Cherry Crop Ready, but Housing Efforts Fruitless

The cherries are hanging plump and sweet, heralding the long eastern Washington summer that buds on these slopes above the Columbia River, blooms in the hot branches of the peaches and pears, and fades slowly as the apples chill to red. But on the outskirts of this idyllic town lies the harvest of four decades of American farm-housing policy: on the back seats of old cars, on plastic tarps spread out on the grass, in tents pitched haphazardly under the cherry trees next to sagging lines of laundry.

This year, an estimated 7,000 farm workers will roam homeless through the cherry orchards, victims of a collision between state and federal housing regulations that has shut down Washington’s state-licensed tent camps on the eve of one of its busiest harvests ever, leaving virtually no sanctioned facilities for migrant workers.

Up to 30,000 people could go homeless as harvests for peaches, pears and apples get underway later in the year, farm worker advocates say.

Already, a state park on the Columbia River in Kennewick is turning away hundreds of families looking for a place to sleep. Cars and vans parked in orchards, with families nesting inside, have become a common sight. And in Mattawa, whose population is expected to double with the coming fruit harvests, makeshift campsites have sprung up all along the river.

How to house migrant farm workers has been a problem for rural communities throughout the West. But nowhere has it reached such a crisis as in eastern Washington, where thousands of families will be without shelter this year, except for makeshift communities of workers and their tents, ice chests, barbecue grills and portable toilets.

“Most of these folks will end up by river beds, under trees. We’re very concerned about [their] health and safety,” said Maria Gardipee, agricultural employee program director for the state Department of Health.

Mattawa Mayor Judy Esser said her town has installed a sewer system that will for the first time prevent streams of raw sewage from running through a ramshackle trailer park rented mostly to farm workers.

The state has also converted several 8-by-40-foot shipping containers into clean and dry temporary housing, mostly for families, in a project named Esperanza, Spanish for “hope.”

“I think they finally got tired of hearing me cry all the time,” said Esser, who has been dealing for years with problems of housing migrant workers. Town officials say they have no idea how to aid the flood of workers.

“The sanitary facilities are a Porta Potti and a garbage can, and that’s it. There’s no potable water,” Esser said. “Now, it’d be fine for a couple of days, when you’re out roughing it. But for weeks on end?”

Children at Risk of Catching Diseases

County officials say children are at risk of contracting tuberculosis, asthma and diseases caused by drinking and washing dishes in river water that is used for showers and toilets, as well as by eating food stored in lukewarm ice chests. Several children have worms and lice, and a special problem is exposure to pesticides from sleeping on chemical-tainted soil in the orchards.

“The conditions are horrible. They’re Third World conditions,” said Guadalupe Gamboa of the United Farm Workers union. “We’re talking houses made of cardboard with plastic tarps on top, people bathing in the river, human feces everywhere, trash everywhere--and you have probably 20,000 to 30,000 people living under these conditions.”

The dilemma has hit hardest in the cherry industry, which has doubled in eastern Washington over the last two decades--sprouting thousands of acres of new trees in remote communities with very little infrastructure to support the influx of workers. Because cherry-picking lasts only a week or so on any given orchard, growers have been reluctant to invest in permanent housing.

The current crisis developed when the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which sets standards for migrant farm worker housing, announced last month that it would not sanction Washington’s transitional program, which had housed up to 1,600 people a year in grower-supplied camps.

Workers in those facilities had to provide their own pup tents, which were pitched on bare ground in the orchards. Showers were available, but they could be as far as five miles away. There were no requirements for beds, screened windows, ventilation, stoves, heating or cooling. Electricity and refrigeration for food were being phased in gradually.

Under pressure from farm worker advocates, OSHA ruled that the state program did not meet long-standing federal standards and threatened to sanction growers who opened such orchard tent camps this year. Since then, all but three of the 200 camps have been shut down.

The result is that the 1,600 workers formerly housed in these camps will join the thousands of others who for years have had no housing at all, except what they could find by the roadside.

Richard Terrill, OSHA’s regional director, said federal authorities accepted the state-sanctioned tent camps in 1995 and 1996, based on assurances that they were transitional facilities until better housing could be provided. But the existence of the tent camps “wasn’t providing any incentive for improving the level of housing,” Terrill said.

“Last year we said to the state, this is not working, we want to enforce the regulations that are on the books,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is raise the standard of on-farm housing to something that’s minimally acceptable.”

Tent Camps Set Up as Stopgap Housing

Rich Nafziger, an advisor to Gov. Gary Locke, said the tent camps were intended to provide stopgap housing until the state could move forward with a $40-million initiative to build permanent farm worker housing over the next 10 years.

The goal, he said, was to meet federal requirements for tent camps within the next three years and phase in the first permanent housing within five years. Then OSHA came in with its unexpected ruling.

Growers say they cannot be expected to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, to house laborers who work at any one orchard for less than three weeks. (Many pickers, though, work the Washington orchards from June until November.)

Mike Gempler, spokesman for the Washington Growers League, said growers are throwing their support behind a plan to provide military-style tents on a shared rental basis that could be relocated as the harvest moves northward through the summer.

Those tents, with 7-foot-high walls erected over concrete or wooden foundations, comply with federal regulations, and OSHA has said it will support such a program for next year. This year, only 25 such tents, able to house six people each, are available.

At the Chukar Cherries orchard in Prosser, Wash., owner Guy Auld has invested $20,000 in water and electricity to operate state-sanctioned tent camps twice in recent years. He elected not to open one this year, fearing lawsuits or federal sanctions. He has no idea where the 200 workers who will arrive to pick his cherries this week will stay.

“The farmers want to do something to help, but we can’t seem to do anything that’s acceptable to the farm workers’ union,” Auld said. “So what you have is people going down by the canal and sleeping on the ground. They swim in the canal, no drinking water, no bathroom facilities. It’s a crime. It’s terrible they have to go through that. They’re driving thousands of miles to come up here and help us, and we can’t come up with a way . . . to help them.”

Along the river bank in Mattawa, Francisco Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant who comes up from Fresno every year to work in the orchards, has planted a garden of chiles and radishes. He has fashioned a tent out of blue plastic and spare boards, and even built a raised bed inside, “to keep off the snakes,” he says.

A few hundred feet up the river, 14 young men from Michoacan, Mexico, just up from strawberry picking in Oxnard, sit in the dust around the embers of a lunchtime fire. They have no tents; sleeping bags will be stretched out on a blue tarp when night falls. If it rains, as it looks like it surely will with the summer thunderclouds building overhead, they will crowd into the two cars, seven of them in each.

In California, there are apartments. In Oregon and Montana, cabins or motel rooms. In Washington, they gesture at the sagebrush and trees and shrug. “You can’t get any worse than this,” said Alejandro Villgas, 22. “Can you imagine getting worse than this? But what else can we do?”