Water Research Director Denies Aide’s Charges of Bay Pollution

The director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project denied on Wednesday a top aide’s allegations that he played down the severity of toxic contamination in Santa Monica and San Pedro bays and said he would ask a scientific tribunal to judge whether he is telling the truth.

Project director Willard Bascom said he was “shocked” by chemist David Brown’s accusations that he distorted scientific information and attempted to censor staff members. Bascom called Brown a publicity seeker and predicted that other scientists will support his scientific conclusions on the bays.

“I want the truth out, and I’m willing to take my licks in front of a jury of my peers,” Bascom said in a telephone interview from Vicksburg, Miss., where he was attending a meeting. “What I don’t like are these wild allegations.”

Brown’s accusations appeared in a five-page letter to Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), chairman of a state task force investigating bay contamination, and were made after Brown and Bascom clashed last Friday at a public hearing of Hayden’s task force.

After receiving Brown’s accusations, Hayden called for Bascom’s immediate resignation and advised Robert Ghirelli, director of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, to disregard Bascom’s findings on a controversial waiver request filed for the Hyperion waste-water treatment plant.

Ghirelli said Wednesday that Hayden’s letter will be reviewed by his staff and the board and placed in the public record of testimony concerning the Hyperion waiver request.

An angry Bascom labeled Hayden an associate of “extreme environmentalists” and said he has no intention of resigning before his July retirement.

In an interview Wednesday, Brown said he considers the letter an extension of his testimony and had no idea that it would generate so much controversy. The chemist called the incident “traumatizing” but expressed no regrets about his statements and claimed that other senior scientists at the agency will support him in a showdown with Bascom.

“I sent the letter off myself without consulting anyone on the staff,” said Brown, 36, who has a year left on a federal grant that funds his position at the agency. “But I think it’s important, if Mr. Bascom wants to discuss each point in the letter, that we have the experts present from each department to discuss it with him.”

The 68-year-old Bascom has headed the research organization, which is funded by the Los Angeles and Orange counties’ sanitation districts and other public agencies, for 12 years. As the overseer of dozens of contamination studies, he has repeatedly maintained that the bays are free from hazardous pollution.

“We’ve done a lot of hard work on the bays, and I think the public is entitled to know what it is,” Bascom said. “The one thing you can accuse me of is simplifying the data so that it’s understandable.”

Charges Coercion

Brown, however, contends that Bascom provided “an unsuspecting public and unsuspecting public officials with false information” in order to please the waste dischargers that fund the agency. In one instance, he said, Bascom tried to coerce staff members into producing information that would help Hyperion win its battle to dump partly treated sewage into the waters off Playa del Rey.

To support the allegation, Brown produced an internal memo in which Bascom reminded staff members that their “purpose” was to “rebut the unsubstantiated allegations of environmentalists . . . in a long-term struggle with the EPA.”

Bascom admitted that he wrote the letter but denied that he intended to coerce staff members, saying, “I have never been pressured and I have never pressured anybody else.” Still, he conceded that negative reports about contamination could hurt the organization financially. “If you twist the lion’s head too damn hard, any one of the five agencies that support us may not support us anymore,” he said.

Bascom also issued a point-by-point denial of four specific allegations made by Brown. In one instance, Brown accused his boss of misrepresenting the hazard caused by DDT and other toxic chemicals by stressing that high concentration levels are dropping without mentioning that the contamination is also spreading.

Contamination Levels

Bascom replied that a “little bit” of DDT is drifting through the bays but added that most of the chemical is in isolated spots. And in those spots, Bascom said, the contamination levels are decreasing.

In another instance, Brown said that Bascom had played down the toxic threat by talking about the national cancer risk standard for contaminated fish without mentioning that Southern California sport fishermen eat four times more fish than the national average. Bascom said he agreed that the cancer risk is higher for local sport fishermen but said he did not believe that it was his place to question the standard set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Asked about Brown’s allegations that he was blocking research on the effects of chemicals that could be much more hazardous than DDT or PCBs, Bascom said he has “never told the chemists not to measure something,” adding that it is probable that other chemicals would show up in routine testing anyway.

Finally, Brown accused Bascom of basing conclusions that local fish are healthy on two to five fishing trawls, when 17 to 29 trawls are required in valid scientific tests. Bascom admitted that extra trawls would be preferable scientifically but claimed that it is impossible because it would “wipe out all the damn fish.”