![]() ![]() The machine sounds like a compressor steadily running 24 hours a day. A chain link fence circles the vacuum-like device, which sucks deadly solvents from the soil and scrubs toxic vapors from the air. Less than 50 yards from his front door sits a trailer with white pipes snaking out in all directions. The lush thicket of trees that once hid Rice’s house from the road is gone-the limbs are thin and bare, sticking out of the ground like crooked fingers. He’s been diagnosed with glaucoma, which his doctor said could be from exposure to contaminants (though it’s an ailment that has also been linked to long-term smoking). “I hurt like crazy every morning,” Rice said, taking a drag from a cigarette. Terry Rice outside his cabin (Kevin Maurer) With his southern drawl, blue jeans, black Harley Davidson T-shirt, and lined, craggy face, he bears a passing resemblance to Willie Nelson. Rice is a carpenter with shoulder length gray hair, thick mustache and beard, piercing blue eyes, and weathered, callused hands. Standing in front of his cabin on a cold recent morning, Terry Rice wondered how the contamination had affected his own health. “We feel sure it is from the TCE and the chemicals around here,” she said. ![]() But she doesn’t have another explanation. None of the family’s doctors have linked the Rices’ medical issues with TCE, Dot said. “It has destroyed her life to the point where she wasn’t able to raise her children,” Dot said of her granddaughter. Terry’s daughter was also diagnosed with a brain tumor and other medical problems that required more than 50 spinal taps. Bob’s father, who lived on the property for nearly a decade, died of esophagus and stomach cancer in 1982. ![]() Bob was diagnosed with a brain tumor more than 15 years ago surgeons tried and failed three times to remove it. His parents, Bob and Dot Rice, live up the hill from him in a ranch-style home. The news made Rice look at his family with newfound alarm. “I’d never much thought about it,” he said, referring to the groundwater on his property. Rice remembers the day the EPA showed up at his door with bottled water. Subsequent tests of neighboring wells and springs showed extremely high levels of the toxic chemical trichloroethylene (or TCE). Taylor reported the oily sheen and the diesel-like odor to the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (NC DENR). “We’re talking two to three feet up the bank and there was a black sheen on the water.” He also found green barrels from a factory that had once bordered the property. “All the vegetation was dying on the bank,” Taylor recalled recently. Taylor was shocked when he climbed down to the water and saw dead plants and an oily liquid near the surface. In July 1999, a visiting friend, Bob Taylor, volunteered to clean out the spring. The Rices drew their regular water supply from a spring just a few hundred yards behind the cabin. As a teenager, Rice would wade into the springs or hike in the woods, drinking from the cool water on hot summer days. When his family bought the 15-acre property in 1974, they were drawn to the natural creeks that wound between the oak and pine trees. Terry Rice lives in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, about 10 miles outside of Asheville, in a cabin his grandfather built by hand. ![]()
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