Pesticide’s Health Risks Debated

Raili West took the 12 children in her care to the beach on Wednesday, but not because of the heat wave. An operator of a day-care center, West has abandoned her east-end home for the week because of sickening pesticide vapors she says are drifting from a field behind the dwelling.

Fumes from the potent fumigant methyl bromide have wafted from a strawberry field just 24 feet from West’s backyard fence, giving her a headache, stomachache, raw throat and leaving a dry metallic taste in her mouth for days, she said.

“I’ve been to the doctor twice, and he said the best thing I can do is move,” said West, who lives with her husband, Blake, and three young children next to fields near the corner of Ralston Street and Ramelli Avenue.

The Wests have done just that for the week, renting a campsite at McGrath State Beach and setting up their day-care business at beaches, parks and other parents’ homes.

Because of her illness, West has taken her concerns to county officials who serve as the government watchdogs over pesticide use, including the summertime injection of methyl bromide on about 4,500 acres of local strawberry fields.

Those officials say the strawberry farmer who tills the soil next to West’s Tamarin Street house has done nothing wrong, meeting all state and more stringent local regulations in applying the highly volatile, highly toxic fumigant.

The closest application to West’s house was about 50 feet, said county Agricultural Commissioner W. Earl McPhail. And that is well beyond the 30-foot buffer required by law. Indeed, California is the only state in the nation that requires any buffer at all.

“There is no harm,” McPhail said. “The application has been done by the book. The grower is very cooperative. The guy is trying to be a good neighbor, and he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“We know where the houses are out there and where the school is out there. It’s been fumigated for six or seven years,” he said. “So nothing is really changed. . . . Except the lady out there said, ‘We don’t want the use of methyl bromide anywhere, period.’ ”

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Grower Jesus Garcia, president of Montalvo Ranch Inc. of Oxnard, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. But West acknowledged that Garcia, though not required by law, had warned her that the pesticide was to be injected beginning Aug. 7. And he had warned her in the past about upcoming sprayings because she runs a day-care center in her home, she said.

“The farmer was nice enough to tell me,” she said.

But when West and her husband ducked into their backyard last Wednesday night to peer across the adjacent field for howling coyotes, West said her concerns quickly escalated.

“Within five minutes I had a headache and I kept it for five days,” she said. “I went on the Internet and got some information, and what I found made me very concerned.”

West said she found that the use of methyl bromide--a fumigant widely used in Ventura County to sterilize fields for growing strawberries--has become a hot political topic in 1996.

Environmental activists and farm worker representatives protested loudly in March when Gov. Pete Wilson, at the urging of agricultural interests, called the Legislature into special session to repeal a ban on the pesticide that was to take effect this year because manufacturers had not completed mandated studies on its health effects. The manufacturers now have two more years to complete the studies.

The governor claimed that banning methyl bromide would cost 10,000 jobs and would cause $346 million in annual strawberry crop losses--a figure disputed by University of California scientists. In Ventura County, the Farm Bureau estimates that the $149-million-a-year strawberry crop could have been cut by up to 40% without the fumigant, which rids fields of a wide range of pests and which farmers say cannot effectively be replaced.

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Continued use of methyl bromide has also been under attack internationally because of studies that found it depletes the earth’s ozone layer. A federal law bans it nationwide in 2001 because of its effects on ozone.

But for West and her neighbors, some of whom also complained this week about headaches and other flu-like ailments, the key issue is safety. And they said they think their health is being jeopardized for political and economic reasons.

“I have a bad headache today,” said West’s next-door neighbor, Ed Burris, whose family has moved to Simi Valley until fumigation is over. “I woke up with it this morning. It’s dangerous. It’s been known to kill people. But everybody at the county seems to consider this a joke.”

Another neighbor, Frances Yzaguirre, said she woke up Sunday with a headache, the first morning after returning home from vacation, and has had one off and on ever since. “My husband has severe asthma, and last night when he went to bed he said he could feel this tightness in his chest,” she said Tuesday.

In West’s aggressive pursuit of information about methyl bromide, she has suddenly become something of a poster citizen for a national environmental group that has studied the use and effects of methyl bromide for years--the nonprofit Environmental Working Group of Washington, D.C.

“Raili West’s experience is very significant,” said group analyst Kert Davies, who in January released a study on the proximity of California elementary schools and day-care centers to high uses of methyl bromide. “She’s a rational, credible, reasonable mom. She is a perfect person to represent the victim of this problem. And her symptoms are the classic symptoms of methyl bromide exposure.”

In fact, the Environmental Working Group has set up monitoring stations at West’s back fence and Wednesday night was testing the air from a station on the street next to her house, adjacent to a parcel that was fumigated Wednesday morning.

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Davies said that his group plans to use West’s experience as a human example of problems with methyl bromide when it soon begins a statewide campaign to better monitor the levels of methyl bromide that drifts from fields to homes, schools and day-care centers. Current monitoring requirements are very loose, he said.

The group also supports buffer zones around fields perhaps 10 times wider than currently called for in California, and the mandatory notification of residents who live near fields before fumigation. Such proposals were defeated in the last session of the Legislature, however.

Davies said his group is working with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, which will soon propose that some local school districts set up monitoring stations at school campuses near heavy use of methyl bromide. The group reported in January that 10 of the 15 elementary schools in the state closest to heavy methyl bromide users were in the Oxnard area--including the top five. Those are Rio Del Valley, El Rio, Rio Plaza, Rio Real and Rio Lindo elementaries. Between 142,000 and 255,000 pounds of methyl bromide was applied to crops within two miles of those schools in 1992, the most recent year for which state statistics were available.

Agricultural industry officials dismissed West’s concerns as unwarranted, and said they may reflect the supercharged political climate now surrounding methyl bromide more than any real health threat.

Kirk Fowler, operations manager for Tri Cal, a large fumigation company and contractor on the job next to West’s house, said that the fumigant was meticulously applied and that plastic covers to capture escaping vapors were left in place longer than the five days required by law.

“There is an ongoing [political] debate that has been more vocal this year than before,” Fowler said. “There are groups out there that think methyl bromide should be banned from use. It’s no different than trying to get rid of nuclear power or the spotted owl.”

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Since fumigation season started a couple of weeks ago, Fowler said, he had fielded two or three calls from concerned residents, an unusually high number.

“We’ll do an application and somebody will either picket or hand out information and some of that information is just not true,” he said. “It shouldn’t be right that people can go around scaring the hell out of their neighbors.”

Fowler said he got a call from one of West’s neighbors, whom he reassured as to the safety of the pesticide.

David Riggs, executive director of the California Strawberry Commission, said he made a recent trip to Oxnard to talk with growers about the political climate this year.

“The idea was there might be a spotlight on the industry, and as we go through the process we just wanted to make sure everything was done at the highest level of safety,” Riggs said. “We wanted to take every step possible to make sure there was a safe and uneventful application during this season.”

Riggs said that agricultural use of methyl bromide has produced few serious injuries and no deaths in recent years, although there have been fatalities when using the chemical to fumigate houses.

According to the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, the pesticide, which is also used to eradicate insects in homes, has killed 18 people since 1982 and poisoned 452 others. In laboratory tests, it caused rabbits to be born without gall bladders and dogs to repeatedly slam their heads against the side of their cages, according to industry studies.

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Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, said the real issue is whether methyl bromide is safe. State and local officials whose job it is to watch out for public safety have concluded it is, he said.

“There has been an incredible amount of work done to ensure public health and safety is not being compromised by the procedures that are in place,” he said.

Laird noted that county Agricultural Department regulations go further than the state’s in several safety areas. For example, local regulations require a cutback in applications of methyl bromide when there is a temperature inversion and fumes are likely to linger in one area. Also, this county has limited the amount of methyl bromide that can be applied on parcels close to houses and requires a thicker plastic to contain chemical vapors in the field.

“So I strongly object to this being posed as a dollars versus public health issue,” he said.

But West is not convinced.

” I think it should be banned, because people are being silently poisoned,” she said. “But it’s not, because it’s political. I think it all boils down to money.”

Correspondent Jason Terada contributed to this story.