The Job Was Poison, Says Woman Suing County

Marjorie Grisak wonders if a job she took to help the environment was slowly poisoning her.

She sold gopher and squirrel poison for the county, and thinks that over a year, she sniffed so much of the stuff that her body rebelled in ways that might play in a Stephen King novel.

She had excruciating headaches. She was nauseated. She had trouble staying awake at her desk. Others said they saw her drooling.

She’s on the mend now, but “I’m still undergoing psychological therapy,” she said of her slow recovery. “I wanted to work for an agency that was helping the environment, and they were poisoning the environment themselves.”

Grisak contends that while working as a secretary for the Ramona-Julian Resource Conservation District, she was exposed to poisonous phosphine gas emitted by the poison she was selling on behalf of the county Department of Agriculture. At least three doctors agree.

And at least two other persons working in the adjoining county Department of Social Services office in Ramona complained that they, too, were made ill by exposure to phosphine gas.

Those workers were granted sick days to recuperate from their maladies, but Grisak filed a personal injury lawsuit against the county and filed for disability payments with the state’s Workers Compensation Appeals Board.

County officials publicly insist there is no substance to Grisak’s complaint, and are fighting her in court. Her former employer, the conservation district, opposes her disability request.

But county memorandums and other internal reports obtained by The Times show some county officials harshly criticizing the Department of Agriculture for storing the pesticide improperly and for failing to train Grisak in how to handle it.

County employees who bag the poison wear protective clothing, according to county officials. But Grisak, who sometimes handled spilled bait directly, was given no protective clothing, no training and, she said, no warnings.

Grisak did not even work for the county, whose poison she was selling. The conservation district is a small state-funded agency whose main purpose is to offer advice on plantings and soil for farmers and homeowners. But because the district used space in the county branch office, it agreed to have its secretary sell the Department of Agriculture’s bait.

The pesticide--packaged, distributed and sold by the county--is grain bait tainted with zinc phosphide. When triggered by moisture--typically after it is ingested by rodents--the bait emits enough phosphine gas to kill small animals. The pesticide was sold by Grisak in 5-pound paper bags, over the counter in her Ramona office, for $1.89 a pound.

While proximity to packaged, dry zinc phosphide is not in and of itself dangerous, inhalation of the dust, or of the phosphine gas after the poison is touched with water, can lead to varying degrees of headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, coughing, diarrhea and shortness of breath, according to authorities and technical papers. Too much exposure can be fatal.

In a Social Services Department investigation of what had happened to its own sickened employees, the resulting report complained that “the Dept. of Agriculture improperly stored, for several months, a toxic pesticide. The matter was stored in an unvented closet with cement flooring. The secretary (Grisak) was not trained or authorized in the handling of this material. The cement floor, when even moderately moist, will cause the pesticide to exude toxic fumes into the environment.”

Where the form asks what contributed to the problem, the report says, “The apparent or alleged disregard of Dept. of Agriculture personnel in seeing to it that this pesticide was more appropriately stored with properly trained personnel.

“Our employees were not aware of this potentially dangerous situation until so informed by (Grisak),” the report continued. “At this point . . . (Cal/OSHA) is involved. Their representatives informed our workers of the potential danger and special care required in handling these materials.”

Such precautions generally include keeping the chemicals dry and avoiding inhaling any fumes or handling the bait with bare hands.

In another interoffice memo within the Department of Social Services, it was noted that Grisak “was observed to occasionally be drooling and suffering from headaches.”

At least two employees in the Social Services Department got time off for their illnesses. One of them, Naomi Dummitt--who no longer works for the county--was diagnosed by her doctor with “exposure to phosphine.”

But Grisak’s case was by far the worst. Three doctors examined her and concurred she showed signs of exposure to zinc phosphide, including “severe, incapacitating headaches,” lethargy, fatigue, nausea and depression, according to files on record at the Workers Compensation Appeals Board.

Dr. James G. Dahlgren, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA, and an internal specialist who examined Grisak, said she also might have sustained damage to her peripheral and central nervous system.

Today, Grisak, 39, believes she is on the mend--but worries about chromosomal damage, which is addressed in technical literature as a possible result of exposure to phosphine. She and her husband, Mike, had been thinking about having children, and now they’re in doubt, she said.

She wants disability income, and she wants the county to own up to what she said it did to her.

“It would have made life so much simpler if the county would have just said, ‘Gee, we made a mistake.’ But they won’t.”

For their part, county officials dismiss Grisak’s allegations.

The county employees who bag the poison wear protective clothing, said Bill Snodgrass, the assistant county agricultural commissioner, in defending how carefully the county handles the poison.

“The health department reviewed our procedures in handling it, and they did air samples in the Ramona office, and they haven’t found any problem with the air in there,” Snodgrass said.

The county no longer distributes the poison through its branch offices, Snodgrass said. The practice was eliminated about a year ago--not, Snodgrass said, because of the Grisak incident but because requests for it were dwindling and because the poison is available “through private vendors.”

In its formal response to Grisak’s lawsuit, the county counsel’s office said any risk she might have faced was “insignificant.” The county’s defense added that Grisak “herself acted unreasonably, carelessly and negligently (because she) did not exercise ordinary care, caution or prudence for her own safety or protection.”

Still, various county workers, in their reports to supervisors, acknowledged the problem.

Neil Connelly, a pesticide enforcement officer for the county, wrote that the county’s “General Services (Department) had some concern about materials on floor (due to leaky nature of the building) and hazards resulting from the smell of zinc phosphide.”

And a supervisor in the Department of Social Services’ child protective services office wrote in a memo clarifying the request by her two employees for worker’s compensation:

“At this time I verified that both workers had indeed been exposed to phosphine gas. The gas was a byproduct of inappropriate handling/storage by the county Department of Agriculture,” wrote Betsy Terrazas, the supervisor whose two employees work in the same office as Grisak.

Grisak was hired as the sole staff person for the Ramona-Julian Resource Conservation District in February, 1988. (The agency has since merged with its sister Palomar Resource Conservation District, based in Escondido.)

The zinc phosphide poison began arriving at her office in May or June of 1988--after the county, following an Environmental Protection Agency ruling, stopped providing strychnine as rodent poison.

Over the next year or so, according to office records, Grisak handled more than 400 pounds of the poison, which often was delivered in 50-pound bags holding individual 5-pound bags. Saying she had no advice from the county on how to handle the material, she put the poison on the cement floor and on the shelves inside the small closet--which was just 10 feet or so from her desk.

Immediately, she said, she noticed a distinctive odor, which later was linked to the poison, and is described as similar to either dead fish or garlic.

“I was getting headaches, lethargic, sick,” she said. “Others in the office were noticing it, too. I was handing out Nuprin like it was candy because of all the headaches we were getting, and we’d make extra-strong coffee to try to stay awake. I’d find myself going into a stupor.”

Dummitt, one of the two employees mentioned in Terrazas’ memo, but who has since moved to Oregon, remembered the smell too.

“I worked under the same roof, but down the hallway,” she said. “It was stinky. You’d always notice the odor when you got to work in the morning, but then you’d get use to it. In fact, what I most remember were the few days when I didn’t smell it.”

But, Dummitt said, she didn’t figure the odor suggested something dangerous.

“We assumed the county wouldn’t put something in there that was physically dangerous,” she said, “because the county is always so conscious about protecting itself.”

Dummitt said she remembered Grisak bringing the poison in from the back service door on a large cart, and how some bags were broken as they were unloaded in Ramona. “I’d see her sweeping the loose poison up into a dust pan,” she said.

And Grisak herself said she would sometimes simply use her hands to pick up fallen poison bait, pour it back into a broken bag and tape it shut. Nobody had warned her not to, she said.

Nor was she told to keep it dry, Grisak said.

Yet, her office typically was filled with plants and small trees donated by local nurseries for distribution as anti-erosion controls, and nightly she would water them. It wasn’t unusual, she said, for the water to drip through the containers and wet the floor--in and around the closet--before she got a chance to mop it up.

The building also had a leaky roof, people familiar with the structure said.

On the same day in May of 1989--after almost a year of handling the stuff--two people complained about the smell, she said. One was a passer-by who walked into the office to look for someone.

“As soon as I walked into the front door of the building, I was overwhelmed by a chemical-kind of fume. It smelled like something you didn’t want to be around or work in,” the passer-by, Lawrence Peabody, told The Times recently.

That day, Grisak said, a county maintenance worker, now deceased, noticed the smell too.

“He said, ‘What do you got in there?’ When I opened the door to the closet, he said, ‘You can’t store that in there!’ He said the county was breaking every regulation on the books.”

Within days, a county pesticide inspector was called to the office, put pallets on the floor to elevate the poison, and installed a small ventilation fan.

Still, Grisak’s nausea and headaches didn’t diminish, and in early June she saw a doctor. He started her on a series of referrals that ultimately put her with Dahlgren, in Los Angeles.

At the same time, she wrote a letter to her bosses--the board of directors of the conservation district--alerting them that she would not be able to return to work for a month. In fact, she decided to quit altogether.

And she complained to the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or Cal/OSHA, fearing that her workplace was contaminated.

Grisak said the Cal/OSHA inspector was astounded by what he saw, but that he could do nothing about it. That inspector could not be reached by The Times. Both times he was called, his supervisor--regional Cal/OSHA manager Don Amos--returned the call.

His office didn’t pursue the Ramona complaint, Amos said, because of an agreement with the county for its own Department of Agriculture to investigate complaints involving the use of pesticide--even if those complaints focus on the Department of Agriculture itself.

The state Department of Agriculture sent a pesticide enforcement officer to Ramona, but according to a spokesman for that agency, nothing amiss was found.

While the agency was miffed that it was called in to investigate “because we don’t regulate storage or if workers are accidentally exposed to it,” an investigation was nonetheless conducted, said Veda Federighi.

“We could find no apparent exposure to zinc, and no evidence that phosphide had leaked out of the bags,” she said.

Grisak and Dummitt said they were not surprised because, they contend, the poisons were removed--and the closet walls and floor washed down--by a county worker before the inspection. There simply was nothing left to detect.

The problem was a major focus of conversation among the county employees in Ramona, according to one worker at the time. “One of our supervisors told us to keep this quiet, to keep our dirty laundry to ourselves,” the worker said.

Even the directors of the resource conservation district seemed to turn against her, Grisak said. “They turned into a company of strangers,” she said of the volunteer board. “And when they heard that Cal/OSHA had lost jurisdiction on the case because of the agreement with the county, they looked like the cat that ate the canary.”

Raymond Foster, president of the board, did not return phone calls put to his office for this story.

For several weeks in June and July of 1989, the office was closed for the investigation. The closure was a “safety precaution,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services told the Ramona Sentinel newspaper at the time. “Some of the workers came down with headaches, but they may have been because the building had been sprayed for ants or it might have been psychological because someone was alleged to have gotten sick,” the paper quoted Yolanda Thomas as explaining at the time.

And in another county memo to his Ramona staff workers, Bill Bransford, a district chief for the Department of Social Services, announced that the building would be reopened because “no contamination was found. No symptoms nor illnesses that can be attributed to the chemicals stored were found. One person, who became very ill, may be suffering from lead poisoning not associated with the building.”

But Dahlgren, Grisak’s doctor, strongly disagrees.

“You can’t say the symptoms she had are unique to phosphine, but it was clear she did not have symptoms compatible with lead poisoning,” he said

Unfortunately, he said, there are no laboratory tests to identify phosphine poisoning, so doctors must rely on the symptoms, coupled with the environment where the person worked and got sick.

“Her’s was a kind of clean case--she was an office worker with an exposure to just one chemical. The only credible explanation that would explain her symptoms” was exposure to phosphine, Dahlgren said.