Jodie Whittaker and Robert Carlyle to Lead an All-Star Cast In Netflix's 'Toxic Town'

Netflix has officially announced the start of production on Toxic Town, a four-part limited series that aims to shine a spotlight on the Corby poisonings, a scandalous series of toxic waste spillages in the East Midlands during the mid-1980s which led to a tragic spike in birth defects in the years that followed and is considered one of the U.K.'s worst environmental disasters.

The Northamptonshire town of Corby was once home to one of the largest steelworks in Europe. That facility was closed in the early '80s, but not before a substantial amount of toxic waste had been dumped there. A few years later, the Corby Bourough Council demolished site as part of a program of urban renewal, a clean-up that involved transporting waste through populated areas using open lorries.

In the years that followed, the rates of babies born in Corby with upper limb defects skyrocketed, and was ultimately found to be three times higher than those of children born in the surrounding areas. Eighteen families subsequently filed a lawsuit that went all the way to the U.K.'s High Court in 2009.