Toxic Spill in River a Trial by Fire for New State EPA : Safety: Early confusion, lack of information on chemical invited human disaster, officials say.

A pesticide spill that destroyed wildlife and vegetation along a 45-mile stretch of the Sacramento River could have turned into a human catastrophe as well because of early confusion about the extent and chemical content of the spill, officials said Thursday.

For hours state emergency workers were unsure what chemical they were dealing with and lacked the safety equipment needed to assess the damage when a tank car on a Southern Pacific train jumped the tracks on July 14 and fell from a bridge, spewing a powerful pesticide into the water near Dunsmuir.

In massive amounts, metam-sodium, the chemical that spilled into the river, can be deadly when it reacts with water, and it may cause serious birth defects in the children of pregnant women exposed to its vapors, health officials now say.

The whole episode was an uncomfortable trial by fire for the fledgling California Environmental Protection Agency and the agency’s chief, James M. Strock.

“I think that there would have been deaths if this had been still water, with the community right near by, with the massive degree of dumping that occurred,” said Dr. Richard J. Jackson, a physician who directs Cal/EPA’s hazard identification branch.

The chief chemical breakdown product of metam-sodium when the pesticide combines with water is similar in its effect to tear gas. “It causes your lungs to go into a spasm and put out a large amount of secretions,” Jackson said. If the exposure is great enough, metam-sodium can be lethal, killing those exposed by asphyxiation, he said.

Although Strock believes that the state generally performed well in the crisis, he said Thursday that he has already taken a number of steps to make vital health information more readily available to those at the scene of future disasters. He has asked his staff to begin sifting through a huge volume of reports provided by pesticide manufacturers and to summarize any findings that would help identify risks in the event of future accidents.

And he said he is considering the creation of an environmental rapid deployment force within Cal/EPA that could be dispatched to accident scenes on short notice, whenever a toxic chemical spill is reported.

Strock and others say that there was delay and confusion in the first several hours after the derailment, which occurred at 9:45 p.m. on a Sunday evening.

When railroad officials contacted the state Office of Emergency Services, more than an hour after the accident, the sole emergency warning controller on duty was told “of a derailment on an unknown creek . . . and the release of an unknown amount of a substance,” according to a memo released Thursday by the emergency services agency. “Through some miscommunication,” the memo goes on to say, the material was misidentified as “alcomethane sodium,” a nonexistent chemical.

Southern Pacific spokesman Mike Brown said the railroad had identified the chemical soon after the incident, had information about its hazards within hours and flew in its own hazardous materials team five hours after the spill.

But Strock said it was “several hours” before his staff was told what chemical they would be dealing with.

Even 10 hours after the derailment, health officials were still being told the amount of the spill was a few hundred gallons not the 13,000 that spewed out of the tanker car, interviews and documents show.

The railroad’s cargo manifest showed that the tanker contained metam-sodium, which was incompletely identified as a weedkiller. Southern Pacific’s Brown said that because the U.S. Department of Transportation does not list metam-sodium as a hazardous substance, there was no requirement to move the pesticide in a double-hulled tank or to post a placard that would clearly have identified the tank’s contents.

But Jackson and others say the chemical is a powerful soil sterilizer, one of the few chemicals left that are used before planting to kill pests that attack a variety of crops, including fruits, vegetables and cotton.

Within two days the flowing river had pushed the plume of pesticide into Lake Shasta, leaving an environmental wasteland in its wake, through what had once been one of the state’s prime trout-fishing areas.

The flow also had the effect of diluting the chemical, preventing a buildup of gases that might prove lethal to inhabitants along the river.

An estimated 300 local residents and emergency workers sought medical care as a result of the spill, but only a handful of the complaints were considered serious, and there were no deaths, according to Cal/EPA statistics.

As the immediate danger from exposure passed, Jackson and other Cal/EPA officials began assuring residents that there would be no long-term effects from their exposure to metam-sodium and its chemical breakdown products.

The officials based that judgement on health study summaries prepared by the state’s pesticide unit, which had been part of the state Department of Food and Agriculture until the creation of the Cal/EPA on July 17.

But when Jackson and his staff began reviewing the pesticide files, protected by trade secrets laws, they found studies showing that metam-sodium in high doses produced serious neural tube defects in the offspring of exposed rats and rabbits--a failure of the spine or skull to close properly in the developing fetus.

What was particularly disturbing was that the levels of pesticides used in these animal experiments were similar to what human exposures might have been at Dunsmuir following the spill.

As a result, Cal/EPA urged pregnant women in the spill area to undergo a standard test for neural tube defects.

Strock pointed out that the data on the neural defects is available to public health officials, despite trade secret protections under federal and state law. But in the past, California’s pesticide regulators have produced summaries of the information that focused on exposures in ordinary use and not on what health effects might be in the event of a sizable spill.

He said that will change now that Cal/EPA has taken over pesticide regulation.