Debate Stirred by Asbestos

As they turn over the soil to build million-dollar ridge-side homes north and south of San Francisco and in the Sierra foothills, developers are finding a potential problem: naturally occurring asbestos.

Veins of asbestos run through the green mineral serpentine, which is so common it’s the state rock. If inhaled, asbestos fibers can lead, years later, to diseases from cancer to asbestosis.

For years, that made little difference in the sparsely populated mountains here. Now, however, California’s population is pushing into the mountains, and serpentine dust is flying as houses go up and road builders quarry gravel.

“We’re the guinea pigs,” said Toni Johnson, 39, who for the last decade has lived a stone’s throw from a mountain of crushed serpentine at a Sierra foothills quarry near Rescue, Calif.

She and other El Dorado County residents have persuaded the state Air Resources Board to impose new restrictions on road use and earth-moving operations.

Johnson and her 46-year-old husband, James, both nonsmokers, suffer frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia. Just around a curve in the road is Country Baby Day Care. Up on the hill is the deluxe ranchette subdivision named Greenstone Country.

“We’ve had clouds of dust 200 feet high,” said Greenstone resident Kevin Long, an attorney and former homeowners association president.

Near Garden Valley, up past Coloma where John Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, Bill and Kalua Rothus each use inhalers to control lung ailments.

Bill, 70, has lived since 1973 in a mountainside home overlooking a lovely oak-and-pine-filled valley--and another quarry about 1,000 feet away. Kalua, 64, has been there since 1982.

“You almost have to die before they know if it’s asbestos or not,” Bill Rothus, another nonsmoker, said in a raspy voice.

Crushed serpentine from the quarry covered his road until federal Superfund money was used to pave it over in 1986. Dust from the road added a thick coating to surrounding houses and trees.

Bill Rothus said at least a dozen residents along the road have died over the last 20 years, although none of the deaths is known to be tied directly to asbestos.

Officials haven’t documented the areas surrounding El Dorado County quarries and roads as cancer hot spots; they say that calls for long-term health studies that haven’t been done.

Still, state Air Resources Board spokesman Jerry Martin said, the area’s “pretty significant anecdotal history” helped persuade the board last year to drop the allowable asbestos in roadbeds from 5% to 0.25%, which the construction and aggregate industries call too extreme.

The board will consider safeguards at quarries, housing developments and even single-family homes installing a new driveway or swimming pool in affected areas. The pending regulations also would let local air districts require expensive air monitoring, a proposal that has upset quarry owners and developers.

“All of these have rock that could have asbestos in it, and all of them could be developed as the state grows,” Martin said.

Everyone wants to avoid a repeat of Libby, Mont., where news reports linked airborne asbestos from the nearby W.R. Grace & Co. mine to nearly 200 deaths and hundreds more illnesses.

The mine, which closed more than a decade ago, produced asbestos as a byproduct of vermiculite, another natural substance used for insulation and potting soils. Researchers are just beginning to study the long-term effects there.

“We agree that there is more than enough science out there that asbestos in the air is a health concern,” said Adam Harper, a policy analyst with the California Mining Assn.

But the danger could stunt development, Harper said, because increased regulation could cost too much and because some quarry operators and developers may fear future legal problems. Even strictly following the new rules doesn’t bar someone from suing if they get cancer, Harper said.

“Is the buyer going to insist I do a geologic analysis before I sell my land to see if there’s asbestos there?” he asked.

The mining, building contractors and construction materials associations, allied as the Coalition for Reasonable Regulation of Naturally Occurring Substances, sued the air board in June over its road-bed restrictions.

Already there’s not enough gravel, sand and crushed stones for homes and highways, and the new regulations will make that worse, said Harper and Linda Falasco of the Construction Materials Assn. of California. They want the state to limit the regulations.

Also, they said, the regulations the board is considering lack appropriate standards and could cost a typical developer or quarry operator $800,000 for air monitoring--a figure disputed by the air board.

They don’t contest other dust-control requirements they say many developers and miners follow already--wetting down soil or covering truckloads with tarps.

They’re not radical ideas, the board’s Martin said, just “ways of keeping the dust from blowing or keeping it from coming into contact with people off site.”

The board estimates 25 of the state’s 799 quarries would have to make changes to meet the new rules. It projects it would cost a homeowner $55 to comply during a typical project, and developers $200 to $500 per lot.

El Dorado County residents who have fought the quarrying of serpentine since the 1980s feel vindicated by the board’s new restrictions.

Melissa Vargas, 40, whom other residents credit with leading Garden Valley residents’ regulation drive, says she received death threats, was labeled a fear-monger, nearly went bankrupt from legal bills and, with her husband, Joe, has delayed having children until she is assured the quarry next door will not reopen.

“We’re trying to prevent dead bodies rather than waiting for them to surface,” she said. “We’re never going to stop the developers from building. But doggone it, we should insist on some safeguards against a known carcinogen.”