Lawsuit inspires a real class action

With that book as inspiration, Bair constructed a course about the 1986 lawsuit that brought to light the dreadful human side effects of drinking contaminated water in Woburn.

His zest for the course was matched initially with a $13,000 grant from Ohio State. With that money, Bair built the course's framework using Harr's book, 2,000 pages of trial testimony, 70 newspaper articles and numerous trips to New England to gather additional material from trial lawyers, government researchers, and Harr himself.

Bair also spent about $100,000 of research money to help his teaching assistant, Maura Metheny, complete seven years of research on two Woburn drinking water wells, from which the contaminants were pumped out into the city's water system.

That work drew national attention this month, when Metheny presented a report to the American Geological Society that showed how chemicals from five companies ended up in Woburn's water supply system, allegedly causing several cases of leukemia. The report put a new spin on the 1986 lawsuit and could have changed the outcome of the trial.

But in 1998, when Bair was putting together his course, he was just looking for a clever way to lure students to geology.

That method was re-creating the case of Anne Anderson vs. W.R. Grace & Co.

And it worked, Bair said in a telephone interview.

"It's the most fun class I've taught in my 20 years here. The students get so involved they pull all-nighters," said Bair, who presided over two mock trials re-creating the Woburn case at Ohio State before he stopped teaching and became chair of the department of geological sciences. He has left the results of the legwork for his course on the Ohio State University website.

Since he began teaching the course, Bair and Metheny have published joint papers on the subject. And Bair has offered lectures on Woburn at 53 universities, in America and Japan, funded by $14,000 in grant money from his institution and the Geological Society of America.

Other geologists, too, have given the mock trial a go.

Bill Simpkins at Iowa State University has used Bair's online material and Harr's book to produce his own version for upper-level and graduate students.

"It's a landmark case, we all look to it as one of these great moments in history, involving ground-water contamination," said Simpkins, who will be grading students in a hydrology course this December on how well they can defend themselves and expound on their knowledge of their course subject before a jury.

''We divide the class into plaintiffs and defendants and try the case before students in an introductory geology class . . . [students] who don't have a great deal of technical background represent the usual jury pool."

So far, the plaintiffs -- the eight families that sued W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods Co. -- have won, said Simpkins. He said the trials use only information available at the time.

For his part, Bair can't wait to offer his class again. He said he plans to resume, ''as soon as my term as chair expires."