Town Crier

By Peter Staler

THE POISON THAT FELL FROM THE SKY by John G. Fuller Random House; 113 pages; $6.95

There seem to be not one but two writers inside the prolific John G Fuller. One has produced sober responsible books on banking and medical research. The other is better known for his hyperthyroid, irresponsible studies of psychic phenomena. In 1965 Fuller, whose various incarnations include a stint as a columnist for the Saturday Review and Emmy Award-winning work as a television producer, published Incident at Exeter. In it he concluded that the unidentified flying objects sighted and reported around the country were of extraterrestrial origin. A year later, he wrote The Interrupted Journey, the preposterous account of a Portsmouth, N.H., couple who claimed to have been abducted by unearthly creatures.

Nor were these Fuller's only transgressions. In 1975 he published Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, an approving look at a South American "psychic surgeon." Then, a year ago, Fuller brought out The Ghost of Flight 401, in which he credulously describes the experiences of flight crew members who claim to have seen apparitions of colleagues killed in a plane crash.

Given these credentials, Fuller is unlikely to be trusted by readers concerned with accuracy, responsibility or perception. A pity. For Fuller has just written a true, tragic account of Seveso. Italy, a town ravaged by a toxic chemical. The "Italian Hiroshima" occurred shortly after noon on July 10, 1976, when a chemical reactor at Icmesa, a plant owned by the Swiss firm of Hoffmann-La Roche, overheated, then blew its safety valve and released a huge grayish cloud into the clear Italian sky. Workers and company officials assumed that the cloud and the droplets that fell from it onto homes, gardens and livestock were composed of trichlorophenol, an irritating but nonfatal chemical. But the overheating reactor sent the temperature of the TCP soaring above 200DEG C. Dioxin was formed--a substance so lethal that one hundred-millionth of a gram in a two-pound mixture would kill half the rabbits who might eat it.

Trichlorophenol, the most active ingredient of the defoliant 2,4,5-T, had already proved its baleful capabilities in Viet Nam, where the defoliant was held responsible for liver cancers and birth defects. The dioxin seems certain to be worse. Within a few days of the explosion, residents of the town watched their cats and dogs stagger and die. Birds literally dropped out of the air People experienced nausea and blurred vision; many developed chloracne, their skin erupting in painful, disfiguring running sores.

Fuller is guilty of a few errors in his reporting of this full-scale disaster. It is misleading to suggest that the cancer fatal to a Seveso woman within a few months after the explosion was caused by dioxin; cancer has a long latency period and takes many months if not years to develop. Nor can it be proved that cancer is a result of something so gross as damage to the chromosomes; most scientists agree that the triggering mechanism is far more subtle.

Despite these flaws, The Poison That Fell from the Sky is a first-rate piece of reporting. Fuller movingly captures the anger of Seveso residents as they are evicted from their now untenable homes, their bewilderment as they wonder what the dioxin will eventually do to them, their frustration as government and company officials argue about what can be done to detoxify their town. He does an equally good job of warning his readers that what happened in Seveso can happen in their own towns. One need only consider the Kepone poisoning of Virginia's James River, the PBB contamination of Michigan or the vinyl chloride threat to U.S. plastics workers to realize the immediacy of his message. Yet The Poison That Fell from the Sky is not a polemic. It is simply an urgent, surprisingly muted, cautionary tale. Much of Fuller's past work should be ignored. His new book must not.

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