Chris Nidel scrolled through a Facebook group about cattle dogs when he came across a thumb-stopping post: A woman wrote that three of her dogs died of the same cancer.
“You may want to check what’s in the water,” he recalled writing in a comment. “She said, ‘Every morning we go for a walk along a canal. It smells like mothballs.’”
Nidel pulled up a map of the waterway — the Roosevelt canal in west Eugene — and spotted a wood treatment plant nearby. As an environmental lawyer with a background in engineering and science, he knew such facilities used highly toxic chemicals.
From his home on the East Coast, he booked a flight to see the J.H. Baxter & Co. facility himself. It was 2021, and the polluter was nearing its operational demise — a decline that ultimately led to it being declared a Superfund site earlier this year…