Study Warns of Pesticide Risk to O.C. Schoolkids

Each year thousands of Orange County children are exposed to a deadly pesticide because they attend the nearly 300 schools and licensed day-care centers located near strawberry fields fumigated with methyl bromide, according to a new study by an environmental group.

The chemical, a highly volatile and toxic gas, is primarily used in agriculture to kill worms and diseases that damage the sensitive roots of strawberry plants and other crops.

But the pesticide has also killed 18 people since 1982 and poisoned 454 others. In laboratory tests, it causes rabbits to be born without gall bladders and dogs to slam their heads against the sides of their cages, according to industry studies.

The chemical is due to be banned in California next month unless a bill scheduled to be heard today by the Senate Appropriations Committee is passed. The bill was approved recently by the Assembly.

At the urging of agricultural interests, Gov. Pete Wilson called the Legislature into special session, asserting that if growers aren’t able to apply methyl bromide, thousands of jobs will be lost to Florida, Texas and Mexico, where the pesticide is permitted. Without the legislation, the ban will automatically take effect because the companies that make the pesticide failed to provide all the scientific tests required by the 1984 California Birth Defects Prevention Act.

Methyl bromide is so unstable that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that from 50% to 95% of it eventually escapes into the atmosphere and helps destroy the ozone layer protecting the Earth from ultraviolet radiation.

Last November, industrialized nations agreed in a treaty to stop using it completely by 2010. And in five years, the EPA will ban the production and importation of the pesticide under the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Agricultural interests, especially the state’s strawberry growers, contend that outlawing methyl bromide now would cost California thousands of jobs and up to $346 million in annual losses.

Environmentalists, health experts and farm worker advocates have testified that the impending state ban should be implemented because little is known about the long-term health effects of exposure to methyl bromide.

“The public is breathing this stuff in and they don’t even know it,” said Ralph Lightstone, a pesticide expert for California Rural Legal Assistance in Sacramento, a group that represents farm workers. “No one knows what it does to people, much less children, exposed over several years.”

Orange County leads the state in the number of elementary schools and licensed day-care centers in close proximity to fumigated fields, according to a study by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, which analyzes pesticide use. Most of the schools are in the Anaheim, Buena Park, Cypress, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Orange, Placentia, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana and Westminster school districts.

At least 2,000 pounds of methyl bromide was used in fields within two miles of each of 295 elementary schools and licensed day-care centers in Orange County in 1992, said Richard Wiles, one of the study’s authors.

“Compared to other pesticides, this is an enormous amount,” said Kert Davies, who coauthored the study with Wiles. “It is by far the largest single pesticide used as a soil fumigant.”

Health officials say there have been no reported methyl bromide poisonings at Orange County schools cited in the study, but school officials expressed concern over how little is known about the danger.

There is no public notification when the chemical is applied near schools, said Terry Scott, director of facilities and operations for the Cypress School District, where more than 16,000 pounds of methyl bromide was applied to fields near Frank Vessels Elementary School during 1992.

“We have a right to know,” Scott said. “Every person has a right to be notified.”

The neurotoxic gas causes convulsions and comas at high doses and generally irritates eyes, noses and lungs, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Poisoning symptoms, often delayed, include headaches, nausea, vomiting and decreased reflexes.

Methyl bromide is required by law to be mixed with tear gas as a warning agent. Growers must pass written tests to obtain permits to apply it. Workers handling it must wear self-contained breathing equipment. For strawberry fields, the pesticide is injected into the ground, which is covered with plastic sheets for about five days. The gas immediately begins to rise to the surface and eventually escapes into the atmosphere.

Because of the toxic nature of the chemical, the state protects the public from methyl bromide poisoning by establishing safety zones around fumigated fields. The buffer zone, intended as a sort of quarantine area, is the distance that a grower must maintain between a treated field and an occupied structure for 48 hours after fumigation. The size of the zone varies by the amount of pesticide used and the method of applying it.

Under guidelines issued by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, the so-called buffer zones can be as little as 30 feet on some fields.

However, an analysis by Robert Sears, an air pollution expert in Ojai, shows that the state’s safety zones should be up to 14 times larger to prevent people from inhaling dangerous levels of the pesticide.

The analysis shows that “the buffer zones are too small,” said Sears, a former air toxics manager for the Santa Barbara Air Pollution Control District.

On a typical 10-acre strawberry field with an average amount of methyl bromide applied, the state requires a buffer zone of 60 feet. Under Sears’ analysis, the safety area should be 440 feet.

Sears first looked at the state’s buffer zones last July for the California Rural Legal Assistance. In two subsequent reviews, last fall and again last month, Sears studied buffer zones using Southern California weather data from Pico Rivera and Anaheim.

His findings are of particular concern for residents of largely urban Southern California counties still dotted with numerous farms and nurseries. In Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, more than 500,000 pounds of methyl bromide is used in each county annually, state records show.

The way the state pesticide agency calculated its buffer zones, said Sears, “is one of a kind. I’ve never seen anything like it. If that type of analysis were submitted by an oil refinery [seeking a permit], it would not be accepted.”

The standard scientific method for assessing toxic air exposures involves plugging actual weather data into the latest version of a computer model supplied by the EPA. To calculate the buffer zones, the state used hypothetical weather conditions and the first version of the EPA computer model.

Paul Gosselin, an assistant director for the pesticide agency, acknowledged that standard scientific risk assessment methods were adapted “in a unique way,” but he said subsequent evaluations show the buffer zones provide more than adequate protection.

“No other state, or the EPA, has even attempted to create buffer zones to protect people,” Gosselin said.

When the state set the buffer zones in 1993, it consulted with the scientists at the California Air Resources Board. Terry McGuire, chief of the technical support division, said air board scientists told the pesticide agency it didn’t use data that were “representative of the entire state.”

“We discussed it at some length and we told them, ‘There is a procedure to do this analysis [and] you didn’t do that,’ ” McGuire said. “You guys didn’t do the kind of analysis that’s prescribed [and] whatever you did is one that suits your needs.”

Scientists from the two agencies, both part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, began meeting recently to reexamine the buffer zones and Sears’ findings, Gosselin said.

Although methyl bromide is still used to fumigate some houses and buildings to kill pests such as termites, the largest use is in agriculture--about 87% of the 28,000 tons applied every year in the United States.

In Orange County, strawberries generate $32.6 million a year on 1,400 acres. And peppers, fumigated with methyl bromide, produce more than $13.2 million on 786 acres.

“None of us out here want to be polluters or endanger the public,” said A.G. Kawamura, president of the Orange County Farm Bureau and a strawberry and vegetable grower in Irvine.

Kawamura described criticisms of methyl bromide as “hysteria” and said, “It makes you wonder if people would rather have their food produced in another country and imported, because that’s the direction we’re headed.”

Growers already use every effective alternative to the gas, from “bug vacuum cleaners” to natural predators to organic wormicides, Kawamura said, adding that it costs from $500 to $1,200 an acre to fumigate with methyl bromide, depending upon soil and climate conditions.

David Riggs, executive director of the California Strawberry Commission, disputed the studies that show methyl bromide depletes the ozone, and he said he does not believe it poses a significant health risk to the public.

Riggs said growers are concerned that yanking such an effective pest killer off the market before “an economically viable” alternative has been developed will put California producers of strawberries, vegetables, cherries, walnuts, timber and nursery products at “a severe economic disadvantage.”

And because methyl bromide is used on some California products shipped abroad, Riggs and others note that exports might suffer too. Some countries, such as Japan, require certain products to be fumigated with the gas before commodities are allowed in.

But safer methods for commodity fumigation are already in use. The Pentagon, for example, uses “controlled atmosphere treatments” to kill pests on its massive shipments of fruits and vegetables to troops stationed overseas, said Lt. Cmdr. Robert B. Gay, a medical entomologist with the U.S. Defense Personnel Support Center in Alameda.

“The growers are not always putting out correct information because they want to protect their own little niches,” Gay said.

Such widespread use of methyl bromide, health advocates say, is not worth the risk to farm workers and the public.

“This is a classic example of regulators [making] a highly toxic substance accessible to agriculture before we’ve figured out all the potential dangers to public health,” said William Pease, a toxicologist at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Pease said all the studies received by state pesticide regulators, and much of the scientific literature, show that methyl bromide produces severe adverse effects in animals.

One especially disturbing study was submitted to the state last July, Pease said. Scientists designed a seven-day experiment in which dogs breathed in methyl bromide.

“The study had to be terminated after two days,” the state noted, because the dogs suffered “severe neurotoxicity [including] delirium, thrashing and vocalization, tremors, traumatizing behavior [such as] slamming the head and body into the cage walls, depression, [loss of muscle control], irregular gait” and other effects.

“The bottom line is this stuff damages nervous tissue in adult organisms when exposed for short and long periods of time,” Pease said. “There is ample cause for public concern.”