O.C. Hit Again By Malathion As Appeal Fails

Hours after a boisterous protest and a failed legal challenge, state helicopters doused parts of nine Orange County cities with 2,200 gallons of malathion mixture Thursday night in the first of perhaps a dozen aerial assaults on the Mediterranean fruit fly.

Five helicopters left El Monte Airport at 8:42 p.m. and soon began spraying the northwest corner of the 36-square-mile area as part of the state’s $25-million effort to rid the Southland of the crop-destroying pest. The job was scheduled to be finished about 1:30 a.m.

The malathion application, the biggest in county history, began four hours after a Sacramento Superior Court judge refused a last-minute appeal to block the spraying for at least 10 days.

Attorneys for Huntington Beach and Garden Grove, joined in their suit by Westminster, argued during a two-hour hearing that the spraying poses a potential health hazard and is both arbitrary and unconstitutional. The three cities were the first in Southern California to challenge the policy in the courts.

However, Judge Michael Virga countered: “When the experts tell me it is an emergency situation, and the governor has declared it and the state has declared it, I’m not going to substitute my judgment for theirs.”

News of the judge’s refusal to halt the spraying was a disappointing, but not surprising, setback to about 250 area residents who gathered at a busy Garden Grove intersection to protest the Medfly campaign.

Undaunted, protesters, some wearing gas masks and carrying signs that compared malathion to Agent Orange and other chemicals, vowed to keep making their case in both the political and legal arenas.

“The most important thing is to keep the pressure on,” protest organizer and state Assembly candidate Jerry Yudelson told the crowd at the corner of Garden Grove and Harbor boulevards. “Too many people’s health is at risk.”

At an afternoon meeting in Garden Grove called by County Supervisor Harriet M. Wieder, about 60 residents and officials from cities both inside and outside the spray zone met with state and local agriculture officials to express concerns about the spraying.

The mood was calm at the outset, but participants became increasingly frustrated by what some perceived as a lack of information from agriculture officials, with residents shouting out occasional caustic comments.

Westminster Mayor Charles V. Smith told agriculture officials: “The state has put us in the trenches in this war against the Medfly. . . . We have to look our people in the eye and tell them not to worry about it and that it’s safe. And they ask us, ‘Then why can’t we go outside and why do we have to cover our cars and our fish ponds?’ We don’t have the answers for them. The state has fallen down on the job in giving us the information we need.”

Wieder promised to contact Sacramento officials to try and slow the spraying. “We can’t stop it tonight, obviously,” she said. “But we should sit down with the legislators to discuss the matter, let them know that this is a top priority and try to find answers.”

And so residents in the spray area--an estimated 400,000 in all--began gearing up for the first of as many as a dozen sprayings by summer. Virtually all of Garden Grove, half of Westminster and parts of Anaheim, Orange, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos, Cypress and Stanton were affected.

Row upon row of covered autos lined neighborhood streets as residents heeded statements from state officials that the mixture of malathion pesticide and protein bait could damage the paint on cars.

Some school officials covered playground equipment and planned to hose down water fountains and other outdoor supplies this morning. Residents brought in pets, taped windows shut and covered back yard ponds with plastic--a hot seller at local stores in the last few days.

But some went even further, leaving town altogether for fear of what malathion might do to them.

“I’m four months pregnant, so I can’t stick around,” said Clara Scheil of Garden Grove, who headed to Thousand Oaks to stay with a relative. “It’s taken me six years to get pregnant, so I’m certainly not going to risk anything now.”

Others were planning to keep their children out of school today, concerned about the aftereffects of the spraying on children.

“I’m not getting that stuff in my blood vessels,” said 9-year-old Joey Rovirosa of Garden Grove.

Together, with two other friends at the Garden Grove protest, Joey sung a rap song that the boys had made up, telling listeners, “We’re the kids of Garden Grove and we’re here to say, we hate malathion in a major way.”

While the malathion application seemed the talk of the day in much of North County, many late-night shoppers and restaurant-goers in Little Saigon said they had not heard anything about the spraying.

A crowd in the area, on the night before the Tet festival, bolstered charges from Vietnamese leaders that the state had not done an adequate job of informing non-English speakers in the area.

One Little Saigon grocery store, which had been planning to stay open later because of the new year, instead closed early when word began to spread about the impending malathion spraying.

Attorneys for the cities challenging the spraying had considered using the Vietnamese language question as one argument for halting the application, but that issue did not come up during Thursday’s hearing in Sacramento.

Instead, lawyers questioned why Disneyland was left out of the spray area, arguing that the theme park is actually closer to the spot where a Medfly was found in Garden Grove than other sections within the spray zone.

“One could hypothesize that the source of Medflies is more likely to be visitors to Disneyland who bring fruit with them, than the permanent and less-traveled residents of the spray area,” said the legal brief. “This appears discriminatory.”

But Deputy Atty. Gen. Charles W. Getz IV countered that Disneyland was simply farther away from the Medfly find than the 1 1/2-mile radius set by scientific advisers for malathion applications.

While Virga refused to halt Thursday’s spraying, he did order the state to wait 21 days before its next aerial application to give the cities time to conduct more investigation. However, the next Garden Grove spraying is not scheduled until Feb. 15.

The Medfly problem first hit Orange County on Nov. 17 with the discovery of a pregnant fly in a Brea guava tree.

That triggered what was then thought to be a one-time-only malathion spraying over an eight-square-mile area of North County, including parts of Brea, Fullerton and La Habra.

Orange County agriculture officials thought they had the problem licked. But after they discovered a fertile Medfly on Dec. 7 in Westminster and a pregnant one Jan. 10 in Garden Grove--both at least 10 miles farther south than any previous finds--state officials decided to spray the whole area.

Because of a new state strategy for combatting the problem, that means the prospect of up to a dozen sprayings in both the Brea and Garden Grove areas by summer. Each area faces spraying every three weeks, with applications growing more frequent as the weather warms.

The next round of spraying in the Brea area is set for Feb. 12.

The expansion and intensification of the spraying set off a political firestorm of sorts in Orange County, where until recently local residents had been slower than other affected areas to respond.

Residents around the new nine-city spray zone bombarded their elected officials with complaints about the possible health hazards of the spraying, forcing some political posturing on the sensitive issue. The county’s Medfly hot line ((714)-447-7118) has been deluged with hundreds of calls each day this week, nearly 700 on Wednesday alone.

Times staff writers Thuan Le, Stephen C. Chavez and Tom McQueeney contributed to this report.