In Netflix’s Toxic Town, Sam Hagen turned out to be one of the few people in the Corby Borough Council who was aware of the kind of evil that was festering within the souls of the bureaucrats. He was the first person to raise concerns about CBC’s land reclamation project to redevelop the sites once owned by British Steel Corporation. In the early 1990s, while working for CBC, Hagen questioned the council’s handling of the entire operation as he believed they were taking too many shortcuts to dispose of the toxic waste from the steelworks. But unfortunately, Hagen didn’t have any conclusive evidence to support his claims, and his complaints were shut down. It is to be noted that almost everything that we saw in the Netflix drama is inspired by real-life events, and the series has stayed true to the portrayal of Sam Hagen’s character, except for the names of the people he worked with, which have been changed for a number of reasons.
Hagen Saw the Red Flags
The redevelopment operation was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Corby Council and its members. Hagen, who was featured in the BBC documentary The Corby Poisonings, revealed that his former colleagues were playing fast and loose with the management of the toxic waste from the steel plant. They wanted to finish the job as quickly as possible and make lots of money, breaking most of the safety rules and regulations in the process, if not all of them. Hagen wanted to fight and take legal action against those involved in such negligence and corruption, but without any solid proof, he couldn’t have done anything. It’s quite ironic, though. No matter how much the mighty and the powerful try to “bury” the truth, it eventually surfaces. The only tragedy in this case was the toxins from these buried sites affected the innocent mothers of Corby more than anyone else. And the culprits responsible for such a horror spent their days in luxury in their newly built mansions, believing they did the right thing.
Hagen Tried To Expose The Culprits
On 16th March 1995, soon after Sam Hagen was elected a councillor for the Labour Party, he received an anonymous call from a young lad named Mark Bosence, who identified himself as a technical officer working with the engineering department in the land reclamation project. In the Netflix series, this very same engineer is introduced as Edward “Ted” Jenkins, who wanted to do the right thing and tried to report the safety concerns to his seniors multiple times, though his pleas fell on deaf ears. Mark told Hagen that nothing could be done internally. He would certainly lose his job if he tried to expose his seniors, which was why he wanted to remain anonymous and requested Hagen to do whatever he felt was right. He handed his personal notebook to Hagen, which discussed in detail how the members of the Corby Council were playing with the health of their own townsfolk. They’d awarded contracts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to the wrong bidders, contractors who obviously were unfit for pulling such a technical job. The leaders only wanted to squeeze profits, but it was others who paid the price for their greed. On 17 March 1996, Hagen wrote a three-page letter to the Leader of CBC setting out the allegations, but no strict actions were taken against the complaints.
As soon as Hagen found out about the Council’s recklessness and ignorance, he started his own investigation. It was believed that he had reported the matter to law enforcement, which eventually led to a police investigation in 1996. The officers raided the council’s offices to obtain information related to the reclamation project and the corruption charges filed against the Labour administration, who were allegedly involved in handing contracts to the wrong bidders. However, the inquiry didn’t return any conclusive results, and Hagen once again couldn’t do much to expose the truth.
Hagen Helped Collins to Build a Legal Case
In 1998, Graham Hind, working with Stephen Bevan, published a detailed report in the Sunday Times, raising concerns that the birth defects in Corby could be directly linked to the toxic waste sites in town. This was when solicitor Des Collins came across the plight of the Corby mothers and decided to help take legal action against the council, who would do everything in their power to shrug off liability. The first thing Collins did was to make some noise in the press, which was when Hagen heard about the mothers’ case and anonymously passed hundreds of highly technical land reclamation documents to Collins. In Netflix’s Toxic Town, we saw Hagen’s fictional counterpart personally delivering the confidential files to Collins in his office, though that wasn’t the case in real life. The real-life Collins found the papers in a brown envelope on his office desk. Sometime later, he made some inquiries, through which he got to know that the papers were left by a former council member, Sam Hagen, who was the first to take up arms against the Goliath.
Collins wasn’t a land reclamation expert, and it took him some time to understand the highly technical documents that Hagen had handed over. However, as he gathered experts, it was these documents that helped Collins and the mothers to build a case against the council’s negligence, who were disposing of waste in uncovered lorries that were spilling the contaminated silt on their way to the dumping ground. These toxins eventually kicked up huge amounts of orangey-red dust that caused the birth deformities in Corby.
Sam Hagen, who moved to Corby in 1962, wanted nothing but the betterment of the residents. He joined the Borough Council and worked his way up the ladder so he could see the beautiful town flourish but soon unraveled a larger conspiracy that he couldn’t ignore. He made it his life’s mission to bring the truth to the public, and in the end, through the mothers’ legal battle, he eventually did. He worked as a councilor for CBC from 1995 to 2003. Hagen took his last breath on 11th October 2022 and is survived by his children and lots of grandchildren.
