High Dioxin Levels Found at Smelter : Pollution: State figures show the cancer-causing chemical at Kern County plant in amounts thousands of times above government limits.

State health officials said Thursday that they had discovered alarming amounts of the toxic chemical dioxin at a metal smelting plant near the Kern County town of Rosamond, an area that has been plagued by a high cancer rate.

The state Department of Health Services discovered the high dioxin levels during a check of results submitted by a private testing firm, Chemwest Analytical Laboratories of Sacramento. The firm’s tests had indicated much lower levels.

As a result of the discrepancies, state officials will recheck other dioxin and heavy metal tests the firm has done.

The health department disclosed the problem after failing Wednesday to persuade Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe to order the immediate closure of the Mobile Smelting plant and allow the state to cover contaminated areas.

State officials said they were concerned that winds could spread high levels of dioxin, a cancer-causing substance, off the site. However, they said the nearest residents across the street in an apartment building did not appear to be in immediate danger.

Siding with the plant’s owner, the judge found no immediate threat and scheduled an Oct. 30 hearing on the state’s request. Meantime, state officials said they will try to work with owner Bill Huffman to cover two large contaminated ash piles on the site.

State testing found dioxin in bags of ash stored at the plant, which burns old airplane parts and other metals, at levels up to 323,000 parts per billion, and at levels exceeding 80,000 p.p.b. in soil on the site. State and federal standards limit dioxin levels to no more than 1 p.p.b.

The state testing, conducted in September, also showed dioxin contamination to the east of the 11-acre plant, at 131 p.p.b. Four samples taken around the apartment building to the south of the plant showed dioxin levels below 0.3 p.p.b., below the state and federal standards.

Residents of the apartments, mostly working-class immigrants from Mexico, said they learned of the problem at the site about two weeks ago from state health inspectors. Some said they were apprehensive, but others said they did not know enough to judge the extent of the danger.

“I guess I won’t worry until they tell us something more,” said Leticia Mari, a resident of the apartments at United Street and Reed Avenues.

Huffman, the 80-year-old owner of the plant, said he has been operating there in the same manner since 1961, and has never had health problems. He also scoffed at the state’s test results, claiming they are inaccurate and unreliable.

“If it’s going to kill me, it had better hurry or I’ll die of old age,” said Huffman, adding that his plant has basically been shut down for the past month. It has two furnaces that burn copper and aluminum and produce the dust and ash residue that state officials say contains the dioxin.

The plant is one of 34 industrial sites in the Rosamond-Mojave area north of Edwards Air Force Base that are contaminated with dioxins or heavy metals. The state has been studying whether those sites caused a cluster of cancer cases among children in Rosamond in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.

The state announced in 1986 that children in Rosamond were contracting cancer at five times the normal rate, and at a rate they said was the highest in California. Eight children were stricken with cancer between 1975 and 1984, and most of them have died. Rosamond has a population of about 18,000 people.

Because the same company that erred in the original 1988 Mobile Smelting tests for dioxin also did the dioxin and heavy metal analysis for all the contaminated sites in the area, state officials said they are having to reassess those results.

Ron Baker, a spokesman for the Department of Health Services, said the state caught the mistaken results by Chemwest in a routine check of its findings by the state’s lab. Chemwest’s testing showed dioxin of only 151 p.p.b. in the bagged ash and levels from 0.13 to 680 p.p.b. in other on-site tests.

Chemwest officials could not be reached for comment.

Baker said the state plans to offer medical testing to the handful of workers at the plant and to nearby residents. The state also plans to perform additional dioxin testing outside the plant near the apartment building.

The dioxin levels found at Mobile Smelting, although more isolated, are far above those found in one of the nation’s most notorious dioxin cases, the town of Times Beach, Mo., which has remained evacuated for the past seven years because a dioxin-laden material was sprayed on its roads.

Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella contributed to this story.