Editor Gone, Debate Lingers : Firing After Disputed Pollution Series Adds to Controversy in Santa Clarita

The story had enough drama and intrigue to bring an investigative journalist’s blood to a boil: illegally dumped toxic waste, four members of a family living nearby wiped out by unexplained cancers and what appeared to be a cover-up involving some of a boom town’s most prominent citizens.

Done well, the story would almost certainly result in prizes. And reporters at Santa Clarita’s 44,000-circulation Newhall Signal--young and inexperienced but encouraged by an editor who boasted nearly 90 awards during a long career of investigative reporting at metropolitan newspapers--knew they were pursuing a big story.

Chuck Cook, the editor, said he admonished his young staff to go to any length to make the story accurate. Remember, he said he told them, those involved will try to blame the messenger. Don’t give them any ammunition. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t back down.

Despite the advice, the spotlight of public scrutiny shifted to the Signal and Cook after publication of a series of stories in June alleging that chemical wastes, dumped before 1984 by Space Ordnance Systems, a Sand Canyon defense contractor, caused the deaths of four members of the Robert Hercules family.

Less than a month later, Cook was fired. He blames leading citizens, who were among those criticized in the articles for not aggressively investigating health effects of the toxic wastes, for his dismissal.

“I was removed basically because five civic leaders went to the publisher and general manager of the paper and said that the stories . . . were not, in their opinion, good community journalism,” Cook said in an appearance on a Los Angeles radio call-in show.

The stories, and Cook’s dismissal, ignited a many-sided debate that has continued in Santa Clarita all summer. Residents have argued over the stories’ accuracy, the role of political leaders in the editor’s departure and the nature of community journalism in a rapidly growing city with a population of 150,000. Meanwhile, real estate agents and other community leaders have sought to calm residents’ fears by convening panels of experts to discount health risks.

Leaders Complained

A coterie of leading Santa Clarita citizens--including City Council member and past mayor Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, present Mayor Jan Heidt, Mayor Pro Tem Jo Anne Darcy, and Planning Commissioners Rita Garasi and Connie Worden--acknowledged that they complained to the newspaper. They said that the series was sensational and that facts and events were stated out of context.

“We were dismayed,” Worden said of the six stories, 16 photos and several graphics that the Signal spread across four pages.

Darcy said she was shocked. “It made it look like we were hiding something, and we weren’t,” she said. “It made me very resentful, and I called the newspaper . . . and said it wasn’t accurate.”

All said, however, that they did not ask the newspaper’s management to fire Cook.

Signal Publisher Darell Phillips acknowledged that he was influenced by the community leaders’ criticism. He stressed, however, that Cook’s departure was caused mostly by “philosophical differences” related to the proper functioning of a community newspaper.

Phillips wrote a lengthy column earlier this month explaining the episode.

“I think we were guilty . . . in certain cases, of not fairly presenting both sides of an issue,” Phillips wrote. He said some of Cook’s editorial decisions were “totally irresponsible.”

In addition, he wrote that the Signal, under Cook, had committed a sin of which big-city newspapers are frequently said to be guilty: “There was a general perception that we were much more ambitious with a negative story than a positive one.”

In an interview, Phillips said he was aware of Cook’s long record of hard-hitting investigative reporting when he recruited him in September from the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. He said the Signal needed an editor who could keep the newspaper in the public eye, the way that colorful editor Scott Newhall had for 25 years until he left in 1988 in a stock dispute.

With competing newspapers pursuing the rapidly growing area’s rich advertising and circulation markets, the Signal’s new owner, Morris Newspaper Corp., wanted it to remain distinct.

Cook said Phillips gave him the authority to go after serious stories, and investigative articles about unsafe school buses, improper handling of 911 calls and unattended asbestos problems ensued. The paper’s stories often were chased by competing newspapers and stirred controversy. Cook said he was never told to soften the tone of the newspaper’s reporting.

“Until the day they asked me to leave, I was hearing nothing but ‘atta-boys’ and ‘way to go,’ ” Cook said.

Glowing Recommendation

Indeed, Cook’s severance report rates his performance as excellent in four of five categories and good in a fifth. Phillips also wrote Cook a glowing letter of recommendation.

The Space Ordnance Systems stories were approved before publication by Signal General Manager Sammee Zeile. Even after they became controversial, Cook said, neither Zeile nor Phillips asked him or his staff to account for the conclusions in the articles.

Cook acknowledges that the SOS stories stretched his seven-person reporting staff--that he was attempting major league journalism with minor league reporters. But he said he felt compelled to do the story, which he continues to defend.

“The story was well-done,” he said. “My concern as an editor was that we handle this responsibly and not to go overboard, and to err on the side of caution.”

But the stories’ critics said the newspaper was anything but cautious. While downplaying the nearly completed cleanup, the stories seized upon a 5-year-old dumping incident that involved highly diluted toxic chemicals. Even though state and county experts had found that the chemicals posed little health risk, the Signal reported allegations that they caused the deaths in the Hercules family, who lived in Sand Canyon from 1978 to 1985.

Critics also said the stories never suggested how the family could have been exposed to the chemicals.

Relying on an informal survey by a housewife, the newspaper said cancer rates in the Sand Canyon area were three to eight times national averages. But a 1988 state study of the area found that, on the contrary, cancer rates were below state and county averages.

The Signal’s stories severely criticized members of a citizens committee who had recommended that the study not be done. But the stories failed to mention the results of the study, or even that it had been completed.

Family Opinions

The series relied heavily on the Hercules family’s opinions, as well as on those of other residents among the nine families suing SOS for allegedly causing them to become sick.

The series also accused public officials of being allied with polluters, which galled the city officials.

“It came across like we had some small-town, big-time conspiracy going here,” said McKeon, Santa Clarita’s first mayor who, like Heidt and Garasi, lives in Sand Canyon.

“It was like we . . . knew of some big health problem and were covering it up to protect our property values, which doesn’t make sense because we all live there still. We drink the same water. We breathe the same air.”

Mayor Jan Heidt said she was stunned by the Signal’s allegations that she and others--who had volunteered to serve on committees to assess the hazards posed by the dumping and to monitor its cleanup--acted irresponsibly.

“I’ve always considered it to be one of the finest things . . . I was involved in,” she said. “You assess . . . the situation, and you take care of it.”

Heidt said the same can-do attitude and willingness to volunteer helped build the city’s hospital and a boys club and to win its 1987 incorporation effort. “Every community has its skeletons,” she said of the dumping incident.

When state and county health officials and Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies raided the SOS plants in March, 1984, in Sand Canyon, near Canyon Country, and in Mint Canyon, near Agua Dulce, they discovered that the company sprayed toxic waste water into the air and dumped it into the ground. Tests found trace levels of benzene, trichloroethylene and other chemicals in nearby wells.

$2.2-Million Cleanup

At the urging of citizens, the company agreed to a $2.2-million cleanup. A committee was formed to monitor its performance.

Three SOS executives pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges and served brief jail terms in 1986. The company paid $300,000 in fines. Tons of contaminated soil were removed. Wells were installed to remove tainted ground water. And tests of ground and drinking water continue today.

The Signal’s stories hinged on allegations by Marilyn Hercules that SOS dumping was responsible for four deaths in the family. Robert Hercules, her husband, died in February of kidney cancer at 40; his twin stepdaughters from his first marriage died of leukemia, one in 1986 at 20 and the other in June at 23, and his stepson died in 1983 at 20, also of leukemia.

The cluster of deaths remains a mystery. Some experts have suggested that Robert Hercules’ first wife, Diane, who died in 1984 at the age of 38 of a lengthy immune system disorder, might have carried a virus that predisposed her three children to cancer. Neighbors said they remembered that Robert Hercules used various solvents in his car repair business.

But experts, who were asked to respond to the Signal’s stories by Santa Clarita city officials, said they were certain that the SOS wastes could not have caused the deaths.

Even if the family had been exposed, concentration levels were too low to cause the cancers, said Dr. Paul Papanek, chief of the county Department of Health Services’ toxic epidemiology program. He said exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke is at least 100 times as dangerous as drinking the most severely contaminated water at the SOS site.

Since the stories’ publication, state and county epidemiology experts have re-examined cancer cases in the area and reaffirmed earlier findings that cancer rates are average or below average.

The experts said their methods were not foolproof but were the best available without conducting an expensive 20-year, house-to-house survey.

Rita Garasi, also a member of the citizens monitoring committee, said the Signal’s stories caused residents to again experience the anguish they felt in 1984 when the toxic wastes were discovered.

“We’re back to where we started in terms of the concerns . . . but not in terms of the pollution,” she said. “You can clean up toxics, but I don’t know how you clean up bad journalism.”

A former colleague described Chuck Cook--6-foot-5, 250 pounds and bearded--as “a bear of a man and a bear of a worker.”

Some fellow journalists praised him as an inspired, extraordinarily committed journalist bursting with brilliant ideas.

Many of the same journalists also said that in his zeal to produce award-winning, blockbuster stories, Cook, 44, has more than once unnerved colleagues with his news-gathering techniques. But several others praised his diligence and ability to dig up information.

“He was a guy you loved or you hated,” said Eric Miller, an investigative reporter at the Arizona Republic who also worked with Cook at the Dallas Morning News. “I don’t think he tried to be mean. It’s just that he was such a hard-charger.”

As a journalist, “Chuck is go for broke, let’s get it done, get it in the paper,” said Jim Carlton, a Los Angeles Times reporter whom Cook hired for his first journalism job in Port Arthur, Tex.

Although many journalists change jobs often, Cook has perhaps been more nomadic than most during his 24-year career, working for five newspapers during the past five years.

“I wasn’t surprised by what happened in Newhall,” said Carlton, who has been friends with Cook for 11 years. “It takes him only a few months to find the most sensitive nerve in town and expose it. That’s why he has to move so often.”

An ex-colleague at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where Cook was a key figure in the newspaper’s 1986 award-winning coverage of problems with the Southern California Rapid Transit District bus system, said Cook suggested several information-gathering gambits that resulted in breakthroughs in the newspaper’s investigation.

But the stories that resulted were criticized as misleading by the RTD. For example, the newspaper stated that one in eight, or 12.5%, of RTD drivers had outstanding traffic warrants, suspended or expired licenses or no license at all. A month later, the RTD responded that its own survey found that fewer than 1% of its drivers had such problems.

Cook said he relied on state Department of Motor Vehicles records for the RTD story, which “performed a helluva important public service for Los Angeles transit riders.”

He said he is never reckless. “I go to great lengths to document a story,” he said. “I realize that each story I print affects people’s lives.”

Cook’s reporting, which has twice made him a finalist for the coveted Pulitzer Prize, has occasionally put him in danger.

He said he had a gun pulled on him by a drunken source in east Texas and has received numerous death threats. Newspapers where he has worked, including the Signal, have received bomb threats from callers demanding that he stop pursuing a story, he said. He has a suit pending against the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, alleging that it hired an undercover agent to discredit him and his reporting.

“Anybody who’s aggressive evokes different reactions,” Cook said. He said one of his few regrets about his experience in Santa Clarita is that “dedicated young journalists” who looked up to him will be discouraged from being “aggressive and asking the extra question.”

Robert Hercules took his story to the Signal in November. After he died in February, Marilyn Hercules called the Signal and the newspaper revived its investigation. Eventually, three reporters--two of whom quit before the stories were published--scoured monitoring committee records and county Department of Health Services documents.

Cook said the reporters interviewed all the parties involved and reviewed pending lawsuits. He said the Signal decided to publish the story even though prominent citizens urged it not to.

Marilyn Hercules said the Signal “did a very fine job of presenting the facts.” She said she found Cook’s dismissal “absolutely appalling.”

But Dennis Ostrom, president of the Sand Canyon Homeowners Assn., disagreed.

“Our main focus is to provide the real data to the recent arrivals . . . in the Sand Canyon area,” he said. Residents who read the Signal’s stories got “the impression that there continues to be a health threat.”

Planning Commissioner Connie Worden, chairwoman of the toxics monitoring committee, said the stories and their aftermath demonstrate that the responsibilities of a community newspaper are different from those of a metropolitan newspaper.

“A community newspaper . . . is looked on with far more significance in a small, insular community. . . ,” she said. “It plays the role of leading the way, of providing leadership.” She said Cook failed that test.

Cook, who is looking for a job, disagrees. He said Santa Clarita’s leading citizens want a small-town newspaper they can control, and he was beyond their reach.