Cancer Deaths : Rosamond: Malignant Mystery

By LOUIS SAHAGUN

Sept. 30, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

ROSAMOND, Calif. —

For more than 40 years, this remote desert community in southern Kern County existed as an unregulated destination for junkmen needing a place to burn, bury and dump waste products ranging from copper wire to car batteries.

Along with the junkmen came carbon products manufacturers and metal recovery plants, which belched foul-smelling smoke that settled on this town of 3,200 people at the western gate of Edwards Air Force Base and stung the eyes and noses of residents.

But the people who lived here rarely complained about the junkyards and smelters or the refuse-fueled bonfires that glowed across the desert at night. After all, they came here in search of freedom from big-city rules and regulations and lived by a simple creed: Mind your own business.

Attitude Changed

That attitude changed abruptly when state health officials two years ago discovered that children living in Rosamond were contracting cancer at five times the normal rate--the highest known childhood cancer rate in California, according to state Department of Health Services epidemiologists.

Nine children here were stricken with cancer between 1975 and 1985, and only three have survived, health officials said. Five of the nine children died of rare brain cancers, the cause of which is unknown.

The childhood cancer rate in Rosamond is twice as high as that in the Kern County agricultural community of McFarland, which has received far more attention from news media. McFarland has a childhood cancer rate of 36.7 cases per 100,000 children, compared with 72 per 100,000 in Rosamond.

Toxic Substances

While researchers say the cause of McFarland’s cancers may never be known, here health investigators are challenged by a staggering variety and quantity of highly toxic and carcinogenic substances that have been deposited indiscriminately along city streets, fields and company yards for decades.

“I have never seen this much waste in one town before,” said Kenneth Hughes, a hazardous waste specialist with the state’s Toxic Substances Control Division. “The amounts and concentrations are alarming.”

Even though health officials have limited their studies in Rosamond to children, parents here say the cancer rate among adults is equally disturbing.

“It seems everybody here dies of cancer,” said Stormy Williams, 54, a Rosamond resident of 32 years. “Once in a while, you hear of a heart attack or a stroke.”

Health officials, however, say they are focusing on children for the time being because of the extreme difficulty in finding causes for cancer among adults, who often have histories of smoking, drinking or working under potentially hazardous conditions. Beyond that, cancer is the second-leading cause of death among adults in the nation.

“In Rosamond, the childhood cancer rate is higher than the Bay Area or Los Angeles,” said Martha Harnly, an epidemiologist with the Department of Health Services.

Of particular concern are four cases of medullablastoma (tumor of the medulla, a portion of the lower brain) and one case of cancer of the cerebellum (a portion of the midbrain). That is the largest number of childhood brain cancers the state has recorded in a town of Rosamond’s size, Harnly said.

Meanwhile, state investigators leading an ongoing $500,000 study of Rosamond’s air, water and soil have identified 35 sites to be tested for possible contamination, although they acknowledge that they may never find a definitive cause for the cancers. Earlier this month, they uncovered at two locations a health threat from elevated levels of lead of such concern that two families were advised to leave their property.

The 35 sites include a 50-ton heap of toxic lead oxide, a 20-ton pile of poisonous lead waste from lead-acid batteries, 100,000 tons of petroleum coke containing potentially carcinogenic carbon compounds and a 10-acre unauthorized disposal site containing heavy metals, as well as dioxins, a potent cause of cancer in laboratory animals, health officials said. Scattered across town are clumps of abandoned 50-gallon drums, some of which contained toxic chemicals, including sodium cyanide.

In addition, a test of a water-cooler filter pad from Rosamond Elementary School revealed 13 times the normal level of thallium, a highly toxic metal used in the production of rodent poison and military communications equipment, health officials said. The origin of the thallium, which though toxic has not been linked to cancer, remains a mystery.

Elsewhere, health officials said, they found elevated levels of toxic heavy metals and dioxins at three metal reclamation plants located 10 miles north of Rosamond, all of which have been cited in the past for illegally discharging toxic smoke.

Rosamond’s problems are tied directly to the fact that it is only 85 miles north of Los Angeles’ waste generators and sits in a county where regulatory controls were all but non-existent for decades, acknowledged Cliff Calderwood, assistant chief of the Kern County Air Pollution Control District, which was formed in 1968.

Stricter Laws

The unincorporated community begins just across the border from Los Angeles County, which for years has had far stricter regulations over burning and depositing waste materials than neighboring Kern County. For this reason, the town became a convenient dumping ground for hazardous wastes from Los Angeles County, Calderwood said.

“You are looking at 40 or 50 years of God knows what out there, and maybe now we’re paying for it,” Calderwood said. “Until recently, it was anything goes out there.”

Added Mike Richardson, assistant superintendent of the Southern Kern Unified School District, “Maybe we ought to levy a tax on Los Angeles to clean it (Rosamond) up.”

Meanwhile, preliminary results of the state’s inquiry have caused many residents in Rosamond to wonder if it will ever be safe to live here. Final results of the state’s testing will be announced here at a public meeting Oct. 24.

“It’s hard to accept that it is so polluted,” said Roberta Bishop, 35, a life-long resident and spokeswoman for Southern Kern Residents Against Pollution, a local group that has complained at community meetings about illegal burning that still occurs. “Hopefully, the state will tell us if there is a need to run and, if so, from what.”

The state’s findings have threatened to derail plans to bring massive housing development here to meet the needs of nearby Palmdale and Lancaster, which are among the fastest-growing cities in the nation.

For example, Kaufman & Broad, the largest home builder in California, last month temporarily halted plans to proceed with a multimillion-dollar proposal to build 700 homes on 127 acres in Rosamond pending the results of the state’s investigation.

“As we became aware of the potential problem, we determined that we would not go full speed toward development until we got answers from the state,” said Frank Scardina, president of Kaufman & Broad’s northwest division. “The concern is this: I don’t know whether there is a safety hazard there or not, and unless I am convinced there isn’t, we won’t build houses there.”

While the state investigation is far from over, a few business owners insisted that the cancer cases are exaggerated and unrelated to the area’s pollution problems.

“There’s no proof we have an extra-large incidence of cancer here,” said Art Landsgaard, 57, owner of Karl’s Hardware and a Century 21 real estate business in town.

Landsgaard’s son, Olaf, a 28-year-old Rosamond lawyer, and some other business leaders here offered another explanation for the cancer cluster.

“It’s a possibility that drug abuse is the cause,” he said.

State investigators do not take that idea seriously.

Nor does Debra Sas, whose 10-year-old daughter, Lauren, contracted Wilm’s tumor, a form of kidney cancer, when she was 3 1/2 years old.

“That’s baloney! My kid wasn’t taking drugs when she was 3,” she said.

Contracted Cancer

Lauren, who had a cancer-ridden kidney removed at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles in 1982, is one of the three surviving children who have contracted cancer in Rosamond.

“What scares us now is that we didn’t know we had all this nasty stuff around until the state began testing,” Sas said. “Now, we’re saying maybe it’s time to move out.”

Even some business owners here insisted that they did not know they had certain toxic substances on their property until state investigators pointed them out.

“All of a sudden, they come in here like a pack of beetles and say, ‘This stuff is bad, man,’ ” said Allan Young, manager of the John Alexander Research yard in Rosamond, where investigators found a 50-ton heap of lead oxide. “Now, holy mackerel, we’ve got a lemon here.”

Rosamond’s childhood cancer cluster was discovered by accident in April, 1986, when state epidemiologists were searching through health records for additional cases of childhood cancer in McFarland, about 100 miles north of Rosamond in the San Joaquin Valley.

All but one of the nine cases they found in Rosamond were located within a square-mile area. At community meetings held shortly after the discovery, residents began to voice concerns about the legacy of burning and dumping here.

It was during these meetings that residents also began to wonder whether the cancer problem included adults as well as children.

Compiled List

Joan McKee, 49, a Rosamond resident of 42 years, even compiled a list of adults who have died of cancer here, which she planned to hand over to health authorities.

“Without even trying, I came up with a list of 40 names,” said McKee, who lives on a street on the west side of town where she said six of seven families have been touched by the disease. “The people in Bakersfield (the Kern County seat) said they would be right out. I never heard from them again.”

In frustration, McKee said she destroyed the list. About three months later, she was diagnosed as having multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that attacks the white blood cells.

“I got too sick to care anymore,” McKee said. “But I do believe my cancer is environmental.”

Meanwhile, rumors of potential cancer causes here abound. Some point to potentially hazardous materials and equipment hauled into town from Edwards Air Force Base and burned or stored at local metal reclamation plants and junkyards. Others believe that soil and water wells may have been contaminated with chemicals and substances from old arsenic, uranium and gold mines in the surrounding hills.

A few, including a former state toxicologist, theorize that crops grown in the surrounding flatlands may have harbored carcinogenic viruses and funguses.

‘Unique Problems’

“In Rosamond, we are looking at unique problems needing unique solutions,” said Dr. Rudy Von Burg, who left the state Toxic Substances Division a month ago to become Bechtel Corp.’s chief toxicologist.

It was Von Burg who tested a water-cooler filter pad at Rosamond Elementary School, where some of the victims were students, and found elevated levels of toxic thallium, which he believes may have come from the air or water used in the cooler.

Von Burg has also proposed that potentially carcinogenic crop viruses may have contaminated sugar beet waste dumped over the years along local streets and the railroad track that bisects the town. State health officials, he said, dismissed the idea.

“We had a scientific disagreement,” Von Burg said.

State epidemiologists, he added, “have been working within the limit of current scientific thought . . . and unwilling to break out of that thought.”

“I suppose if we really wanted to stretch our imaginations we could suspect something fell from outer space,” responded Lynn Goldman, chief of the state’s Environmental, Epidemiology and Toxicology Division. “We don’t know of any cancer clusters caused by plant pathogens. I don’t think that theory merits follow-up.”

However, Goldman said that state investigators are conducting extensive testing of local water sources for a wide variety of carcinogenic substances and even plan to examine brain tissue samples from cancer victims “for human viruses--not plant viruses.”

Scrap Metal

Bill Huffman, 78, thinks they are all wrong. The scrap metal dealer operates a smelting operation 10 miles north of town where state investigators found soil contaminated with dangerous levels of heavy metals and dioxins.

“If it’s gonna kill me, it better hurry, or else I’m gonna die of old age,” said Huffman, who blamed the childhood cancers on smog produced by increasing numbers of automobiles in the Rosamond area, a theory discounted by health investigators.

Nonetheless, Huffman recalled a time 20 years ago when salvage operators from Los Angeles routinely converged at a disposal site about 3 miles south of town to burn military equipment and insulation off copper wire and to incinerate photographic film to recover silver compounds from the ashes.

State investigators believe the same site is contaminated with heavy metals and dioxins and this week planned to fence the 10-acre area and post warning signs.

“There’d be 18 trucks at a time out there burning wire, and that smoke went every which place,” said Huffman, adjusting his grimy captain’s cap while leaning up against one of several old Packard automobiles he keeps in his scrap metal yard. “They didn’t give a damn which way the wind blew.”

COMPARING ROSAMOND’S CANCER RATES

These are figures to compare childhood cancer rates in Rosamond with those of other Kern County towns and with selected regions in the United States. Rates are computed per 100,000 children per year. In the Kern County figures, childhood is defined as age 0 to 20. In the national figures, it is defined as age 0 to 19.

Rosamond

Est. Pop. Aged 0 to 20: 1,010

Confirmed Cases 1975-85: 9

Rate/100,000 per year: 72

McFarland

Est. Pop. Aged 0 to 20: 2,475

Confirmed Cases 1975-85: 10

Rate/100,000 per year: 36.7

Delano

Est. Pop. Aged 0 to 20: 6,615

Confirmed Cases 1975-85: 6

Rate/100,000 per year: 8.2