Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis was screened at CineVegas last week. This PBS-style documentary on the leukemia cluster in Fallon (about 60 miles east of Reno), and the tribulations of three families in particular, premiered on KLVX Channel 10 last month and will be shown on several public stations around the country over the summer.
I was assigned to review Deadly Oasis as part of the Weekly's CineVegas coverage (see page 29). But the program deserves more analysis than can be contained in a simple review.
First, a quick rundown of the Fallon leukemia cluster. In mid-2000, Fallon residents began to notice an unusually high number of local children diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia—at that time, five such diagnoses in the area within the previous year. A town the size of Fallon should, on average, see one such diagnosis every five years. Initial investigations could find no common link, although a host of possible causes were raised and explored: the high levels of naturally occurring arsenic in the water; a nearby nuclear test in the 1960s; pesticide contamination; a virus; and the military jet fuel, JP8, that is pipelined through the town to the Fallon Naval Air Station.
By April 2001, when Deadly Oasis begins, the number of juvenile leukemia diagnoses has risen to 12, and the people of Fallon are clamoring for quick governmental response. They want answers and they want them now, and they don't want to hear that investigations take time. To the people of Fallon, it's only so much bureaucracy; as one frustrated father puts it, "They look at it as numbers; we look at it as children, because one of them is ours."
But what's behind the slow response? Is it deliberate bureaucratic foot-dragging, or is it a necessary by-product of careful scientific examination? The film never answers that question, never poses it to the epidemiologists and regulators and public officials responsible for examining the Fallon cluster. I can't recall a single instance where filmmaker Amie Williams interviews anyone from any of several governmental agencies involved, state or federal. If there's stonewalling going on, the film manipulates us away from being able to draw a fair conclusion.
Deadly Oasis turns out to be less a search for truth than a portrait of a community looking for blame. At every turn, the profiled families accuse the government of downplaying the problem. Intimations abound that a cover-up is in the works. A 10-year-old girl takes it upon herself to investigate nuclear testing in Nevada after a friend of hers is the first of Fallon's leukemia deaths, and the film seems to place credence in her claim, "I know somebody knows."
The people of Fallon may have a right to presume some sort of cover-up. In 1988, a tank overfill at the air base resulted in an estimated 30,000 gallons of jet fuel spilled onto the base grounds. Much of it was burned off in a controlled fire that lasted five or six days. But the Navy claimed that never happened—can you hide a six-day open-air fire from the public?—and in a 2001 U.S. Senate field hearing in Fallon, base commander Rear Adm. R. J. Naughton dismissed it as unfounded "local legend."
Sure enough, that JP8 jet fuel figures heavily in Fallon residents' suspicions. They tell of fighter planes routinely dumping fuel on their returns to the base. (The Navy insists such dumps are only occasional, emergency incidents.) They tell of the pipeline leaking JP8 into the ground, but the film shows that an examination of the pipeline turns up no leakage. There is no documented direct exposure to jet fuel, and its carcinogenic properties don't include any link to the specific form of leukemia diagnosed in Fallon.
Other potential causes—the arsenic, the pesticides, the nuclear testing—are also ruled out. One of the profiled families refuses to accept these conclusions—especially the pipeline examination—insisting that the government doesn't want to find a problem.
Toward the end of the film, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presents its findings: In addition to the expected high levels of arsenic, the study also found unusually high levels of tungsten in Fallon residents' urine. (Tungsten is another naturally occurring metal that used to be mined throughout the state.) Again, we see one of the families toss the findings aside, as the father tells us: "Do I feel that we're on the right track in finding the cause for the cluster? No."
(The CDC's ultimate results, released after the film was completed, were inconclusive, and the tungsten aspect has since proven to be less than promising. However, a University of Arizona toxicologist's preliminary research indicates that tungsten may alter the growth of leukemia cells. Some hypothesize that it may act in concert with some other factor.)
From the news accounts I've read, Deadly Oasis seems to accurately depict the attitudes of many Fallon residents. However, that's no reason for the film to tacitly acquiesce to this groundless dismissiveness. I hold no brief for the government, and I'd like to think I share filmmaker Williams' progressive values (her production company "specializes in film and video for community groups, labor unions and related organizations working in peace, social justice and activist issues," according to her distributor's website). But I don't think it's asking too much to demand facts and reasoned argument rather than the bland government-cover-up mind-set that the film adopts, or at least yields to, on little more than say-so.
By the way, a film reviewer for one of those other weeklies wrote that Deadly Oasis "disdained witch-hunting and paranoia" and described the families profiled as "reluctant to blame." Did we see the same documentary?
Jeremy Parker writes about politics biweekly. His website is lasvegasweblog.blogspot.com.