On a cool afternoon, when the sun tried without luck to pierce a gloomy sky, Burnice Tatham climbed into her red Ford Bronco for a tour of her Hipps Road neighborhood.

"The man in this house died of cancer," Tatham said, pointing as she drove. "And that man in the blue house died of a brain tumor. The man in that house -- they found high levels of arsenic in his body. He was full of cancer. He was gone."

Then Tatham stopped the Bronco next to a treeless, 7-acre mound that rises from the neighborhood like a malignant lump. The folks around Hipps Road call it "the dump." Tatham calls it "the graveyard."

In the 1960s, without the community's knowledge, the U.S. Navy buried large amounts of toxic waste at the site. Chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects and a host of serious illnesses seeped into the underground water.

Three generations of Hipps Road residents drank water from wells in their back yards. As many as 200 families -- 1,000 people -- may have been poisoned.

"This is like an atom bomb has gone off in our neighborhood, and now we're showing the effects," Tatham said. "One by one people are getting sick. One by one people are dying."

When it comes to polluted ground water in Florida, no place is worse than Hipps Road, a mostly poor area 15 miles from downtown Jacksonville, where people live in tattered trailers and struggle to get by.

The problems are so severe that Hipps Road has entered the lexicon of environmental war zones, like Love Canal in New York, as an example of the price people pay when the soil and the water are tainted.

Some experts say that Hipps Road residents may be among the clearest cases in the nation of the historically elusive direct link between toxin-tainted ground water and human illness.

In December, a private Navy contractor that hauled waste to the dump agreed to pay a group of residents an undisclosed sum rather than fight charges of contamination in court.

In a significant victory for residents two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled in the same suit that the Navy was responsible for contaminating the area's water. The judge will decide this month how much to award the 140 Hipps Road residents who could benefit from the suit.

"Hipps Road really stands out for two reasons," said Lenny Siegel, a researcher for the National Toxics Campaign Fund, a non-profit organization in Boston that works with communities grappling with toxic pollution.

"First, there's no question where the waste came from. The Navy's fingerprints were found on the gun. Secondly, the community was destroyed. People are sick. They've had to leave their homes," he said.

Hipps Road is one of the worst of 529 toxic-waste sites identified so far as a legacy of massive military dumping in Florida.

The Navy, however, has never admitted its responsibility for the dump or the contaminated water and has fought the legal allegations of residents. Navy spokesmen would not talk about the case.

But dozens of Hipps Road residents have no such reluctance. And their laments have a haunting similarity.

-- John Mosley's two sisters and two sisters-in-law had miscarriages. They drank the water. Mosley's father has skin cancer. He drank the water. Bobby Cansler is fighting cancer of the esophagus. He drank the water.

Kim Crawford has kidney infections and stomach problems. Her husband, Arthur, has kidney infections, too. Kim's father died of a brain tumor. Arthur's father has stomach cancer. They all drank the water.

And then there is Kathy Taylor. All five of her children have birth defects.

The worst is Ronda, 14, born with legs like pretzels and a crooked spine. Ronda is so deformed that she cannot even roll over. She can utter "Mommy" and "Daddy," but mostly she moans.

Taylor lived across the street from the dump and drank the water during her pregnancies. A recent blood test showed that she had arsenic, lead, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in her system.

"I lived out here since I was 3 years old, and nobody told me anything about any chemicals," said Taylor, 42. "I didn't know anything about it."

Many of the residents want to move but can't afford to. The dump and the bad water have made their homes nearly impossible to sell, and the federal government won't buy them out because their houses do not sit on top of the dump.

"It's terrifying," said Crawford, whose front door is 300 feet from the dump. "I just can't pick up and move. I don't have that kind of money. And I can't sell. I mean, who's going to buy a house near a toxic dump?

"Life as we know it is slipping through our fingers, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it," she said.

-- The dumping began in 1966, when the nearby Jacksonville and Cecil Field naval air stations -- large, industrial bases that overhaul Navy aircraft -- paid a local company to truck their waste to a cypress swamp on Hipps Road.

The practice ended four years later, when the dump was covered with soil and subdivided into lots, along with the surrounding area.

Although residents remember that their water often had a metallic taste, the health risks weren't known until 1983, when people complained that their tap water tasted of oil. At about the same time, residents began to find rusted drums with Navy and chemical markings poking up from the ground.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services tested wells in the neighborhood and found 60 toxic chemicals and heavy metals, including 12 known to cause cancer.

The contaminants included high levels of arsenic, benzene, cadmium, chlorobenzene, lead, mercury, PCBs and vinyl chloride. Some were found in levels 9,250 times the federal safety limit for drinking water.

In 1984 U.S. officials placed Hipps Road on the Superfund cleanup list, which marked it as one of the most polluted sites in the nation. The EPA also began to force the parties responsible for the dump to pay for its cleanup.

Waste Management Inc., the company that hauled the Navy's refuse, paid $530,000 to five families who lived directly on the dump in 1987. The families moved out, and the homes were bulldozed.

They are among the residents involved in the suit against the Navy for health problems caused by drinking the tainted water.