Banned DBCP Still Haunts San Joaquin Valley Water : Health: Pesticide was hailed as savior before 1977 ban. But it continues to contaminate drinking wells.

For 20 years the vineyards and fruit orchards that surround this small San Joaquin Valley town were saturated each season with a chemical that gave farmers a quick and easy fix.

The soil fumigant DBCP killed the tiny, pesky worms that suck the life out of roots, with dramatic results. “I can remember standing in back of my pickup and I could see right down to the row where I had used it and where I hadn’t,” grape grower Norm Waldner said.

Eighteen years after it was banned for causing sterility in humans and cancer in laboratory animals, the effects of DBCP are still being felt--this time as the culprit of the worst ground-water contamination in the United States.

Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, more than 100 municipal drinking water wells have been shut down because of unsafe levels of DBCP. In Dinuba alone, 11 of the town’s 15 wells are closed. To keep the tap running, local officials have been forced to break state health standards and pump the tainted water.

Like the science-fiction blob that refused to die, DBCP in the aquifers continues to creep from farmland into the cities, mowing down more wells in its path. It has already cost its three manufacturers--Dow Chemical, Shell Oil and Occidental Chemical--$50 million in out-of-court settlements with affected cities and water districts.

The amount could easily double as DBCP continues its voracious march and more cities such as Dinuba press their claims in court.

“No one can pinpoint the environmental and health costs because DBCP is incredibly persistent,” said William Pease, a toxicologist at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “It just won’t go away.”

Pease has documented DBCP contamination of ground water in 18 California counties, including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego. More than 1,700 public and private wells serving 200,000 people statewide now exceed federal standards for safe exposure to DBCP.

By far, the greatest impact has been felt in the San Joaquin Valley, where cities rely almost exclusively on ground water and where millions of pounds of the sweet-smelling, amber-colored oil were applied legally and then illegally by farmers after its ban in 1977.

Cities are now faced with retiring wells that routinely exceed the safety limit or equipping them with elaborate filtration systems that pump contaminated ground water into huge tanks filled with carbon, which acts as a cleansing agent.

No city in this vast farm belt has been hit harder than Fresno. Over the past 15 years, an underground plume of DBCP has closed 29 wells, many of them in fast-growing areas. Five carbon filtration systems at a cost of $800,000 each try to keep pace with the problem, but residents of some new suburbs complain of weak water pressure.

Last month, in the midst of a jury trial, the city settled its case against the manufacturers for $21 million in past and present damages and as much as $80 million in future damages. It is believed to be the largest settlement of its kind and unusual in that it compensates Fresno for any wells that may go down in the next 40 years.

Dow attorneys say the companies agreed to cover any future problems because they believe the worst is over, and DBCP is finally breaking down.

“We’ve resolved the DBCP problem for the city of Fresno in a fair and unique way,” said Dow’s attorney, Larry Looby. “Whether the settlement becomes a model for Dinuba and other cities, that remains to be seen.”

It was at a pineapple research center in Hawaii during the post-World War II boom in petrochemicals that DBCP (Dibromochloropropane) first drew raves. It not only killed several varieties of nematodes, the tiny, parasitic worms that feast on the roots of fruit-bearing plants, but it dissolved in water.

Whether applied via irrigation system or injected directly into the ground, DBCP was the only nematode-killing pesticide that didn’t damage the tree or vine.

As word spread to the San Joaquin Valley, growers experimented with the fumigant on a variety of fruits and vegetables. Early users soon learned that DBCP was a quirky product that produced miracles in one field and very little in another. It worked better on some grapes than others. Peaches and nectarines in sandy soil responded better than those in heavier loams.

Sales of DBCP soared. Occidental Chemical Co. in the valley town of Lathrop was processing 50,000 pounds of DBCP a year for farm use in the early 1960s. A decade later, it was buying and selling 60 times that amount.

When vineyards belonging to the Sadoian brothers of Dinuba began losing vigor and showing signs of disease in the late 1960s, they dumped the oily concentrate straight into irrigation pipes and watched it finger down the furrows.

“There was no question that you would see a result the following year,” Cliff Sadoian said. “Of course, none of us knew that it was going to do [to the environment] what it did.”

Plaintiff attorneys argue that Dow and Shell, the principal makers of DBCP, and Occidental, which converted the petrochemical for farming use, had plenty of reason to suspect its dark side.

As early as the 1950s, Dow and Shell discovered that DBCP caused sterility in male lab animals. Later studies showed tumors in rats. In 1977, workers at Occidental’s Lathrop plant compared notes and discovered that many of them were having trouble conceiving children.

Most of the workers settled out of court, but five went to trial and were awarded $4.9 million in damages.

California banned DBCP, but Dow and Shell continued to sell their inventories to other states and to lobby to get the ban lifted. In the late 1970s it began showing up in ground water in Northern and Central California and was promptly banned in the continental United States.

Shell and Dow ended up putting new labels on the chemical and selling it in Central America, where thousands of banana workers reported becoming sterile and are now suing as a group in Texas state court.

Some San Joaquin Valley farmers continued to buy DBCP on the black market and apply it at night on their vineyards and fruit orchards. Others quit growing table grapes and started growing raisin grapes, which can get by with nematode-damaged roots, or switched irrigation methods or to disease-resistant stock.

Cities where DBCP continues to contaminate the ground water have had a harder time finding a way out. Over the past 15 years, the population boom in the San Joaquin Valley has compounded the DBCP problem.

More demand for ground water has created what hydrologists call a cone of depression that draws water into a city’s core from the agricultural fringe. And as housing subdivisions have sprawled onto farmland, new residents are pumping water from aquifers directly contaminated with DBCP.

“Millions of pounds of DBCP were applied to the Central Valley over two decades,” said UC Berkeley’s Pease. “Only about half of that has degraded. So there’s still millions of pounds of this stuff to contaminate after the turn of the century.”

The city of Dinuba, whose lawsuit against Dow, Shell and Occidental is moving to court, has borrowed $4 million from the state to drill new wells and install carbon filtration. City officials thought they had the problem stabilized when they dug a deep well two years ago and began pumping clean water.

“It was the best well we ever had,” said Daniel Meinert, community development director. “But the DBCP migrated to it too. It’s been closed for two years now.”

To meet summer peak demand, the city has had to violate state drinking water standards and use the contaminated water. Last week, a letter went out to the town’s 14,400 residents suggesting that they boil the water to reduce any risk of cancer.

Some longtime residents say they have never heard of DBCP. Other say they have read about the problem, but they doubt that it can hurt them in the minute quantities that science can now measure.

Others, such as Virginia Rodriguez, buy bottled water and count the number of cancer cases on the block, and wonder.

“I’ve had two tumors, one on my kidney, and the boy down the street has a brain tumor,” she said. “This is a poor community and a lot of people can’t afford bottled water. They say they lived here all their lives and have no problems. So they just keep drinking it.”

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Pesticide in the Water

Use of the pesticide DBCP on crops was halted in 1977 after workers at a Lathrop, Calif., manufacturing plant became sterile, but it is still seeping into ground water. Traces have been detected in 2,600 wells in the counties shaded on the map, forcing officials to find new sources of water.

Butte Fresno Kern Kings Los Angeles Madera Merced Monterey Orange Riverside San Bernardino San Diego San Joaquin Santa Clara Stanislaus Sutter Tulare Ventura