Seven—
The Exposed

Do I worry? I don't worry about it twenty-four hours a day. You'd be neurotic. But the concern is there. Always.
—Cleanup worker

As organizations fashioned solutions to the State Office Building's problems and set the terms for what would be considered acceptable risk, they evaluated the hazards not only to themselves but also to workers and Binghamton's public. Organizational sociology does not have much to say about exposed individuals, of course, but there were interesting similarities between individual and organizational reaction to the SOB's risks—the topic of the first part of this chapter. The second part is concerned with the Citizens' Committee on the Binghamton State Office Building, an association whose members considered themselves victims of the SOB. In examining the Citizens' Committee, I seek to answer the question of why this group was unable to have its interests reflected in policy. Unfortunately, there is no way to know the extent to which these groups represented Binghamton's general population.^[1] However, after interviews with members of the Citizens' Committee and exposed workers, it is clear they were not simply a cadre of

[1] Attempts to secure funding for a survey of Binghamton's population were unsuccessful. I obtained a list of most of the workers included in the state's medical surveillance program, but ethical considerations prevented me from contacting them (see Appendix B). Nevertheless, I was able to gather data on two sets of exposed workers. The first was the wave of people in the building during the first couple of months after the accident. The second was part of a more organized cleanup effort that began in October 1981, eight months after the fire. These workers are not part of the state's surveillance program, and because they are employed by a private company, I was unable to obtain an accurate estimate of their number. The perceptions and positions of the second group were similar to those of the first, and so I interweave their testimonies.

malcontents or a group whose worldviews were radically different from the rest of their community.

Exposed Workers

Grievances

The janitorial brigade was the first major group to be exposed to toxins in the SOB. That cleanup lasted about three weeks, until the building was "closed" on February 26, 1981. State officials, predictably, blamed the workers for the ineffective program. The deputy commissioner of OGS reflected the official view when he proclaimed: "The process of cleaning that we used is still a good process, but not with that group" (Hudacs interview, October 8, 1981). Similarly, the official directly responsible for the brigade said: "There was just no way we could keep watch on all the janitors" (Beaudoin interview, October 6, 1981). In these declarations, officials mimicked the "operator-error" excuse so common when untoward events attract publicity. I do not intend to evaluate the degree to which the opposing views were or are correct, but rather to trace out the areas of disagreement and the basic, underlying issues.^[2]

If the supervisors held the workers responsible for their own exposure and for spreading the toxins, workers responded that it was their bosses, not they, who left fire-escape routes unlocked and gave permission to flush the building's toilets. "When you talk about negligence [by the state] beyond your wildest dreams, you don't know the half of it," said one worker (Fecteau 1981p). Although some of the members of the initial cleanup crew apparently failed to appreciate the imprudence of tracking contaminants outside of the building, they maintained that officials were not following the rules they themselves had promulgated. About two weeks after the accident, some county employees distributed a petition in which they complained of their exposure: "This has occurred either by use of

[2] Some workers disregarded obvious safety precautions. In March 1981, 131 lottery tickets were stolen from a newsstand inside the SOB. A year later, $3,000 in presumably contaminated cash was stolen from a safe in the office building.

county vehicles which were deemed safe after the mishap or by going to the basement to obtain vehicles" (Broome County Employees, February 18, 1981). These petitioners were worried about birth defects and cancer.

Cleanup workers claimed they were not told that dioxins were in the SOB or how to use their protective equipment. In a typical account, one worker said that, on one job, he worked without

a suit because the store's clerk . . . said the area was not contaminated. [On another job] I worked with a protective suit and respirator, gloves, and boots. Nobody instructed me how to put the suit on or how to use the respirator. There were no safety checks made. My job was to tear down drapes, [and] I got a face full of soot. There were no goggles. The boots . . . kept coming off and ripping [and] . . . the sleeves of the suit would ride down when I reached over my head. My arms were covered with soot. The inside of my respirator filled with soot, so I took it off. I then took off my suit improperly since there was no instructions on how to do it, in the same place that I put it on . . . My eyes started to burn at this time and I asked [the] director of clean-up what to do about my eyes. [He] wasn't sure, but he said to wash my eyes out with cold water . . . I then went to the men's room in the City Hall to wash up. I had a scabby rash around the eyes and was sent to the hospital . . . They did not know what to do.^[3]

The first cleanup squad also reported nausea, headaches, trouble with swallowing, lack of coordination, disorientation, extreme irritability, faintness, fatigue, insomnia, and cold sweats following their work in the building—all symptoms associated with dioxin exposure. The decontamination worker quoted above later hanged himself, apparently because of the depression and anxiety he experienced as a result of his work in the SOB. (Following his attempted suicide, he went into a coma for several years and then died.) It is impossible to be certain that toxic exposure caused his troubles, but anxiety and mental disturbances are among the symptoms associated with exposure to PCBs, furans, and dioxins.

[3] Some of the testimony from the janitors comes from affidavits they completed in February 1981 for the Civil Service Employees Association, whose cooperation I gratefully acknowledge.

Nearly a year after the janitorial cleanup, better-trained and more informed workers (employed by Allwash, Inc., the state's cleanup contractor) voiced many of the same concerns.^[4] Indeed, judging from the interviews, I found it difficult to distinguish the later cleanup workers from the earlier ones. Allwash workers alleged that officials were taking shortcuts that threatened their health, as well as the health of future inhabitants of the building. "The word 'clean' is a joke," said one. "The state is really concerned with money. You'll say to someone, 'We can't clean this. It'll have to be thrown out.' 'No, no, no,' they say. 'We'll clean it up.'"

These workers were very concerned that their protective equipment failed to shield them from exposure and argued that self-contained respirators (i.e., those that continually supply fresh air) would have been more appropriate for such hazardous work than the simple air filters they were given. One worker explained that because "you have three layers of clothing on and you're doing strenuous work, you begin to sweat. The outside of the respirator mask is rubber, and therefore it gets lubricated by the sweat on your face, and your mask starts to slip back and forth if you have a lot of head movement. On one occasion I . . . got some of the dust into my mask and started choking." Another worker described what it was like when the mask was contaminated: "Once you get something inside your mask . . . it won't go out. It just stays there, and you breathe it, breathe it, breathe it." These workers reported headaches, chest pains, and regurgitation of blood (Seely 1983).

Besides distrusting the measures taken to protect them, the initial cleanup crew, as well as employees in the neighboring city and county buildings, were troubled that the state senate ma-

[4] On October 8, 1981, OGS announced that Allwash had been awarded the contract to decontaminate the SOB (VERSAR remained the directing organization of this effort). Interviews with the Allwash workers are taken from verbatim transcriptions kindly provided by a reporter then with the Syracuse Herald American , Hart Seely, who interviewed a score of workers involved in the project. At Seely's request, I do not use the workers' names. As a point of interest, no women were allowed to work on the cleanup because of the potential threat to their reproductive systems. It should be pointed out that there is evidence that dioxins can adversely affect male reproductive systems as well (see Smith 1985).

jority leader salvaged personal effects from his office and that contaminated files had been removed from the SOB. They were also disturbed that a judge was trying to retrieve cassette tapes from his office. A labor representative wrote to the OGS engineer in charge of cleanup to protest the judge's request:

Such a request is of grave concern to all employees . . . There are several young women of childbearing age presently working in this building who may needlessly be exposed to toxic PCB material. Indeed, the person whose normal function it is to handle these tapes is pregnant . . . I have personally spoken to at least a dozen state employees now working [where the tapes would be taken] who have expressed an objection to [the judge's] proposal. (Weigert to Seiffert, February 26, 1981)

Upon closing the building, state officials announced that it would thereafter be restricted to all but authorized personnel and that nothing should be taken from the State Office Building. One week after the official closing, however, the deputy county health commissioner wrote to an on-site OGS representative: "Tuesday evening I received a call from [a worker at a local] car wash who was concerned because he discovered that a New York State car that he had cleaned inside and out had been parked in the garage at the time of the explosion" (Gaffney to Mosher, March 5, 1981).^[5]

Firefighters also questioned official policy. They had not been given answers to some important questions. "I think most of the guys have gotten over the uneasiness," one remarked, "but no one really knows what will happen. . . . I think we're going to be a batch of guinea pigs." These workers feared not only for their own health, but for that of their families as well. "I claim my men are strong," said the assistant fire chief, "but there is only so much that anybody can take. If he has got a constant worry on his mind that he's got a carcinogenic problem, it affects not only him, it affects his family" (Faughnan interview, August 13, 1981).

Most research on risk perception is conducted on survey re-

[5] This memorandum, according to Gaffney's notes at the bottom of it, was never sent, but its contents were discussed over the telephone.

spondents and experiment subjects (e.g., Hohenemser, Kasperson, and Kates 1977; Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein 1978; Cole and Withey 1981; Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1982). But the reactions of those exposed to the SOB's toxins suggest it is also useful to elicit the views of those who actually bear risks. One of the lessons from the evidence reported here—along with evidence from the exposed at Love Canal, Michigan, and Three Mile Island—is that what we usually think of as "at risk" should extend well beyond physical health. Psychological well-being, family health, friendships, and communities are all exposed, in a sense, when groups of workers confront an increased probability of contracting cancer, liver disease, and other ailments that attend occupational hazard.

Reactions

In addition to examining workers' perceptions, it is necessary to explore reactions based on these perceptions. Some workers reacted with resignation to a fate beyond their control. One engineer, whose superiors pressured him to enter the State Office Building several times without a protective suit, conceded: "At that time I guess our attitude was kind of, well, you know, if it's going to get us, it's going to get us. We are going to die of something anyway, so we just kind of had an attitude of, well, if it does it does, and if it doesn't it won't" (interview with engineer, anonymity requested, February 22, 1982). Similarly, the guard who was contaminated at the time of the fire, although disconcerted that no one had told her how deadly the chemicals were, scorned others' protests: "I, for one, hope . . . that I will be called [to testify] for the state. There is nothing I would like better than to cut these money-hungry people down and let them end up paying court costs as well as their attorneys" (Foldes 1981).

But with time, resignation turned to distrust and anger. The engineer quoted above eventually refused to enter the SOB:

One [reason] for my decision was . . . that I would pick up a paper one day and they would say, 'Oh, yes, this stuff is very deadly. Just a little bit will kill you,' and the next day you see that some scientist

says, 'Well, they are making more of this than it really is.' So, I got to thinking, well, if they say one whiff of this thing will kill you, at least you know what you are up against, or if they say no, definitely it's okay . . . I started to wonder that maybe we really don't know what we are up against.

Even the frustrated guard, after several months, decided she would go back in the building only "if the Pope said it was okay." Obviously, something had changed, as these workers came to believe that those who professed they were protecting public health were not. The guard said, in marked contrast to her earlier statements: "I think we're facing another Love Canal. Look how much those people had to fight to get what they wanted. I'm getting the feeling New York has more environmental disasters than any other state and apparently, they don't know how to handle them. You'd think by now they'd be experts" (Fecteau 1981n).

From nearly everyone subjected to the toxic chemicals came a common refrain: "We are guinea pigs." One of the workers was rueful: "Let's face it," he said, "even with guinea pigs they write everything down and make sure it's a controlled experiment. I don't think they do that with us."

Another response of these "workers at risk" was organized, albeit modest, protest. In addition to the petition mentioned above, another petition was circulated in early March of 1981 among city and county employees, many of whom feared they had been exposed to the tainted soot. These petitioners were moved by "considerations of personal health as well as for the future safety of our immediate families," asking:

• What is the nature and extent of scrubdown of the city building's restrooms and water fountains, which were heavily utilized by the cleanup personnel during the first stages of PCB cleanup?

• What is the condition of the elevator and stairwell areas that link the affected sub-basement and basement levels by persons carrying contaminated materials from the state building? What current safeguards are being utilized to control this unauthorized traffic?

There were other questions in their petition. The signers explained they were not convinced the state was protecting their interests, and therefore they requested "an immediate and thoroughly detailed explanation of the above mentioned items. Moreover, we want to know the specific plans of the State regarding the present and future safety protection of our health and welfare" (City and County Workers to Schecter, March 3, 1981). The petitioners received no response to their requests.

Certainly, officials did not perniciously plot to contaminate employees, and the "guinea pig" metaphor is somewhat overdrawn. Some would argue that the workers' fears reflected an unreasonable expectation that experts and organizations always have satisfying answers. If so, then authors such as Raiffa (1980), a pioneer in the field of risk analysis, are correct when they assert that the key problem in situations of risk is an ill-informed and unpredictable public (also see Schwing and Albers 1980). In this view, the remedy for maladies of hazard is to educate the public about the realities of making difficult trade-offs in a context of scarce information and resources.

From this perspective, workers become overly alarmed, even panicked, when experts disagree. But a closer examination of the evidence suggests we should exercise more caution before hastily dismissing the worries of these workers as another instance of an overreacting, ill-informed public. When pressed, workers do not really expect experts and officials to be omnipotent: "I had one of the experts tell me what I consider to be the truth, and he said, 'We don't know what the far-reaching effects are' . . . He said, 'We just don't know.'" What does concern workers is that officials refuse to acknowledge their uncertainty. "We've heard nothing," the assistant fire chief said, "[not] even . . . the results of those other blood tests and now they're talking about more blood tests. The more I hear the less satisfied I am" (Fecteau 1981n). Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Brown interviewed some of Binghamton's firefighters for their book Workers at Risk and report similar evidence: "We were getting everything from you're going to die to it's good for you . . . These were supposedly medical experts. So we're still in the dark as to what's what" (1984, 157).

Overall, the types of responses and perceptions among the

exposed workers varied widely. This variation was remarkably similar to much of the organizational behavior chronicled in the previous chapters. Ambiguous contexts elicit contradictory behaviors from individuals and organizations, suggesting that it is not irrationality, but the difficulty of making sense of unfamiliar environments that allows or facilitates unusually flexible reactions. However, an important difference between officials and exposed workers is that there were no risks of cancer, birth defects, or chloracne for the former. Workers will develop a certain measure of cynicism toward policies and programs when they are asked to bear the costs of possible failures.

The literature on risk assessment is of little help in understanding workers' reactions, mainly because there are few studies of subjects facing actual risks. But Levine's (1982) research on Love Canal residents, Walsh's (1981, 1985) studies of people living near Three Mile Island, and Nelkin and Brown's (1984) study of chemical workers in a variety of occupations, in addition to the evidence from Binghamton, suggest that an important element in the development of distrust of officials and organizations is the extent to which the aggrieved themselves are defined as part of the hazard by organizational decision makers. As an alternative, these decision makers could concede the possibility that these complaints come not from an abstract and uninformed "public," but from people who have borne, and will be asked to bear, the negative consequences of public policy.

Risk Assessments

In addition to the grievances of exposed workers and their reactions to official policy, there is one more component of their risk assessments: An interesting question to ask is why the cleanup crews—both the untrained janitors and the Allwash employees—would volunteer to work in a dangerous environment like that of the SOB. Some versions of economic theory would argue (e.g., Viscusi 1979) that they do so because of the extraordinary compensation for extraordinary risk. But the janitors received only their regular hourly wage, plus overtime and expenses. And most of the Allwash employees received

about $5 per hour, usually with a $97.50 per diem, which turned out to be insufficient to retain some workers:

Say I had a really menial job . . . You'd expect to be paid $3.35 an hour. Okay? But in a job where you're cleaning up hazardous wastes, and the state is paying a two-digit number for the company that hired you to do the work, [they're] only paying you $5 an hour. On top of that you get a per diem . . . And [the company] takes a percentage of that, also, which I don't think is fair. Because it's our health that's on the line, it isn't [theirs].

"Revealed preference" theory proposes another explanation for why these workers would accept the SOB's risks. This theory posits that an individual's notion of acceptable risk can be inferred from her or his behavior. But because revealed preference theory assumes that people have complete freedom of choice, it fails to take into account social structures that limit the discretion to choose and therefore affect the formation of motive. The OGS janitors felt constrained by the informal structure of their organization: "There were rumors going around," said one, "that if employees did not work, they would get in trouble, and it would reflect on employees' evaluations and job security." Later, the Allwash employees faced a similar dilemma that pitted safety against livelihood:

I'd say almost every day you could tell some material had gotten into your mask. At first, I'd report it and go out [of the building]. But very quickly you'd find that's frowned upon. After a couple of times they'll say you'd better get the problem fixed or you won't go back in the building [which meant being fired]. There is a limit to how many times you can do it. It's an unspoken limit, but you catch on pretty quick. (Seely 1983)

Another said: "When I started, if you had to shower out for any reason—even going to the bathroom—they were pretty lenient; they'd let you shower out. But as time goes on, more and more people are finding they have to go to the bathroom, and . . . they decided that if a person had to go to the bathroom, they were kept out of the building for the remainder of that shift, and they were docked for their hours."

It seems too obvious to observe here, but it bears emphasizing that workers tolerate job-related risks because they need to make a living. "These happen to be trying times," one worker explained. "There are a lot of people out of work. We all need a job." One of Nelkin and Brown's respondents summarized the predicament succinctly: "You can never balance the wage against the risk; you balance the wage against the alternative. The alternative is starving" (1984, 180).

Organizing Dissent

The Citizens' Committee on the Binghamton State Office Building first took form in mid-October 1981, about nine months after the accident. Although aggrieved, the committee initially adopted a conciliatory stance toward the state and county. One of the committee's founders explained that they wanted "to work with the State and be its partners in the protection of our lives and those of our children" (Citizens' Committee meeting transcript, October 26, 1981). The Citizens' Committee was an association of homemakers, lawyers, fire-fighters, exposed workers, and others who will someday have to decide whether or not they will again work in the State Office Building. In this way, the association resembles many other citizen action groups.^[6] As is true of other such groups, few committee members had heard of toxicology, chemistry, and epidemiology—subjects remote from their everyday lives. With time, though, its members developed the skills to converse in these strange languages, asking reasonable questions of those making the decisions that would affect them, and understanding the answers they received. The Citizens' Committee became adept at recognizing official assertions of safety that hid the more important issues of relative risk.

Committee members believed the Binghamton case to be in the same genre of other, more famous, incidents. "Binghamton

[6] In a study of 242 community organizations involved in environmental health issues, Freudenberg (1984, 445) found that the occupation most commonly listed by members was "homemaker."

now has the dubious distinction," one member noted, "of ranking with Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Seveso, Italy, and other localities where environmental pollution has become a health threat to its citizens" (Fecteau 1981p). But the Citizens' Committee was not demanding the shutdown of multimillion-dollar power plants or the purchase of a neighborhood. It sought something much more modest—answers to some simple questions: Who will decide what is safe? On what authority? What will be done to protect the health of workers and Binghamton's environment? These questions, members thought, were not especially alarmist. Rather, they were the basic questions of individuals who would someday have to shoulder the consequences of official definitions of acceptable risk.

One of the committee's specific concerns was that the medical surveillance program did not include all those who were indirectly exposed. They protested, in particular, that it did not include the family members of exposed workers, even though toxicological evidence suggests that such indirect exposure can be dangerous. The Citizens' Committee also tried to find out why no attempt had been made to discover whether their neighborhoods and the downtown area were contaminated. An oft-repeated sentiment was that if the decision makers had dioxins in their own neighborhoods, more would have been done to ensure public health.

The members of the Citizens' Committee thought their goals were reasonable. They were not asking for absolute definitions of safety; nor were they demanding that a large fraction of New York State's budget be diverted to their problems. They did complain of what appeared to be senseless organizational behavior; echoing rationalist theory, they objected to actions that were not directed toward well-defined ends. They had witnessed more than eight months of official dismissals of the problem of the SOB and its victims, as well as promises that no expense would be spared to protect their health. They had heard certain declarations of safety and were subjected to platitudes, such as the governor's assertion that "life is a risk." Committee members pointed out that state experts had been quick to judge the soot nontoxic when the "carbon-love" hypothesis was suggested, and equally quick to conceal the results of the

chick-embryo tests that suggested otherwise.^[7] They argued that because they, and others like them, were the ones who inhabited cost-benefit ratios, they should have some voice in deciding what level of risk was acceptable. One member observed that "many actions have already been taken by the State, and others are being planned, without anyone knowing whether those actions were or are desirable and necessary, meaningful, effective or safe. Because the planning and execution of the plans [were] undertaken without input from the citizens, we were and may still be seriously shortchanged and unnecessarily endangered" (Citizens' Committee meeting transcript, October 26, 1981). The committee, in short, was demanding political accountability from policymakers.

On November 4, 1981, the committee staged a public meeting and invited the media, local health officers and politicians, and officials from the New York State Department of Health and the Office of General Services. The state officials were cordial during the meeting and explained that they wished for an environment of cooperation. They volunteered the truism that risk is defined by society and asserted that safety would not be determined on the basis of technical criteria or fiscal costs. The committee's leaders again stressed their own desire for a "cooperative partnership" and pointed out that "everyone knows by now that we have no saints and no magicians on our public payrolls."^[8] The committee asked state officials the hard questions:

• Why, nine months after the accident, has a clear medical surveillance plan not been instituted?

• Why have data been withheld?

• How, exactly, will a safe level of toxins be established?

In other words, the Citizens' Committee was asking these representatives what their goals were, how they planned to reach

[7] The "carbon-love" hypothesis (see chapter 5) proposed that bonds between chemicals and the carbon in the soot would render the chemicals harmless.

[8] These quotations were taken from a verbatim transcription of the meeting.

them, and the role they intended the public to play in the process of defining acceptable risk. State Health Commissioner Axelrod denied that any data had been withheld and that positive but inconclusive data were readily released. He also told the gathering: "We have always proceeded from the fact that the citizens of this state represent a very well informed and intelligent community, and I would not presume at any point to underestimate the intelligence of any body of people who ultimately pay my salary."

Axelrod also told the citizens that "'safe' is a political term" and that the risk of reentering the State Office Building "will not be any greater than the risk of entering any other state office building within the state of New York." He clarified the official view of the proposal that the Citizens' Committee could be a partner in determining policy when he told them they would "have the opportunity to comment on whatever levels are going to be recommended . . . That is [why we are here]," he said, "to offer you the opportunity to comment." Simply commenting, however, was not what the committee had in mind.

Not much came of the committee's meetings with state officials, except to gain a small measure of publicity for the committee in the local press. Its leaders and members both were disappointed with the officials' lack of candor and thought they had been subjected to more instances of "informing the public." State health officials, for the most part, imparted "press-type information," and representatives from OGS read long, self-evident statements that had been delivered at previous public meetings.

After the November meeting the committee became somewhat more adversarial. "We are getting into that stance, whether we like it or not," one of its members explained, "because the state wants to sit on some very unfortunate information, and [we are being] forced to assume this stance" (Stuckart interview, April 29, 1982).

Nevertheless, the Citizens' Committee on the Binghamton State Office Building was unable to garner enough power to become an effective constraint on the decision makers who would define acceptable risk for the public. One of the reasons

for the committee's failure, several members confided, was that many of them worked for the county and state, and they feared reprisals for "going public." One of the committee's leaders told me: "I have had people tell me that all kinds of terrible things could happen to them if they join" (Stuckart interview, April 29, 1982).

A common theme pervades scholarly work on risk. Of all the research topics that might fall under the general study of risk, the most common address arguments and assumptions regarding the role of unorganized, and unofficially organized, publics. A frequent and consequential assumption in many studies is that the public is irrational and overly alarmed about hazards. From that assumption it is no great leap to the conclusion that publics should play a reactive, rather than a proactive, role in determining policies regarding risk. When Raiffa (1980, 340) notes that "public perceptions and reality dramatically differ," he is echoing a common view of those who make important decisions and policies regarding risk. But such views ignore the structural contexts within which publics assess risk.

Fortunately, some recent progress has been made on the study of publics, as more attention has been accorded to structural issues rather than to the psychology of risk. Adeline Levine's study (1982) of Love Canal activists and Walsh's studies of Three Mile Island (1981, 1985) provide rich evidence of the strategies and tactics used by protest associations to achieve goals in a context of threats to public health. Nelkin and Brown's (1984) research chronicles structural factors such as the range of occupational alternatives open to workers and the opportunities workers have to engage in meaningful protest that shape their perceptions of risk.

It is true that the notions of acceptable risk held by exposed workers in Binghamton were not based on probability distributions of the likelihood of contracting cancer, and it is true that their risk perceptions differed from those of experts. But it does not follow that the solution to problems of risk is therefore public "education," if "education" means convincing publics to accept official definitions of safety. For Binghamtonians

who perceived the building as a threat, the crucial element in the debate over the acceptability of the SOB's risks was that the officials are not the ones who will live and work there. As a committee member pointed out, "There is a big difference between going in for an hour or so for an opening celebration and spending forty hours a week in there."

Despite the efforts of the Citizens' Committee, it was clearly unable to achieve its goals. In 1984 it succeeded in having Ellen Silbergeld, a respected toxicologist, appointed to the state's expert panel. Nevertheless, the committee and the state organizations never became "partners" in any meaningful sense, and there is no evidence that official policy was in any way shaped by the demands or existence of the association. Why the failure?

Most of the risk analysis literature is rooted in the psychology of individual fear, so little research has been conducted on how public values are reflected in policy choices. One explanation, however, is suggested by the revealed preference theory mentioned earlier (see Starr 1969; Cole and Withey 1981; MacLean 1982). According to this view, individual behavior mirrors individual definitions of acceptable risk. If millions of people smoke cigarettes or live near a nuclear power plant, they must consider the risks of smoking and atomic power acceptable; otherwise, they would quit smoking or move away. One reason the Citizens' Committee failed, according to its leaders, was the committee's inability to convince people to protest openly. Perhaps we may assume, from the behavior of the citizens, that they thought the hazards posed by the SOB were not severe enough to serve as a rallying point for their grievances and that they approved of official policy. After all, massive protests were not staged in the streets, the workers' unions were fairly inactive, and officials were not kidnapped in protest, as EPA officials were at Love Canal (Brown 1979).

Nevertheless, even if we ignore the inherent tautology in revealed preference theory, it still cannot explain the failure of the Citizens' Committee. First, some segments of the public were indeed quite concerned about the building's risks. Second, the revealed preference hypothesis assumes, as Nelkin and Brown (1984) point out, a wide array of choices unconstrained

by social structures. Yet it is clear that the Citizens' Committee enjoyed little or no effective connection to policymakers. For preferences to be revealed in behavior, there must be some way both to transmit goals to decision makers and to ensure their enforcement. But the Citizens' Committee, and the public more generally, was excluded from the political arena. Any possible contributions they might have made were therefore thwarted and became expressions of anger, frustration, or resignation instead. If we are to understand how "society" evaluates, distributes, and accepts risk, we must therefore address the issue of the structural connections between those with power and those without it.

Comparing the Binghamton case, on the one hand, with Love Canal and Three Mile Island, on the other, shows two differences that help explain why the Citizens' Committee was unable to establish connections with policymakers. First, aggrieved citizens and workers in Binghamton were unable to attract outside support—in particular, the attention of the national media. Although the event received a modicum of national and international attention—several newspapers covered it, it was reported in Science magazine, National Public Radio did a small piece on it, EPA changed some regulations concerning electrical transformers, many papers on the incident have been presented in environmental and trade journals—it never received the extensive publicity that Love Canal and TMI did. We have no studies of the processes through which the national media come to regard some public health threats as serious enough to warrant major coverage (cf. Schoenfeld, Meier, and Griffin 1979). But the Binghamton case, in conjunction with others, suggests that national media coverage is necessary, if not sufficient, before grass-roots associations can gain enough power to become real forces.

The second difference between Binghamton and other cases is that the Citizens' Committee did not form until after most of the major issues were resolved. By the time members of the committee began to voice their objections—nearly nine months after the accident—decision-making structures were already in place, lessening the impact of the committee's challenges. The major sociopolitical battles among the various organizations

were also settled, so that state agencies were firmly ensconced as the "owners" of the building's risks. State organizations were the only ones left to propose solutions to the problems created by the contaminated building. In late October 1981, the same month the Citizens' Committee started to organize, OGS began a publicity campaign designed to remedy popular distrust of state policies. A series of open meetings (discussed earlier) were held in which the public was given symbolic opportunities to influence decisions. State officials also met with editors of the local papers and convinced them to soften their previously critical stance. Thus, the timing of intervention and association is an important, albeit neglected, variable in research on citizen protest (Walsh 1985). Associations of dissent, it seems, are more likely to achieve their goals the earlier they claim a legitimate role in the process of defining what constitutes acceptable risk.