoxins.

We're now looking to test another 13 sites across Wales and the northwest of

England.

If high levels of PCBs are found, it would raise all sorts of alarm bells.

During his lifetime, Douglas struggled to get traction with the authorities,

despite media interest.

I wanted the PCB problem to come to public attention.

I wanted Monsanto to be held accountable.

So I contacted the Sunday Times Insight team, and one of the journalists

there, Peter Pringle, thought that this was the tip of an iceberg.

Peter? Oh, Mike! Hello.

In 1973, journalist Peter Pringle agreed to work with Douglas on a piece for the

Sunday Times.

He invited you to come down to this area? Yeah, he said, come down.

And I said, well, I want to bring a photographer and all this, which we did.

The photographer went up in the helicopter.

So this is Douglas in the helicopter.

Wow, that's Douglas in the helicopter.

And this is him getting out of his car. So you see all the rubbish that's down

there. And there's him actually right up to his knees in it, taking some kind of

sample or something.

That's amazing to see those pictures of him.

When you put the piece together, what was the kind of big headline of that

piece? Well, the big headline of that piece was water risk from poison tips.

There was uncontrolled dumping of industrial waste.

It was all over the place.

And this wasn't just being dumped by Monsanto.

No, no, no, it's others as well. And so you were pointing this out and no one

seemed to be doing anything about it or taking responsibility.

I mean, it took a toll on Douglas, didn't it, this whole long saga? It

certainly did, and he thought, of course...

You know, Monsanto's a big company.

They had a lot of clout and they don't want people like Douglas wandering

around knocking on the door, you know, telling them they're not doing things

that they ought to be doing. And there are a lot of ruffians involved here in

disposing of waste and all the rest of it.

The famous one is, of course, when he's walking out of his club in Mayfair or

something and he gets assaulted by men with steel bars.

Four men came out of the side.

and laid into me. Now, I was fit in those days, but I don't care how fit you

are, one against four and with arm bars.

They broke six of my ribs.

So do you think it's possible that that's true?

Perfectly possible.

The more he decided that he wasn't going to let go, the more they would want to

deter him in one way or another.

He just didn't go away, did he? He did not go away. Good for him.

There's no way of verifying his stories about shadowy figures and underhand

tactics. But what is on record are the official responses to the Sunday Times

piece.

They did discuss it. They responded to that article in Parliament. I think

we've got it somewhere.

The transcript from Parliament. Basically, the government was ripping

Douglas apart. They were accusing him of doctoring his results and saying that it

was all nonsense.

So who was that? Who was saying that?

This is it. This is it. This is the transcript.

The Minister of State from the Welsh office is essentially accusing Douglas

of doctoring his results.

The government were issuing public denials, but the evidence in Douglas'

files tell a different story.

What is incredibly worrying and infuriating for Douglas is behind the

scenes, this was their... secret testing programme.

This is Monsanto's? This is the government's secret. Oh, the

government's testing, yeah. So they were ordering tests.

They're finding nine times over today's US limit for PCBs in soil.

You know what? I've never noticed this before, but that debate in Parliament is

June 1973.

This result... July 1973?

The same time.

It's exactly the same time.

And they're not just publicly denying it. They're saying that Douglas Gowan is

doctoring his results.

You can see why, from that point on, he felt like there was a conspiracy against

him.

Unless there is someone like Douglas prodding away and prodding away,

something as important as this, and as potentially as urgent as this, can just

slip out of the consciousness.

This is not historic. This is about, you know, whether there's a danger there now

for these people and in all the other places.

Our next testing site is Anisthi.

We're nearly at the old pass here. Where people's dogs have fallen ill after

walking in the woods.

And is home to the two Jans.

A quarry is in there and it gets filled with water. The quarry is just up that

right, on the top of that right? Yeah, it is. The former dump site sits above

the village, at the very top of a hill.

With heavy rain, locals worry the chemicals may be washing down into the

woods. What is at the bottom of this?

There's a road, then there's a field, and then it's a river.

So even though, you know, the fencing is up and it... That's, you know, on the

one hand, good, because it stops people from going in. You can't get in there to

be able to see what's going on. And it doesn't stop the water. No. You know?

No, this fence just stops the people. It's not stopping it actually leaking

out. Yeah, it'll just go down the mountain and out the bottom.

This wood is used regularly by locals, unaware of the potential toxins leaching

out of the tip up the hill.

Now... We might find Paul and Dave somewhere around here because they're

doing testing somewhere around here. So don't be surprised if you see two

strange men.

This is where a lot of the water would come down. You see, this is part of it.

This gully here. The gully, yeah.

This would be full of water.

You can just about see a little bridge.

Oh, yeah. So the children come with their parents with remote-controlled

cars, completely oblivious to what was coming down here. Oh, my God.

A young lad came to me about a year ago and he showed me photos of his legs and

his feet and they're all scabbed. He said that his consultant doesn't know

what it is.

Whatever's on his legs, he thinks could be as a result of playing his cards

here.

It's a very odd feeling to think there could be such danger in this place.

You know, the fact that we've done some testing to find out how contaminated

this place is, is good.

There's no water running down now, but just me walking around here now, you

know, I'm a bit worried about, well, what's here?

Another of our 14 test sites is just over the Welsh border in Alvenley,

Cheshire.

It's home to farmers Paul and Wendy.

I walked up a week ago and it nearly gassed us out. The smell was that

strong.

Their farm borders another landfill used by Monsanto.

Closed in the 1970s, it was left to nature and has returned to grass.

But they say chemicals from the tip have been seeping onto their land ever since.

It was orange on Sunday, but it does change colour.

And in the summer it was...

pure orange along here but because there's a there's a fair water flow

today because we've had so much rain it's clearing a long line but you

constantly see the bubbles coming all the time at certain times you see big

mounds of froth like that oh god the

tip was used throughout the 50s and 60s

and it's never been capped

For years, Paul and his dad dug ditches and laid pipes by hand, trying to keep

any chemical runoff away from their land.

That's my granddad outside the farmhouse.

He's got his old braces on, hasn't he, the old boy?

We started fighting this in 1979, and my parents took it as far as Houses of

Parliament, and still nothing's been done, and it's getting more dangerous

and dangerous, I think.

Paul lost his father to cancer, and he did work with Paul, putting the drains

in.

It was like a blood cancer that he had.

It just, after he'd gone, probably, it dawned on us.

One of the main things of PCBs is the blood cancers and things like that.

And, like, I spoke to my sister about it, my mother.

And I said, do you think it's the same?

There's no denying the people living near these tips believe that there are

still PCB chemicals in the soil.

But what they need is proof.

So, I'm in Manchester to get the results of the soil testing from

the sites that Douglas talked about.

This is our chance to really find out whether these places are...

dangerous, you know, as contaminated as we think they might be.

This is important because a lot of the burden of proof depends on this.

This is our instrument here where we've been running your samples.

Oh, right. Amazing.

So we'll go through and see what we've got.

To put them in context, the Environment Agency, 2007, went round the UK and

studied.

366 random background areas across the country to say this is our average uk

level whether we find something around there unlikely to be any leakages if

we're finding stuff that's elevated we might have a problem when pcbs are

getting out so here are rafiskin and tear cluid rafiskin is 160 times

higher than the national average yeah where i met Lynette and her son Simon,

who had been playing around the quarry. Tear fluid as well.

And that's the area where the Jans are campaigning again.

That's 140 times higher.

Yeah, so I think it's no longer we think.

We've got evidence to suggest that's leaking and PCBs are getting out.

Every alarm bell in me is ringing.

We've tested so little, it's indicative testing. Like, you know, this is...

High levels of PCBs that I think warrant pretty much immediate investigation.

Really? We met people walking their dogs around that area. There's huge potential

for people to trap that back into their houses and potential to cause harm.

13 of the 14 sites tested showed above average PCB levels.

There's one site left.

Oh, my goodness.

But one result stands out.

Alvin Lee.

Nearly 2,000 times higher.

I'm struggling with this one because we've met the farmer.

They thought there was pollution coming across their land, so the farmer and his

dad, I think, dug this ditch to try and catch that leachate to stop it going

across their farm.

Are you worried that those people are at risk?

If that was in my back garden, I'd be furious. Yeah.

And I'd worry about the implications it had had to me and my family, if I'm

honest.

Dave, you seem... I've never seen you emotional.

But that's scary, isn't it?

Yeah.

What are you thinking, Michael?

Well, I'm just terrified.

How far away from there are we here?

30 miles or so across the M56. 30 miles away? Not too far away, yeah.

Well, I'm going to have to go there.

I mean, I'm slightly scared of going there, but I have to go now and I have

to tell that man what we know.

Hello, Paul.

Pleased to meet you. I'm Michael. Hello. Nice to meet you. Please come in. Thank

you.

We bought this land next to the tip just as I was leaving school.

There's some of the barrels that are still there today, like... Wow.

We're seeing evidence of... broken down barrels now, and it has got worse.

I remember going for walks with the children and Paul and his family saying,

you know, don't let them go near any of the water.

But recent years, it seems to be worse than it was when the children were

younger and the children are in their 30s now.

I mean, it's incredibly alarming what you're saying. Yeah, it is.

So the reason I'm here and the reason why I came here is because we've seen

the results of the testing that was done on your land.

I'm sure you know there is a kind of baseline of what is considered the norm.

Not that it's normal at all, but like everywhere. Yes, yeah.

And the figures of PCBs on the bit of land that was tested are

2,000 times higher.

than the norm.

Right.

Well, that is worrying.

So, I was really nervous about coming here and speaking to

Paul and Wendy, having...

Seeing those results that were just so shocking, I was really nervous about it.

But, you know, their reaction to it is just that they're not surprised

by it. And they just seem worn down.

How many other communities, how many families trying to be heard and just

feeling like they're getting nowhere?

It just makes you really, really worried about, like, how many other places like

this are there?

Next time... I go in search of a site where even more dumping took place.

This is the site of Monsanto? Yes.

It separates three villages.

This is a lagoon where some of the stuff from Monsanto was dumped.

It's just full of a toxic soup.

And I want to know...

Who is in danger now?

We detected 81 different PCBs. You're not free by any stretch of the

imagination. 81 different PCBs.

How do you get people to understand this is something that's going to affect

their children and their children's children?

The local health board commissioned an investigation into cancer clusters.

They found an area of concern from that factory. They found that actually people

are more likely to die from cancer in general.

My surgeon he said this is strange. He said I've never seen this type of cancer

It's not a coincidence

You can step into the role of decision maker and discover how your choices

could affect the environment with bonus interactive content from the Open

University.

Scan the QR code on screen or go to connect.open.ac.uk forward slash

buried.