Grand Jury Panel Cancels Presentation on Pesticide’s Hazards

A Ventura County Grand Jury committee investigating the use of highly toxic methyl bromide on local strawberry fields has canceled a presentation today on the pesticide’s danger by a group of environmental attorneys, health experts and Ventura residents.

The presentation was called off, jury foreman George Billinger said, because a member of the County Services Committee misunderstood the intended scope of the inquiry and solicited evidence on pesticide hazards that the grand jury never intended to consider.

“The reason it was called off was because our investigation had nothing to do with the health issue,” Billinger said. “The committee member misunderstood and got off on a tangent. He had the wrong information and unfortunately got these people involved, which was not our intent at all.”

Billinger said the county panel, which gathers information on public issues then reports its findings, was focusing strictly on how the poisonous gas is applied in local fields and on whether workers applying it were properly dressed to avoid getting sick.

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“We wanted to make sure the guidelines were being followed,” he said. He said the inquiry arose from one grand jury member’s interest in the issue, not from a public complaint.

Several east Ventura residents complained last summer that a grower and pesticide crew violated county regulations when injecting methyl bromide in a field next to homes, but county agricultural officials found no problem.

Until their presentation was abruptly canceled, officials at the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center had scrambled to assemble speakers on the dangers of poisonous methyl bromide vapors when they drift from strawberry fields to nearby homes.

Evidence was to include a statement from a Thousand Oaks doctor who treated victims after a 1992 methyl bromide incident in south Oxnard, a study by an Ojai meteorologist on how local weather conditions can cause methyl bromide to linger in the air, and assertions by an east Ventura child-care operator, who insists she and 20 of her neighbors were sickened last summer by the poisonous vapors.

But then, the witnesses were told by EDC officials that their presentation was canceled, two of them said Wednesday.

“They said the grand jury decided not to have the session because the EDC gave information about it to the media. [The jurors] were angry,” said Santa Maria nurse Lynn Montandon, executive director of the nonprofit Response Team for the Chemically Injured. The Times published a story on the investigation Friday.

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Defense center officials would not comment on the cancellation. But Montandon said the grand jury’s refusal to hear her is disappointing because she has evidence that methyl bromide constitutes a danger to residents.

“We responded to the exposures in Oxnard a few years ago,” she said. “Those people were very sick. Even some of the firemen who evacuated the area got violently ill. I even took one woman, a nurse, back to Santa Maria with me for 24-hour care. I had to keep picking her up off the floor [from dizziness] and working to try to control her seizure activity.”

In a number of the Oxnard cases, the victims had high levels of bromide in their blood and urine, indications they had been exposed to high levels of methyl bromide, she said.

In a recent Santa Maria case, Montandon said, doctors have concluded that a child’s asthma was induced by exposure to methyl bromide.

“There should at least be some pre-notification before a spraying,” she said, “so people can shut their windows and bring in their kids.”

After numerous east Ventura residents complained of illness after a methyl bromide application in August, analysts found a high level of the toxic vapor in the air.

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But Dr. Gary Feldman, the county’s public health officer, reported he had communicated with several physicians who treated people from the east Ventura neighborhood and had been unable to confirm that methyl bromide had caused their illnesses. Feldman said the state needs to do more studies to resolve the uncertainties of whether methyl bromide is making people ill.

County Agricultural Commissioner W. Earl McPhail--questioned by the grand jury recently--investigated the August incident and said he found no problems with the way methyl bromide was applied, and no provable health problems.

McPhail and state pesticide regulation officials maintain that methyl bromide is strongly regulated in California and poses no health threat to farm workers or residents if it is applied properly.

Methyl bromide is a highly volatile and widely used pesticide most commonly used in strawberry fields but also on vegetables in plant nurseries, and to fumigate crops for export.

In strawberry fields, it is injected about 18 inches into the soil, then covered with a plastic tarp for at least five days to contain the chemical’s toxic vapors.