Trailer Park’s Children Played for Years on Superfund Site

After a rainstorm in the Tall Trees Mobile Home Park, little kids on bikes and Big Wheels swerve around the puddles that collect in widening circles along a pockmarked road.

Even the name seems like some kind of cruel joke. The only things towering above this shantytown of ramshackle trailers and rotting bungalows are the giant cranes that buzz all day at the junkyard just beyond the barbed-wire fence.

The Mixtec Indian children here aren’t allowed on the other side of the fence anymore, not since their parents were finally told--in a language they could understand--that the grassy field where they had been flying kites and playing soccer had been declared a Superfund site in 1982, long before they ever moved in.

“If we were told about what was hidden over there, we wouldn’t have chosen this place,” said Mauricio Dominguez Santos, whose seven children, ages 8 to 23, still live with him and his wife in a 10-foot-wide trailer, in a space they rent for $160 a month.

These migrant families, indigenous Mexicans who generally don’t speak English or Spanish, have wanted to move ever since interpreters were brought in two years ago, warning them about the oil plume beneath the trailer park and the toxic wasteland next door.

But they won’t leave unless they can move together, all 200 of them, further complicating a decades-long dispute over cleaning up the mess.

Meanwhile, though the companies involved say the Mixtecos aren’t in danger, no comprehensive study of their health risks has been done. Only one of 41 children tested for lead had elevated levels, but the nearby Sequoia Community Health Center has found a high rate of miscarriages, and residents have complained about trouble breathing and other ailments.

“These people have waited too long,” said Fresno County Supervisor Juan Arambala, who’s been working quietly behind the scenes to reach a solution acceptable to everyone.

*

The seven-acre site--one of about 100 on California’s Superfund list--was first ordered cleaned up back in 1974. A Fresno County judge told the owners of Purity Oil Sales to dig up the unlined pits where it had been storing millions of gallons of used oil, and to backfill them with clean soil. They never did, instead abandoning the property and filing for bankruptcy.

In the years that followed, investigations unearthed arsenic, mercury, lead, benzene and an assortment of other chemicals, landing the site on one of the nation’s first Superfund lists. Air, soil and ground-water tests were then performed as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began tracking down the legally responsible parties and figuring out how to mop up the mess.

By 1990, the EPA narrowed to 146 the number of oil giants, utilities, municipalities, military outfits, government agencies and other companies that trucked in used oil from 1934 to 1974, and calculated their shares of the cleanup cost, now projected to be $43 million. Chevron Corp., for the sake of alleviating red tape, volunteered to be lead negotiator for the group.

Before the cleanup work began, the Mixtecos started moving in.

Bernardino Juarez, his wife and six kids arrived first, paying $700 for a trailer in 1988. And as word trickled back to their small village of San Miguel Cuevas in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, the community grew, crowding into 56 trailers and a smattering of cabins.

Their tattered island of collapsing roofs, buckling walls and chipped paint is surrounded by a scrap metal heap, a wrecking yard, a manure plant, a propane business and the Superfund site.

“It was shocking to see such horrible conditions,” said Jeff Ponting, who directs the Fresno office of the California Rural Legal Assistance program, which has led the effort to help the Mixtecos find new, safe housing near their jobs in Fresno County’s vineyards and orchards.

Still, the Mixtecos feel lucky. People in San Miguel Cuevas are subsistence farmers, live in adobe houses with dirt floors, cook with wood, and have no running water nor any means of income. Here, they can earn enough wages to own homes, drive cars and feed their families. Most important, their kids can attend American schools.

“Back home, we would have nothing,” Juarez said, standing proudly next to his family’s minivan.

Amid the pungent odors and the clank of machinery, the Mixtecos carried on with their lives even as the first phase of the cleanup--the construction of a pumping system to purge toxins from the area’s ground water--began in 1994.

They planted gardens of huaje, hierva santa and other vegetables and spices from their homeland, exchanging seeds and foods during the Festival of San Miguel, a one-day event in September that mimics the weeklong feast in Mexico.

After school, on weekends and during the summer, the children would slip through a gaping hole in the chain-link fence to romp on the field next door where oil drums are still stacked.

“We played over there all the time,” 19-year-old Seferino Dominguez said in the English he learned at Fowler High School.

Outreach workers occasionally came through Tall Trees to provide updates to the Mixtecos. But the language barrier and cultural impediments left most of the residents voiceless as the EPA and Chevron worked out their cleanup plan, and state and Fresno County officials repeatedly renewed the trailer park’s permit, which had been granted before the area became an industrial zone.

Relocating the tightknit Mixteco community wasn’t addressed by the cleanup plan until Ana Chapa, who used to be a cashier at the trailer park’s grocery store, called the CRLA’s Fresno office in the spring of 1998.

By then, Chapa said she had been written off as a quack or ignored by lawmakers, criminal justice agencies, the media and various other government officials as she tried to get the community moved to a safer place.

“I’m a nut? A nut? Stuff was leaking into the backyards of these people’s homes. It’s not going to go away because you have a fence there,” she said. “Nobody wanted to say or do anything because they’re just poor farm workers. But they have rights too. I did everything I could.”

*

Cleanup work has stopped now that the CRLA has joined the negotiations and argued that dust kicked up from the contaminated soil could harm the Mixtecos. The hole in the fence has been closed off and new warning signs are posted.

The EPA and Chevron agree that the 15 or so trailers along the fence line should be permanently relocated to make room for the cleanup, and Chevron is considering paying for an off-site summer recreation program for the children.

But Chevron maintains that the cleanup can be controlled to rule out health risks, and says the settling parties should not have to pay for moving the entire community, which sprung up long after the property became a Superfund site.

“This is a broader issue of public policy,” said Chevron spokesman Ed Spaulding.

Because the trailers are in such disrepair, the EPA says the entire community should be moved permanently. “If you moved the homes, you really couldn’t put them back. They’d be less inhabitable than they are now,” said EPA project manager Rose Marie Caraway.

But so far, nobody has come up with the $5 million it would cost to develop a new trailer park on clean soil. Government funds normally available in such situations can’t be used because some of the residents are in the United States illegally.

And despite the potential health dangers, the CRLA doesn’t want Tall Trees’ permit revoked, saying the community won’t survive if the Mixtecos are thrown out or made to move to more expensive housing far from their jobs.

A community meeting is planned at the end of this month to discuss sites identified by the county for a new trailer park, and the CRLA is arranging to bring in epidemiologists to perform the in-depth health tests.

Meanwhile, the Mixtecos wait and worry, especially about their children, the reason they came here in the first place.

“I want to leave now, more because of the kids,” said Dominguez Santos. “I want the best for them. But I’m afraid they’re going to get sick now.”