Medfly Attack Stirs Barely a Whimper : Environment: While L.A. has rallied against sprayings, Orange County remains nonchalant. An aide calls the passivity ‘appalling.’

Randall Toler is sure there are other critics out there of the state’s aerial assault on the Mediterranean fruit fly, but he couldn’t prove it by the turnout at a demonstration he tried to stage a few weeks ago.

When just one supporter showed up, the Fullerton man had to scrub the whole thing. And a team of helicopters proceeded unhindered to spray hundreds of gallons of malathion mix over North County, with no hint of protest in the streets below.

“The opposition just hasn’t developed yet here,” the self-styled environmental activist lamented.

While the state’s recent onslaught of aerial spraying has triggered growing resistance among Los Angeles residents and politicians, it has drawn barely a whimper among those in Orange County, even as the pesky Medfly has threatened to move deeper into the county.

“The passivity is appalling,” said Huntington Beach Councilman Peter M. Green, a human ecology professor who fears that the Medfly may be heading toward his city. “How people can allow some helicopters to come over their houses and dump poison on them, I don’t know. I don’t see anyone questioning this at all. I don’t see it on anyone’s agenda.”

The difference in reactions between Los Angeles and Orange County may be explained, in part, by contrasting temperaments, politics and loyalties in the two regions, political observers say.

In Orange County, a community considered more conservative than Los Angeles in both its politics and its approach toward governing, politicians may be less likely to challenge the policy of a Republican administration in Sacramento, observers suggest. And that may be particularly true on an issue that many believe sharply undercut the political future of Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. in 1981 through his failure to respond quickly to the Medfly.

But the biggest reason for the differing responses, politicians agree, is also the simplest: The Medfly has not hit here with the same severity and duration as Los Angeles.

If and when that does happen, officials caution, a political firestorm seems sure to follow in Orange County.

Already, some North County residents, now facing as many as a dozen sprayings in their neighborhoods through the summer under an aggressive new state plan, have privately voiced fears about what the drops of pesticide mix may be doing to their bodies and the environment, not to mention the finish on their cars.

A few dozen malathion critics in Orange County have even called county and state agriculture officials, contacted the media and attended city council meetings to question claims about malathion’s safety.

But whatever concern does exist has not translated into any visible show of opposition to the ongoing Medfly spraying, nor has it caught the attention of many politicians.

With the lone exception of County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, virtually all county leaders and North County municipal officials have voiced strong support for, or at least acceptance of, the state’s Medfly spraying.

With only a negligible influence over the state’s policy, many local politicians view the spraying as “a necessary inconvenience” to protect the state’s $16 billion-a-year agricultural industry. The raiding Medflies ravaged California in 1981 to the tune of about $200 million in damaged produce and eradication costs.

Said Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas F. Riley: “I’d like to think that we in Orange County have rationalized that our own best interests are at stake.”

And Fullerton Councilman Chris Norby added: “I think people pretty much accept the spraying. You sort of joke about it and say that it’s there, and they’ll spray, and we hope they get the Medfly.

“If you had a lot of people in the community rising up against it, we’d certainly listen, but that really hasn’t happened,” Norby said.

In Los Angeles, the signs of unrest over malathion have been many in recent weeks: 90 people showed up for a downtown demonstration in one of several protests. Neighborhood groups banded together to create an anti-malathion coalition. And city officials formally asked the state to consider alternatives to spraying and are now looking at a possible lawsuit to ground the helicopters.

In Orange County, by contrast, the Medfly has been a silent issue.

“We’ve only had a few sprayings, and I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet,” said Supervisor Stanton, who is openly skeptical about the state’s policy. “I think we have to question this early on before we’re literally doused in this stuff. If not, look out.”

In Orange County, the Medfly spraying has been confined to an area just under 10 square miles that includes more than 30,000 homes and businesses in parts of Brea, La Habra and Fullerton. The region surrounds the Brea guava tree where a pregnant Medfly was found Nov. 17, and borders several other finds in La Habra Heights in southern Los Angeles County.

But another fertile Medfly was trapped in Westminster about two weeks ago.

Because the sexually immature fly was not pregnant, state officials decided not to spray the Westminster area for now. But they nearly tripled the number of traps in the area to more than 2,200, and the discovery triggered fears among agriculturists that the destructive insect may have broadened its reach.

To thwart any spread of the Medfly into South County, the heart of the county’s $225-million-a-year agriculture industry, officials say they have no choice but to spray the infested area with malathion--again and again and again.

For North County and the other eight areas around the Southland where Medflies have been found, totaling 277 square miles, the new state program will mean helicopters overhead once every three weeks in the next few months, increasing to perhaps once a week toward spring.

State officials anticipated from the start that their stepped-up spraying policy was likely to prompt public concerns.

“People are quiet about it for a while, but then just the noise of the helicopters overhead ruining their sleep is enough to get people cranky,” said Gera Curry of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. “We’re sorry about that, but this was really the only alternative left.”

At stake, malathion spraying proponents say, is the very core of the state’s economy--its agricultural base--in the face of attack from the Medfly. The insect is thought to destroy more than 260 types of fruits, vegetables and nuts by laying eggs in the skin and producing pulp-attacking maggots.

Japan, which officials say imports about a third of California’s $3.3-billion in agricultural products, has been monitoring the Medfly situation “very carefully,” said Hiroyuti Kobayashi, agricultural counsel for the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. U.S. official worry about a possible Japanese quarantine on California produce.

And the powerful agricultural lobby, which supports the Medfly spraying, has made clear to Sacramento that “if we don’t keep on top of this thing, there could be terrible consequences,” said David L. Moore, president of the Irvine-based Western Growers Assn.

“My biggest concern is the (potential) public outcry,” Moore said. “I hope people will listen to the scientific evidence and have the patience and fortitude to stay with this thing.”

Environmental critics, however, charge that the costly aerial spraying is only the easiest solution to appease the powerful agribusiness lobby; it is not, they say, the best.

They assert that the state has not worked hard enough to find other alternatives to combat the Medfly, such as the use of sterile flies to invade and kill off the fertile population, fruit-tree stripping, and further ground application and trapping.

And, pointing to past studies, these critics say the true health effects of malathion are not known. It may, they assert, cause cancer and genetic defects and damage to the nervous system.

“The best you can say is that we don’t know what this stuff can do,” said David Bunn, a research director with Pesticide “The worst is that it can really do some harm.”

State officials assert, however, that scientific evidence shows malathion, used in low doses for the aerial sprayings, can kill off Medflies but poses no threat to humans. But public reaction has been decidedly mixed.

Some North County residents in the spray area say they support the current strategy against the Medfly and believe state officials when they say malathion won’t hurt them.

Many seem most concerned not about the effects of the pesticide on their health but rather on their cars, as evidenced by the rows upon rows of tarpaulin-covered automobiles on spray nights and the long lines at carwashes the next morning. Then, too, they complain about the noise and disruption, likening the spraying to a scene from “Apocalypse Now.”

But some simply don’t believe that the pesticide is safe.

“I don’t want to be the sad recipient of news 10 years down the road that ‘oh goodness, we were wrong. This pesticide is deadly,’ ” said Kathryn Fine, a Fullerton resident who lives in the spray area.

Fine was so concerned about the malathion that she addressed the Fullerton City Council at a meeting last week. She was the only person to do so.

“It’s a shame that so many people are so lackadaisical,” she said. At work in the public reaction are two competing forces, says Elaine Vaughan, an assistant professor of social ecology at UC Irvine who studies the way people view the risks of pesticides and other environmental threats.

On the one hand, “people are naturally wary of pesticides and tend to overreact to the risk,” often with little regard for scientific evidence or assurances from the government, Vaughan said.

On the other hand, she said, “people tend to feel helpless when it comes to these large policy questions. And if they don’t think there’s anything they can do about it, they simply accept it.”