There’s something deadly in the water in southern Minnesota, according to concerned residents.
All along the two-mile stretch of Dodge County Road B, which runs through farmland about 60 miles south of Minneapolis, with every family living there reporting unusually high rates of cancer.
Among the members of just four families, there have been 12 confirmed cases of cancer — and seven family members have died.
“Every family along here was affected,” former resident Brian Bennerotte, 60, told Circle of Blue. “Every one.”
Benerotte was lucky: The long-haul truck driver was diagnosed with lymphoma as a young man of 20 and survived. However, his father and three of his four brothers didn’t survive their own bouts with cancer.
This is why some residents now refer to County Road B as “Cancer Road.”
Survivors fear the culprit behind this cluster of cancers may be nitrates, commonly found in agricultural fertilizers, including both manmade fertilizers and livestock manure.
After being spread on fields, nitrates flow into well water as well as streams and ponds. And a growing number of studies have linked nitrates in drinking water to elevated rates of cancer.
‘People [are] questioning, what’s up with the water? Because of all the cancer that people had up and down that road.’
Former Cancer Road resident Scott Glarner, who has battled cancer and lost his mom to the disease in 2021.
In fact, many of the cancers found along County Road B — breast, blood, colon and lymphoma — have been specifically linked in medical studies with exposure to nitrates.
“It’s eyebrow raising that you have this cluster [of cancers] in this area where you have high levels of nitrates and kidney cancers and bladder and breast cancers,” said Dr. Paul Mathewson, science program director at the environmental group Clean Wisconsin.
“Those are some of the cancers that have been associated to increased risk with respect to nitrate contamination,” he added.
The Minnesota Department of Health maintains that recent claims made by residents are the first time they’ve been made aware of the situation, the Daily Mail reported. A spokesperson told the outlet Dodge County’s cancer rates have not exceeded the state’s average.
The Post has reached out to local residents for comment.
Meanwhile, in 2020, Mathewson published a health study that estimated up to 298 cases of colorectal, ovarian, thyroid, bladder and kidney cancer in neighboring Wisconsin may be due to nitrates in drinking water.
And Minnesota and Wisconsin are just the tip of a very large and very deadly iceberg: Nitrate contamination of drinking water is common throughout most of the US.
A 2020 report from the Environmental Working Group found high levels of nitrates in the tap water of more than 4,000 public water systems in California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.
Alarmingly, those water systems supply tap water for more than 45 million Americans. The EWG report also revealed that nitrate contamination is getting worse over the years in many communities.
The Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1974, established the legal limit for nitrate in drinking water is 10 mg/L. But since then, new research has found an increased risk of colorectal cancer, thyroid disease and neural tube birth defects at levels of 5 mg/L.
“There’s been a lot of new research making a strong, compelling case that even at nitrate levels that are much lower than 10 parts per million you’re seeing these increased risks,” said Mathewson. “There needs to be greater awareness. The science is out there.”
The $27 billion fertilizer industry, however, is pushing back: In 2017, the Fertilizer Institute stated, “The US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry does not characterize nitrate as a carcinogen.”
But back on County Road B, the drinking water in wells has typically exceeded the safe limit for nitrates: Nitrate levels in the well for the Glarner family — neighbors of the Bennerotte family — consistently tested at 11 ppm from 2002 to 2011.
Bonnie Glarner died in 2021 after developing breast cancer at age 35. Glarner’s son, Scott Glarner, developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2005 at the age of 43 but survived.
“People talked about it,” said Scott, who has since moved away from Cancer Road. “People questioning, what’s up with the water? Because of all the cancer that people had up and down that road.”