Home FEATURE STORY Ruben Luna Bruce Brummel Libby Thompson Bill Sinn Dave Erickson Tom Schultz Anna Sutton Anonymous Dana Weese Bill Fleming Update:Nicor denies contamination issue again Denise CrosbyDenise Crosby weighs in. Find out more. The Documents View Gallery Download .pdfs The Culprit? Workers at the Nicor plant in Aurora believe methylene chloride was leaking into drinking water at the plant How can your water go bad ? Without a fairly simple device, it’s easy for polluted water to back up into your shower. Download the page Read More Peril in the pipes Backflow problems have had serious consequences in the United States. Find out more. Additional Links Nicor Co. Information via Google Nicor Corporate Homepage OSHA Homepage Credits Story by:
Matt Hanley Photos by:
Donnell Collins
Bill Sinn, 50 Employee: 1980 - 2002 Surrounded by four half-built motorcycles in his Oswego shop, Bill Sinn finally feels at home. More than that, for the first time in years, he feels healthy.

"I didn't realize how bad I felt until I didn't feel bad," he says.

Sinn is one of the more than a dozen current and former Nicor employees who believe the drastic health problems they have suffered through for years stem from drinking water that city and OSHA records show was contaminated by being hooked to the boiler in the gas company's Aurora facility.

Around 1996, Sinn started to have severe stomach pains and incredibly violent headaches. He had trouble holding down fluids. Sinn says he noticed other people getting sick at work, but figured it was just bad luck.

"It took us a while to put it all together," he says. "What do we all have in common? We work here."

Sinn says he remembers employees asking for his advice on how to connect plumbing. He thinks inexperienced plumbers allowed the drinking-water lines to cross-connect with the pipes that carried chemicals from the building's boiler.

Nicor denies that plumbing was connected incorrectly, even though city of Aurora documents show the company was ordered to fix a problem that could potentially harm city drinking water.

"It seems like the sickest guys were the guys who worked a lot of hours, drank coffee day and night," he said. "It seems like it hit those people hardest."

Sinn, who quit in 2002, is still angry with Nicor, although he doesn't let it keep him up at night. What makes him upset is his friends who feel stuck there, bound to medical insurance.

Sinn now spends his days running his understated motorcycle shop. He still has the same work ethic — building beautiful bikes for 12 and 14 hours a day — but now he's working for someone he trusts.

"So many of us put our heart and soul into what we did for them," he said. "To get stepped on made it kind of fruitless.

"I'm lucky enough I can do other things. I wonder why I stuck with Nicor so long."