Toxic Town: Sam Hagen played a pivotal role in revealing Corby Council's negligence in the redevelopment and here's why

The environmental disaster seen in Netflix's Toxic Town had a major figure: Sam Hagen. He used to work for Corby Council. Hagen was crucial in revealing their carelessness. He gave important papers to the families of kids with birth defects. This helped them in their legal fight. In the end, there was a verdict in 2009.

Sam Hagen had seen signs of corruption before. He worked for the parks and later became a manager and council member. Back in the 1990s, he was part of a push to look into fake contracts connected to a steel plant's land clean-up.

This changed everything and helped them win their case on Toxic Town.

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Toxic Town: Corby’s regeneration poisoned a generation

Corby, a town once home to a huge European steelworks, faced environmental problems when the steelworks closed, as the new series Toxic Town shows. After 1981, when the steel plant stopped working, a lot of dangerous waste was left behind. This included arsenic, nickel, boron, and zinc.

Between 1985 and 1999, while the area was being cleaned up, toxic materials were moved through where people lived in open trucks. This let out a lot of bad dust into the air. The cleanup was not done well, and it had bad effects. Many children were born with missing or deformed limbs and other issues.

Two journalists, Graham Hind and Stephen Bevan, made a big exposé about this in the Sunday Times in 1999. They found a report that showed the cleanup didn't follow the safety rules for the environment.

A doctor named John Scott, who knew about how landfills can cause health issues for babies, called what happened in Corby:

"An early warning."

Mothers in Corby, like Susan McIntyre and Tracey Taylor, had been worried for a long time that the dust was making their kids sick. The journalists' story showed that they had a good reason to be worried.

Taylor spoke to Time Magazine about a big problem:

“A fine dust got everywhere. You could clean your desk, and by the time you picked up your coffee cup, it was thick with dust again”.

Despite all the evidence, Corby Borough Council didn't take responsibility. But everything changed when Sam Hagen stepped in, as seen on Toxic Town.

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Toxic Town: Sam Hagen’s documents won the case

In 2008, an event helped the mothers in their quest. Hagen decided to share secret council documents. These papers had information that could get people in trouble. They ended up with Des Collins, the lawyer working for the families.

He found the papers in a brown envelope, which was part of a larger file with a lever-arch fastener. The contents of the envelope contained strong evidence that could be used against the council. This was a big help to the mothers.

Collins described it to the Daily Mail as:

“Something out of a John Grisham novel”.

Some documents showed that the Toxic Town clean-up in Corby was not done properly. They talked about problems like not washing wheels well enough, spreading dirty mud around public spaces, and not watching the waste transport closely. Despite past failed attempts, Sam Hagen testified in court in 2008.

A year later, a judge decided that Corby Borough Council had been careless. This was the first time in England that a civil court connected environmental mistakes to babies being born with problems. The families got a lot of money in April 2010, but the exact amount was kept secret.

Sam Hagen was remembered as a good person who cared about Corby. His granddaughter, Kerry Naylor, went to the first showing of Toxic Town. There, she met some of the moms who had worked hard to get justice.

She told the Daily Mail:

“One of the mothers told me I should be so proud of him, and I am. They said they would never have got justice if it wasn’t for him.”

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Netflix’s Toxic Town is now available for streaming.