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In Toxic Town, a drama out now on Netflix, poisonous dust in the air causes children to be born with missing limbs and other physical abnormalities. The alarming story is based on a real incident, when people in the English town of Corby inhaled toxic dust that was later linked to birth defects in a cluster of children.
The 2009 ruling against Corby represented the first time a civil court in England made the connection between birth defects and the negligent management of toxic waste in the air. The landmark case, previously described as the “British Erin Brockovich,” was made possible by the mothers who demanded justice from Corby leadership.
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Their stories come to harrowing life in the Netflix series. Over four episodes, we follow mothers living their daily lives under clouds of orange dust, winding up with one another in hospitals as their children are in and out of surgeries and doctor’s appointments after they are born. The real mothers who experienced this and were later part of the class-action suit consulted on the show.
Here’s what to know about the true story behind Toxic Town.
How a cluster of birth defects was linked to toxic waste
In the series, Jodie Whittaker plays Susan McIntyre, who starts getting suspicious after she gives birth to a baby with a deformed hand and is put in a hospital room with another mother who has also had a baby with a birth defect. Then, a call from a journalist makes her realize something is amiss.
It is true that a journalist called up McIntyre when her son was 18-months-old and broke the news in a 1999 Sunday Times article that a cluster of children with limb deformities, like missing fingers, lived close to a network of toxic landfill waste sites once associated with a former British Steel plant. Journalist Graham Hind had received a tip about problems with the decontamination of a former steel works site in Corby and multiple cases of children born with birth defects to mothers who lived or worked close to the site.
Hind and his co-writer Stephen Bevan gained access to a report by local auditors that revealed one of the sites, a quarry land, contained levels of arsenic, zinc, boron, and nickel that far exceeded environmental safety guidelines, even after it had been supposedly cleaned up. Pediatrician John Scott, who contributed to a study that established a link between birth defects and landfill dumps, called the Corby cluster “an early warning that something may be going wrong.”
Bevan tells TIME that the mothers had a suspicion that they were not the only ones who had had children born with birth defects, and they were right. Lawyer Des Collins, a Corby native who represented the families in the case, read the Sunday Times article and decided to find more mothers who might be willing to join a lawsuit. The article had uncovered four instances of limb deformities, and 19 families ended up signing onto the class action suit.
“Our story was the spark that lit the fire,” Bevan says. “You’ve got ordinary people who are the victims, paying the price for mismanagement. That’s one of the roles of an independent press: to speak up for the people who have no voice.”
What it was like to live in the ‘toxic town‘
Residents recalled muddy lagoons that smelled “like a hospital ward” and children playing by large pools of liquid that fizzed when stones were thrown into them, according to the Sunday Times article.
In press notes for Toxic Town, the mothers who inspired the characters in the show explained how the dust affected their daily lives.
Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood), whose first child was born with a deformed ear and died shortly after, remembers “a fine dust that got everywhere,” as if “the Sahara desert had just done a great big whoosh over.” It was so hazy. “You could clean your desk, and by the time you picked up your coffee cup, it was thick with dust again.” She wouldn’t leave the house at dinner time because the air would burn the back of her throat. In the show, Taylor and McIntyre are good friends, encouraging other mothers to join the lawsuit. But Taylor wasn’t allowed to be one of the claimants because her child did not survive.
Taylor says she was constantly using inhalers for her asthma when she was in Corby, but wouldn’t have to whenever she left the town. When she showed Collins her commute to and from work, he told her that if the toxins were spreading how he thought they were, then she was definitely getting exposed to toxic air on her commute.
Maggie Mahon (Claudia Jessie), whose husband Derek (Joe Dempsie) worked at the reclamation site, said, “I had to brush the dust off his clothes when he came home.” Her son was born with a club foot and required several operations to walk properly.
She remembers wondering if there was a connection between the dust and her son’s deformity when she saw an article in the local newspaper in which Collins was looking for families who had children with disabilities. “Derek came in from work, and I was like, ‘Just read this—you worked among all this, and Sam got a club foot—that’s a bit coincidental, isn’t it?’”
Mahon ended up joining the class action suit, but Derek could not because of his work.
How the Corby case was won
As Toxic Town shows, Collins’ legal team received various documents from a former council worker Sam Hagen (Robert Carlyle) that proved that the steps that the Corby Borough council took to ensure that contamination did not become a problem were largely inadequate. The documents were given to him by a senior engineering technician had concerns about contamination after working on the site.
In 2009, a decade after the 1999 Sunday Times article came out, a court ruled that the Corby borough council was liable in negligence.
“Corby borough council permitted and led to the extensive dispersal of contaminated mud and dust over public areas of Corby and into and over private homes, with the result that the contaminants could realistically have caused the types of birth defects of which complaint has been made by the claimants (save in limited respects),” the judge wrote at the time.
Many of the people cleaning up the sites were former steel workers, who were unemployed after the steel industry receded and got jobs working on the reclamation site, even though they were not experts on toxic waste removal. Toxic material was sticking to the wheels of the vehicles that were transporting it. The wheel-washing that was supposed to clean the tires was actually making it worse because they were being washed with contaminated water instead of fresh water.
In April 2010, the Corby borough council reached a settlement with the families. The exact amount of compensation that the mothers received was not disclosed.
Collins, who continues to represent families in civil litigation cases, says the case has been a warning to localities embarking on land reclamation projects: “If you look at the advice being given by insurance companies to people who are reclaiming brownfield sites, they will always go into Corby, the dangers of Corby, to make sure Corby doesn’t happen to you. In that sense, yes, it did help. It hasn’t led to further litigation. I think it’s led to there being a more cautious and sensible approach to land reclamation. But possibly there’s still a lot covered up.”
Cases like the Corby case are very expensive, and many lawyers do not take them on because they don’t think they will pay off and don’t have enough legal aid to fund the work. The mothers hope Toxic Town could reach other people who might have connections to Corby or who are worried about pollution in their own neighborhoods. As McIntyre explains her motivation throughout this case in the press notes, “Money didn’t interest any of us. All we wanted to know was, ‘Why? Why did this happen to us? How do we stop it happening to anyone else?’”
