The notion that each case shared some common cause began to obsess her. “The water and the air were the two things we all shared,” she said in a deposition some years later. “And the water was bad. I thought there was a virus that might have been transmitted through the water, some kind of a leukemia virus. The water had never tasted right, it never looked right, and it never smelled right.

Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action, loc. 62