The 100% Solution : Microbiologist Bill Frankenberger Was Certain He Could Clean Up the Kesterson Toxic Disaster. All He Needed Was a Chance to Prove It.

ON MARCH 20, 1987, an agitated laboratory technician slapped a newspaper into the hands of Bill Frankenberger, 34-year-old associate professor of soil microbiology and biochemistry at UC Riverside. Frankenberger slumped into a chair, put on his glasses and began to read. Suddenly, he jolted upright, excited . . . devastated.

According to the article, the state of California had decided how to solve an ecological disaster at Kesterson Reservoir in the Central Valley. Toxic levels of selenium there had killed hundreds of birds and contaminated countless others. Now, the marshy ponds were to be drained and the soil scraped into a $48.2-million, 20-foot-high toxic dump--a permanent poison island the size of 40 football fields.

Frankenberger jumped to his feet and strode across the hall. He shoved the newspaper at his assistant, Ulrich Karlson, a fast-talking, intense 30-year-old German two years out of graduate school. As Karlson read, his eyes widened. “My God,” he said.

In test tubes just 10 feet from where they stood was an alternative to the poison island, the product of two years of research. Their findings had not yet been published or field-tested, but if Frankenberger and Karlson were right--and they were sure they were right--there was a way to clean up Kesterson naturally, cheaply and permanently.

In the test tubes were microscopic fungi that ate selenium and burped it out as a non-toxic gas. It was no secret that such microbes existed; they were a natural component of Central Valley soils. But Frankenberger and Karlson had coerced the fungi into gobbling selenium as fast as 200 times the normal rate. At that rate, Frankenberger calculated, they might clean up Kesterson in just one year.

But not if the contaminated land was bulldozed into a dump. The fungi lived, ate and burped only in the upper 6 inches of soil. They couldn’t make a dent in a 20-foot pile of dirt.

Frankenberger and Karlson decided that they had to “get somebody’s attention.” In hindsight, Frankenberger regards it as the moment he tumbled from the ivory tower of research science into a bewildering world of politics, bureaucracy and public policy. He prepared himself for failure--”We always thought we would be too late,” he remembers. But he was not prepared for two years of crusading, risking his reputation and research, fighting with environmentalists and taking on government bureaucrats. He was not prepared for the difference between the world of the laboratory, where compromise is unheard of, and the outside world, where compromise is the rule--where he could win spectacularly and lose spectacularly at exactly the same time.

KESTERSON Reservoir, 1,280 acres of irrigation evaporation ponds near the middle of California, was eerily quiet in 1983. Quieter, at least, thought U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists, than the surrounding marshes of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge and the adjacent Grasslands, a private marshlands reserve. The marshlands were usually a duck’s version of the Ritz Hotel, a choice spot along the Pacific Flyway, the wetlands route followed every year by thousands of migrating shore birds and waterfowl. In 1983, however, Kesterson Reservoir had turned into a duck’s version of Hotel Hell.

When the biologists investigated, they found grossly deformed bird embryos missing wings, legs and toes. Beaks of black-necked stilts curved grotesquely; brains protruded through holes where eyes should have been. Biologists also found hundreds of dead adult birds. And a flock of tricolor blackbirds, indigenous to the marshes, had an unexplained nesting failure: Thousands of eggs never hatched.

Headlines raged; environmentalists screamed for action; politicians demanded to know what happened.

It took two years for the state to declare that high levels of selenium--a trace element found in soils and rock--were responsible for the mutations and mortality. In very small amounts, selenium is essential to life. Ten parts per billion in water and 4 parts per million in soil are considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In some areas of Kesterson, the levels had soared to 3,000 parts per billion in the water and 250 parts per million in the soil.

The source of the disaster was California’s No. 1 industry: irrigated agriculture. The state’s farmers sold $16.1 billion in agricultural products last year alone, but the riches have come at a price. As land is irrigated, the water leaches substances such as salts, pesticides and selenium from the soil. High evaporation rates concentrate the substances, and bad drainage, common in arid regions, traps what doesn’t evaporate. Over time, the soil fills with contaminants or contaminated water. Draining the water and flushing the soil only moves the problem elsewhere.

On the west side of the Central Valley, where the soil is high in selenium and an impermeable layer of clay 10 feet down makes for especially bad drainage, crops began to die of selenium poisoning in the mid-’70s. The land was like a bathtub with no drain, filling with dirty water.

The farmers installed pipes to empty the irrigation waste water into rivers or into the federally built San Luis Drain, which flowed into the ponds at Kesterson. There, the water evaporated and was replenished over and over, and selenium concentrated and began moving up the food chain.

From 1983, when the poisoning first surfaced, to 1985, U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists found about 1,000 birds poisoned by selenium--”a conservative number,” says research biologist Henry Ohlendorf, who led the investigation. “We were never trying to get total counts.” The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the reservoir as part of the West’s massive federal water system, installed noise cannons to discourage birds from landing there. Signs against hunting and fishing were posted. In 1985, after selenium was named the culprit, the state ordered the bureau to clean up the mess.

By then it was clear that Kesterson, as one scientist noted, was only a “pimple on the rump of an elephant.” Next door, at the Grasslands, where some agricultural waste water mixes with fresh water, ducks have shown dangerous levels of selenium. And the same has been true for waterfowl at federally funded irrigation projects such as Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada, the Salton Sea and Tulare Lake in California, the Kendrick Reclamation Project in Wyoming and the Middle Green River in Utah--all sites laden with selenium, uranium, boron, arsenic, salts and pesticides. Biologists are investigating dozens more sites.

The birds at Kesterson Reservoir weren’t just the Central Valley’s canaries in the coal mine. What happened to them sounded a warning for wildlife--and irrigated agriculture--throughout the West.

A PHOTOGRAPH above Bill Frankenberger’s desk shows a younger man, a long- haired college pole-vaulter running toward a 15-foot-high bar in a stadium at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia. His eyes--all calm determination--are riveted on the bar.

“I was a track star,” he says slowly in a soft, distant voice that belies his ambition and stubbornness. Then he adds with a disarming giggle: “It paid my tuition. One day, I realized that I had only two more years of pole-vaulting. What was I going to do after that?”

The pole-vaulter, a city boy, son of a Topeka, Kan., grocery store manager, took a soils conservation course that piqued his interest. “The course was concerned with the deterioration of the environment,” Frankenberger says. “It really opened up things for me.”

After completing a master’s degree and a doctorate in agronomy, the science and economics of crop production, at Iowa State University, he arrived at the University of California, Riverside, in 1981 with his two sons and his wife, who was expecting their third child. He taught one course a quarter and spent most of the rest of his waking hours conducting basic research alongside a group of soils microbiologists pioneering the use of microbes to clean up pollutants.

In July, 1985, Frankenberger received a grant to study the interaction of microbes and selenium in San Joaquin Valley soils. Although he didn’t know it--the grant never mentioned Kesterson--he had become a beneficiary of the disaster at Kesterson Reservoir. In its wake, the Bureau of Reclamation had hired UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to devise a cleanup plan for the site, and four multimillion-dollar state and federal projects had been set up to look at the broader problem of contaminated irrigation water in the San Joaquin Valley. Frankenberger’s $38,000 and his research assistant were paid for by one of those projects.

He and Karlson hunkered down to the science of microbes and selenium. First, they discovered three fungus species-- Acremonium falciforme, Penicillium citrinum and Ulocladium tuberculatum --that had an appetite for very high concentrations of selenium. Then they stumbled on a decades-old study that showed that the eating and burping process, called volatilization, was speeded up by adding carbon in the form of glucose. What else, they wondered, fueled the process or stopped it?

“We did a grab sample,” says Frankenberger, referring to a seemingly unscientific scientific method of grabbing anything they could get their hands on to apply to the fungi. They paid special attention to natural elements of the Central Valley soils--crop residues, feed-lot manures and sewage sludge. Within six months, they found that applying carbon in the form of pectin, from citrus peelings, as well as stirring the soil and keeping it warm and moist, dramatically increased volatilization rates. In test tubes containing soils with 100 parts per million of selenium, they were able to remove 51% of the element in 118 days. Absorbed in their research, Frankenberger and Karlson ignored the outside world.

In 1986, they heard none of the screams of outrage when the state shut down the San Luis Drain and threatened to end irrigation in the area. They heard none of the debate over the cleanup plans. One from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory would have replaced contaminated water with selenium-free water. Another the lab offered would have immobilized selenium in pond sediments. The bureau proposed a more familiar route: Create a dump. They heard nothing until the news article in March, when the state and environmentalists agreed that the LBL plans were “research” and that a toxic dump was the best way to halt bird deaths.

“I knew the name--Kesterson--and that it had selenium problems,” Frankenberger remembers. “But I knew absolutely nothing about the alternatives for cleanup until I read that story.”

Frankenberger’s first response was tentative. He and Karlson gave a summary of their research to a Bureau of Reclamation environmental engineer they knew. The most they hoped for was a chance to conduct field tests at Kesterson to prove their research. The response stunned them.

In June, a copy of an LBL report was sent anonymously to Frankenberger’s lab. In part, the report read: “We were jolted into a decision to quickly set up a volatilization experiment after we received a copy of the . . . letter and manuscript sent by Bill Frankenberger to . . . the Bureau of Reclamation’s Sacramento office.” It concluded: The “data supports Frankenberger’s proposal for selenium volatilization as a cleanup process.”

“I was extremely upset,” says Frankenberger. He had never heard from LBL, a courtesy he expected if another lab intended to duplicate his unpublished research. Would LBL steal his thunder, if not his data? “I wanted to make sure we would be the ones involved in field tests, not LBL,” he says.

But how could he protect his claim on volatilization? He could go to the newspapers with his research, but that could jeopardize his career. It was a big leap from a few test-tube results to proposing a plan to clean up Kesterson. Besides, protocol meant waiting until research had been reviewed by one’s peers in a respected journal before announcing anything publicly.

Frankenberger paced outside his home for several nights. “I put a big path in my back yard,” he says. “I didn’t want to get out on a limb where my credibility would be questioned if it didn’t work.” He discussed options with Karlson, who agreed to abide by his decision. Then he rolled the dice.

They applied for a patent on the “Frankenberger-Karlson process.” They made an appointment to see Bureau of Reclamation officials. And they called a reporter.

Oleh Weres, a chemist who had helped LBL pioneer the basic research on selenium poisoning and who had been part of an early decision to discard volatilization as being too slow to clean the reservoir, was shocked when the press called for comments. He called Frankenberger’s theories “half-baked” and pointed out that they had undergone no formal peer review. (Later, Weres, reluctant to discuss LBL’s duplication of the Frankenberger-Karlson process, said, “We did just enough to figure out what was going on.”)

Eventually, the scientists from Northern and Southern California reached an uneasy truce. Frankenberger and Karlson gave Weres more details about their process; Weres gave them a better way to measure volatilization. In July, 1987, the bureau anointed Frankenberger: It gave the UC Riverside researchers $50,000 to begin field tests at Kesterson.

GOSH, IT’S so big,” Frankenberger said as he and Karlson stood on the road that topped a narrow Kesterson levee and tried to imagine cleaning up an area so vast that they couldn’t even see its boundaries. It was a hot, dusty day at the end of July. Most of the ponds were dry because the San Luis Drain had been closed the previous year.

They gathered soil samples during the day and hunched over a table in a tiny Los Banos motel at night to plan their field-test strategy. They wanted a year of tests. Since their findings were due at the bureau in March, they had to settle for eight months. Although they hoped that the fieldwork would prove the one-year-cleanup theory, they thought the fungi would still provide a digestive solution for Kesterson if the method cut the selenium concentration in the soil by at least 20% a year.

They knew the bureau was not planning to wait for their results to act at Kesterson. The most it had promised was to use the process, if it worked, in remedial cleanup after the dump was constructed. Still, Frankenberger and Karlson thought, if the field tests worked like the lab tests . . .

They could envision “farming” the entire 1,280 acres: spreading manure, straw and orange peelings, plowing the soil and installing a sprinkler system. They estimated the cost at $2,200 an acre, or $2.8 million total. If the cleanup lasted longer than a year, an additional $1,000 per acre per year would be required. Once the selenium was diffused, the bureau would be able to flood Kesterson with clean water and restore the wetlands habitat for waterfowl.

In December, Frankenberger was dealt two hard blows. The fungi weren’t working fast enough. The test hadn’t begun until September; he had missed the hot summer months when the fungi worked best. He needed warm weather to show what the fungi could do, and even with that, the field tests indicated that the lab volatilization rates would always outstrip field results because of seasonal and nightly temperature drops. “If only I had a giant hair dryer,” he moaned.

Then he discovered that the bureau planned to bulldoze his test plots at the same time it created the dump. He could lose the only chance he had to prove that the fungi could work in a situation like Kesterson.

Karlson and Frankenberger were desperate. “We felt we should be given a chance,” Frankenberger says. “All we really wanted was the summer months.”

They decided to try an end run around the bureaucracy. Frankenberger lobbied U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), state senators, water-quality officials and powerful environmentalist organizations; Karlson devoted himself to the lab and the plots. They described their results at scientific conferences.

Karlson began to worry about his future. “I was beginning to doubt if doing field tests was the right thing to do for my career,” he remembers. “A post-doc’s job is to publish at some point. It was not that I didn’t have the data. I had a whole drawer full of data. I was getting tired of the long trips to Kesterson.”

In March, 1988, about a month before the bulldozing was to begin, LBL hydrogeologist Sally Benson scraped 6 inches of dirt from empty Kesterson ponds. She watched ground water ooze back into the excavation sites and bring toxic levels of selenium along with it. It was clear that creating the $48.2 million dump would only re-create the disaster. Californians would end up with two hazardous-waste sites for the price of three: The bureau estimated that solving the new problem would cost an additional $96.4 million.

Finally, the bureaucracy ground to a halt. Citing Frankenberger’s process as a possible alternative, the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, which was responsible for approving the money for the bureau’s dump, stopped funding for the bulldozing. It told the Department of the Interior to order the Bureau of Reclamation to ask the state to reconsider the toxic-dump plan.

On July 5, Frankenberger, working in his laboratory, answered the telephone. When he replaced the receiver, he threw his head back and let out a whoop of victory. The state had delayed its cleanup order. It declared that Frankenberger’s process, “if viable, . . . is a preferable cleanup technique.”

“Frankenberger Instrumental in Stopping Bureaucracy,” the headlines should have screamed. “For the first time, the government has recognized a natural solution to massive cleanup problems,” the story should have read. But the details indicated another theme: Frankenberger wins the war but loses the battle for Kesterson.

“Viable,” according to the state, meant that the fungi must be able to clean up Kesterson in two years--in 1991, after a final review in 1989. From his winter results, Frankenberger knew that the fungi couldn’t do it. Five years maybe, but not two.

But the issue of “viability” was actually moot. What Frankenberger didn’t know was that the state, alarmed by Benson’s findings, had decided to cover the low areas of Kesterson with enough dirt to raise the ground 6 inches above the high water table. The idea was to prevent the rise of selenium-contaminated ground water into ephemeral pools--and the deaths of more birds--during the 1988-89 rainy season.

In October, Frankenberger and Karlson grimly watched “truck after truck after truck after truck” of fill dirt roll past their research site. They had written a letter to the bureau protesting the decision but had received no reply. Bulldozers spread 6 inches to 3 feet of soil over 600 acres of Kesterson that were below the high water table and the selenium-eating fungi that lived there.

By December, the reservoir was bleak and barren. It looked as if it had been prepared for the 16 giant malls, complete with parking lots, that could fit there. No waterfowl could be poisoned there. But then, no waterfowl could live there.

Kesterson Reservoir was a desert.

THE STATE OF California is expected to decide on the final cleanup plan for Kester son next month. The Bureau of Reclamation has already made its position clear: The leveling of Kesterson means that the cleanup is complete, the goal of no more bird deaths has been met and the reservoir needs only monitoring. “We will have elevated levels of selenium there, but we will not have it moving into the ground water or into the food chain,” says Susan Hoffman, manager of the bureau’s Kesterson program.

But what represents an adequate cleanup to Hoffman and the bureau hasn’t convinced others. “The Bureau of Reclamation has gone a long way to halting the immediate threat to waterfowl,” says Ken Tanji, a UC Davis professor of water science and the administrative coordinator of UC’s Salinity /Drainage Task Force. “In the long run, whether selenium will stay (buried) and not contaminate the surface is open to conjecture. It depends on the seasonal rise of ground water.”

Bill Frankenberger is less sanguine. “Filling Kesterson was a major mistake,” he says. “This is going to haunt us for hundreds of years. It’s an extremely good possibility that selenium will contaminate the fill material. I would have preferred to see a few more bird deaths than this.”

Jonathan Deason, coordinator of the Interior Department’s National Irrigation Water Quality Project, guffaws when he considers the situation. A drained and leveled Kesterson, or even the environmentalist-preferred lined toxic dump, he says, “is certainly not a model” for other areas where as much as 200,000 acres is contaminated by selenium and other poisons. “The tremendous volume of dirt and water makes removal and encapsulation impossible. Conventional hazardous-waste cleanup . . . just won’t work.”

Even Hoffman finds little hope for the future in Kesterson: “We may do penance at Kesterson,” she admits. “It may not be the best solution in terms of money, time or effect.”

Real solutions, according to Deason, who monitors 200 scientists focusing on the agricultural waste-water problem, are prevention (in the form of new methods of irrigation being developed as part of the research prompted by Kesterson); the possible abandonment of farming in some areas (despite multimillion-dollar losses), and the cleaning up of existing contamination, employing bioremediation solutions such as Frankenberger’s fungi.

At his test plots in February, Frankenberger struck a few poses with a shovel for a visiting university film crew doing a story on his research. Karlson, his post-doctoral appointment at an end, had already joined the Biotechnology Research Institute in Braunschweig, West Germany, to conduct microbial ecology work. “I remember when Uli and I did all this ourselves,” Frankenberger said, throwing the shovel aside and watching bureau workers spread orange peels, manure, straw and two new materials--casein and soybean--onto research plots.

Frankenberger’s one assistant and $38,000 have turned into 23 scientists and lab assistants; a new, larger laboratory; and since 1987, $1.02 million in research grants. He and Karlson have published four papers in scientific journals; seven have been accepted for publication, and three others are being reviewed. Oleh Weres at LBL is using the Frankenberger-Karlson process on a project to clean up San Luis Drain sediments, and a plan is being tested to use the fungi to clean up evaporation ponds on private land. Frankenberger hopes to get a new study going at Kesterson when the first ends in September. The new research would delve deeper into what happens during volatilization. He is also researching microbial volatilization of selenium in water through bacteria.

At the Kesterson plots, his fungi continue to show promising results. They are cleaning soils with 40 parts per million of selenium--about average at Kesterson--at a rate of 28% a year. But, cautious now about making predictions, Frankenberger warns that as selenium concentrations are reduced, the fungi work more slowly. Still, even if fungi take 10 years to clean up Kesterson, he says, it’s a better method than burying the problem.

Will the method ever be applied? Perhaps if the water table rises, or if research being done nearby by UC Davis and LBL succeeds in using plants to draw selenium up and out of the soil--or at least close enough to the surface that the fungi could do their work.

Frankenberger, looking out over the stark emptiness of Kesterson, can’t quite see himself battling to get the money and the go-ahead for such an ultimate cleanup. “Perhaps I made an important first step at bioremediation as a cleanup technique, but I just want to get back into science and get out of the political arena,” he said in February. “All this was too much for me.”

He gave the workers a few last orders, slumped into a rented car with a laboratory assistant at the wheel and was driven off along the narrow levee road that pierces the dry, flat land like an arrow. Shore birds, ducks, marsh birds and coots in the still-lush--and still-contaminated--Grasslands on the west side of the road heard the car’s engine and whooshed into the air. From a distance, their shrieks, hoots and whistles sounded like the roaring crowd in a stadium.