Building Studied for Link to Workers’ Cancers

Another Pacific Bell worker will undergo cancer surgery today--one day before researchers visit her Euclid Street office to try to learn whether electromagnetic fields could have caused a string of cancers there.

So far 13 of 100 Pacific Bell employees who once worked in the building’s basement have contracted some form of the disease--four with breast cancer, four with lung cancer (one of these workers is dead), two with thyroid cancer, one with uterine cancer, one with testicular cancer and one with cervical cancer, company spokeswoman Linda Bonniksen said Tuesday.

Since no worker from the building’s upper two floors developed cancer, “we’ve been doing a lot to investigate,” Bonniksen said, including inviting the telecommunications research firm Bellcore to test electromagnetic fields in the building this week.

Workers are glad the phone company is investigating but they dispute Bonniksen’s figures, saying there have been 15 cancer cases among 65 basement workers in the past three years.

“She forgot the melanoma and the colon cancer,” said data processing worker Judy Parker, 47, who had surgery for breast cancer and who maintains a roster of her fellow cancer victims.

Parker suggested Tuesday that there may be a substance in the basement “that suppressed our immune systems,” causing a variety of cancers.

“There were a lot of tears after we found out” about the latest victim, data processor Nora Vest, Parker added. Vest is scheduled to undergo surgery for breast cancer.

Co-workers are worried, Parker said. Even though many accepted the company’s invitation to move out of the sometimes foul-smelling basement to upper floors, “they all worked down there in the basement. So who knows--they could be the next one.”

Cause of the cancers remains unknown. Although Pacific Bell contractors have sampled the building’s air and water and tested for radon gas and asbestos, the results were either negative or well below limits considered dangerous, Bonniksen said.

Recently Pacific Bell officials authorized a new round of tests that start Thursday when researchers from Bellcore visit the Euclid Street office. That inspection is part of a national study of telephone company offices to learn if low levels of radiation might cause cancer.

Also, Pacific Bell has hired a Los Angeles environmental firm, Forensic Analytical, to research the building’s history over the past 100 years, including whether any toxic substance was ever kept there. That study should begin in a few days, Bonniksen said.

Pacific Bell is now gathering data from Euclid Street employees and their physicians to see if any had a “lifestyle” risk for cancer. Also in June, UC Irvine’s Cancer Surveillance Program opened a new inquiry to learn if the cancers might have a common cause. A 1990 UCI study found a high cancer rate there, but the number of cancer cases--then only nine--was not statistically significant, Bonniksen noted.

Whatever the new tests show, Bonniksen said, the company plans to submit the findings to state health officials and ask them to “name us an expert who can look at everything we’ve missed,” for one last study of the building.

For all that, Bonniksen cautioned, “I don’t think the issue will ever be closed. The origins of cancer are very complex. . . . There will probably always be employees who believe it’s that basement.”