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Some complained that the water pouring from their household taps had caused their skin to blister and peel. Others reported chronic vomiting and diarrhoea. Doug Cross’s wife Carole noticed that the soap she used while bathing had turned bright blue and that the water was “quite sting-y”. “I told her to get out of the bath immediately, because I knew there was something seriously wrong,” he says now.
For two days the couple drank water from a well in their Cornish garden, but then came the advice from the water authority that, despite an outbreak of illness seemingly linked to the local supply, it was safe to drink. “Purely an aesthetic problem,” as one official put it. It was advice that Cross and his wife dutifully followed and that, he believes, was what ultimately killed her.
The 1988 Camelford water scandal remains known as the worst case of mass poisoning recorded in the UK – 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate was mistakenly added to a drinking-water supply tank at a local treatment plant and piped into 20,000 homes.
The story is revisited in a new BBC documentary, and 37 years on it’s clear that it still ignites sadness, anger and claims of a cover-up. As well as causing widespread sickness among people across north Cornwall, the contaminated water killed all the small animals at Camelford’s pet shop and livestock on nearby farms.
Though it’s accepted it was an accident – albeit one that was demonstrably avoidable – what infuriated residents was that it was a full 16 days before the South West Water Authority came clean and announced in a local newspaper advert that aluminium sulphate was the source of the contamination. A coroner later said that delays in informing the public about the poisoning meant they were “gambling with as many as 20,000 lives”.
Cross, a pollution scientist by profession, believes the reason for the delay became obvious. “It was a commercially driven cover-up,” he says, citing Margaret Thatcher’s much-heralded plans to privatise the water industry that were taking shape at the same time. “If this had got out, then it would have risked derailing the whole thing.”
Throughout the early years after the July 1988 poisoning Cross, now 88 and a “citizen scientist” as he describes himself, was central to the campaign to get to the truth of the long-term effects of the poisoning.
He retained, though, sympathy for the relief delivery driver whose mistake it was that caused the calamitous contamination. He’d arrived at the water-treatment site with a load of aluminium sulphate to find there were no members of staff on hand and none of the tanks were labelled. He ended up choosing the wrong tank to drop the chemicals into. “He was the first victim in all this, and for all of these years he’s had it on his conscience, but none of us blamed him,” says Cross.
In 2004 Cross’s interest in the issue became tragically personal. Carole collapsed and was taken to hospital where she died, aged just 59. “The doctors asked me about any unusual events in her life and the only thing I could think of was the poisoning in Camelford. It was then the penny dropped.
“I said we had to get the brain tissue samples off to find out what’s going on. It was horrendous, but we had to find out what the effect of this exposure was.”
Because the precise cause of death remained unclear, the coroner, Michael Rose, ordered Carole’s brain to be examined by a neuropathologist. Tests revealed she died from a neurological disease linked to a rare form of Alzheimer’s, and that a “very elevated” level of aluminium was present in her brain.
In his inquest verdict, the coroner wrote that while there was a “very real possibility” the aluminium contributed to her death, there was “only a slight possibility” it was the cause. “At the end of the day I can say that the incident may either have contributed to, or possibly caused, Mrs Cross’s death, but I do not have sufficient evidence to say so conclusively.”
While Cross understands the coroner’s circumspection, his own view is that his wife was killed by the water poisoning and that upwards of “a dozen” others might also have died, though he accepts it would now be impossible to prove.
In 2013, the Government apologised “unreservedly” for the mass poisoning. For Cross, the fight for the justice he believes has been denied the people of Camelford goes on. But there is, he says, a wider message triggered by this new documentary for us all to embrace.
“When something happens and it’s obvious that the authorities are covering it up, get together and use whatever skills you have to find the evidence.”
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