FBI Probing Contracts at Toxic Waste Sites in State

The FBI has launched an investigation of contracting practices at federal Superfund hazardous waste cleanup sites managed by the Deukmejian Administration, The Times has learned.

The inquiry began as an examination of the state’s response to the death of a 4-year-old boy who lived less than a mile from the Stringfellow Acid Pits hazardous waste dump near Riverside, according to individuals contacted by the federal agents.

The boy’s family, charging that there has been a state cover-up, contends that the California Department of Health Services quashed its own internal investigation into how the case was handled. The allegation has been emphatically denied by the chief of the department’s toxic unit, Richard P. Wilcoxon.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles office of the FBI would neither confirm nor deny that it is conducting the investigation, but individuals interviewed by federal agents confirmed to The Times that the inquiry is under way.

Those who have talked to FBI agents say the investigation is looking at contract issues that go beyond the Stringfellow case and include at least one other site, the McColl dump in Fullerton.

One source, who asked not to be identified, said the FBI wants to learn whether cleanup contractors are charging the state for unneeded services and whether the state’s contracting methods are so loose that they might invite abuse of federal tax dollars, such as billing for work that was never done.

The questions about contracts come on the heels of a critical audit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, which was released last month. The auditors’ report criticized the state Department of Health Services’ toxics unit for the way it handled contracts totaling $28.5 million in federal funds at three hazardous waste sites--Stringfellow, the McColl dump and the Purity Oil site near Fresno.

The auditors recommended that the EPA hold up or deny $2 million in payments to the state because of contracting procedures that led to excessive costs.

Wilcoxon and other state officials have repeatedly insisted that they acted properly in awarding contracts at the three California sites and did so with the knowledge and cooperation of the EPA’s regional office in San Francisco.

They have also insisted that their review of the death last year of 4-year-old Michael Harman from aplastic anemia, a rare blood disease, was conducted properly. The FBI got interested in the case because of the family’s allegations of a cover-up.

Steve and Diane Harman and their two children lived within a mile of the Stringfellow Acid Pits, where for decades some of the most dangerous types of hazardous wastes were legally dumped.

But their $120,000 house on a three-quarter-acre parcel of land should not have been threatened by the contaminants that have periodically been washed out by storms or slowly been drifting from the site toward the town of Glen Avon. That is because the underground plume of toxic wastes that is slowly moving out of Stringfellow is heading in the opposite direction--toward the water supply for 500,000 Southern Californians.

In the fall of 1984, however, Michael Harman suddenly became severely ill. Within six weeks he was dead of a multitude of afflictions, including a gangrenous appendix and hepatitis--all apparently the result of his blood disease.

The boy’s doctors suspected that a toxic substance could have caused the blood disorder, Diane Harman said.

“He was a healthy, good-sized boy,” she said in an interview. “He loved to play out in our backyard in the dirt.”

With Stringfellow so close, the family suspected that the soil might have been contaminated and asked the state to investigate.

Technically, the Harman home was not part of the Stringfellow cleanup site, said Marcia Murphy, of the toxic unit’s office of public information.

Nonetheless, the department agreed to have its Stringfellow contractor, JRB Associates--now Science Applications International Corp.--take soil samples from the Harmans’ backyard. The family was particularly worried that their daughter, then 8, might also be poisoned by what they feared was hazardous waste contamination.

The Harmans said the contractors’ representative assured them early this year that the soil was clean.

That, Murphy said, was a “miscommunication.” The laboratory testing had in fact never been done.

The Department of Health Services had held up testing until state epidemiologists could review the boy’s medical records and autopsy. The contractor had simply told the family that there was no visible evidence of contamination, Murphy said.

The family was dubious and hired its own firm to do soil testing and a laboratory analysis, which turned up cyanide and a breakdown product of the banned pesticide DDT in some of the samples.

The Harmans found the results so alarming that they moved out of their home and will probably lose it because, they said, they are unable to continue making payments. They said they now believe that their property was used for illegal dumping and have sued the developer of their housing tract.

But when Barton P. Simmons, an environmental biochemist for the state, reviewed the privately conducted laboratory tests, he concluded that the levels of hazardous chemicals were less than the amounts allowed in drinking water for most of the toxins tested. The only exception was the DDT breakdown product, but even that was present in such low levels that it should not have contributed to the boy’s disease, Simmons wrote in a memorandum last May.

Meanwhile, the Harmans contacted investigators in the toxics unit’s own enforcement section, which began looking into the case. But the department quickly brought that internal investigation to a halt.

“It wasn’t that we quashed anything,” Wilcoxon said. “We said it was something more appropriate for medical doctors to try to explain.”

The entire matter was turned over to the department’s epidemiological studies section, which ordered another set of soil samples and is awaiting the results.