VISALIA (California) DELTA-TIMES

August 19, 2006

1999 Earlimart incident was lesson to be learned

 

By Laura Florez
Staff writer

Remembering Nov. 13, 1999, isn't easy for Teresa DeAnda.

The day sticks out in the 47-year-old Earlimart woman's mind like "a horrible nightmare."

"It's incredible that it happened in this day and age," she said.

It was on that day that metam sodium, a pesticide used to kill weeds, fungi and bugs, drifted into Earlimart, causing the evacuation of at least three streets of homes. One of those homes was DeAnda's.

She was about a block from her home, returning from a Delano grocery store, about 6 p.m. that Saturday when flashing lights from emergency vehicles stole her gaze.

"We had ordered a Holyfield fight on pay-per-view, that's why I went," she said.

But when DeAnda got home, she was told to leave. Her home, along with others, was being evacuated because of the pesticide drift.

"There had been an accident and we had to leave right away," she was told.

Some Earlimart residents, who had begun experiencing symptoms of exposure to the pesticide, were vomiting, getting rashes and having trouble breathing. They were told they could go to Earlimart Middle School for medical treatment.

Treatment shock

What they didn't know was that once there, men, women and children would be asked to strip in front of each other, then run down a decontamination line where they would be hosed off by fire department water hoses in plain view of other residents, DeAnda said.

"These people were afraid for their lives," she said. "That wasn't a medical treatment. It was a horrible violation of a human that should never have happened."

The treatment of what ended up being about 21 Earlimart residents at the school that day has almost seven years later changed the way counties across the state respond in the event of such emergencies. Counties are now required by law to have more uniform responses to pesticide drift emergencies.

While DeAnda wasn't at the school that day — she and her husband had gotten their children and left — they returned to hear the stories. The event had traumatized people, DeAnda said, and it wasn't right.

"My story is nothing compared to the other people who got sick that day," she said. "But I was in darkness then, I was ignorant. Before I trusted our government, our agencies, to do the right thing. I had no idea they had no idea what to do in this type of emergency, no protocols. I couldn't sleep at night. It bothered me that we weren't really safe from all these poisons that are being sprayed around us."

DeAnda, who had been a caregiver for the elderly, turned advocate. She began speaking out about what happened at Earlimart and about other experiences with pesticide drift that she and her family had gone through.

Senate bill

Eventually, stories of what happened in Earlimart and similar incidents in other rural farming communities like those in Arvin and Lamont in Kern County helped establish Senate Bill 391.

The bill, which became law in 2004, required the California Environmental Protection Agency to establish minimum standard protocols for responding to pesticide drift emergencies and required local governments to include those protocols in their Hazardous Materials Emergency Response Plans, also known as area plans. The law also directed that innocent bystanders exposed to a pesticide application can get unreimbursed medical expenses paid.

Tulare County Agricultural Commissioner/Sealer Gary Kunkel calls the Earlimart incident unfortunate but said the county learned from it and has moved on.

"I remind people that it was almost seven years ago — that there have been enormous improvements since then," he said.

In Tulare County, Kunkel, whose office grants permits for pesticide applications and investigates complaints of pesticide oversprays whether exposure is to land or people, is also charged with enforcing penalties for the misuse of pesticides. Those fines, which go to applicators of pesticides, can top out at $5,000 for each person exposed, he said.

"What I tell applicators is to be paranoid, be worried, be concerned about it. Use an abundance of caution. Make an application as if everybody in the world is watching you do it," he said.

County standards

The county has also developed its set of standard protocols for responding to pesticide drift emergencies, said Kunkel, although he couldn't answer questions about what they are because he said his office isn't a "first responder" to such incidents.

The office does send someone out to investigate, but that person's job is to find out about the pesticide, offer advice and find out if someone has done something illegal, he said.

Instead, Kunkel referred such questions to Joel Martens, environmental health supervisor for the county's Health and Human Services Agency.

When contacted, Martens said the county has an updated area plan that includes standard protocols for responding to pesticide drift emergencies but couldn't provide details of what they are or which ones were implemented as a direct result of actions taken by the county in the Earlimart incident.

The reason, he said, is because while the plan outlines coordination of emergency response and emergency assistance between jurisdictions, it does not go into detail of procedures for things like decontamination.

"The area plan would not get into that level of detail. It determines which agency is responsible for that," he said.

Those procedures are developed by those who are responsible for those specific functions, which in most cases would be first responders like the California Highway Patrol or fire suppression agencies that first arrive on scene, according to the 30-page area plan provided to the Times-Delta. The incident commander would be responsible for monitoring and decontamination efforts, it says, but does not detail procedures for decontamination.

Martens did say there have been equipment purchases that have been made, and provisions are in place for doing decontamination in a more sensitive manner.

"I know that the Visalia Fire Department has purchased emergency showers. They are designated Hazmat responders so they have those things in place," he said. "There also has been in the seven years since the incident ... a greater understanding of these types of incidents. There's some other statewide guidance that is in place and there's some monitoring equipment that allows them to determine the identity of unknown contaminants."

There's also been more training of county employees, including environmental health personnel who would respond to such incidents, hazmat teams, and people from the county's agricultural commissioner office, Martens said.

"There's been a lot of changes and a lot of improvements," he said.

Still work to be done

Most recently, in March, the county made a big push to begin educating the public on what to do in the event of a pesticide drift, although Martens and Lali Moheno, a cultural competency and outreach coordinator working with the county's Health and Human Services Agency to educate the public, could not say why that push was made this year rather than immediately after the Earlimart incident.

"Because of the concern we all have, it's time we do this work. To me, it's never to late," said Moheno, who noted that reports of pesticide drift and overspray are going to happen "again and again."

But when they do happen, it's important for the public to know what to do. Moheno is among those promoting the county's 24-hour phone line that both English and Spanish speakers can use to report pesticide drift, especially to farmworker communities. The county's agricultural commissioner is also spreading that message, Moheno said. Kunkel is scheduled to speak on Spanish radio shows and at community meetings throughout the county, noting that since March that message has already been delivered to at least 10,000 Tulare County residents

Kunkel said he's glad there has been change since Earlimart, but he would like to leave what happened that day in the past because it has the ability to give pesticide use a bad name. And that isn't necessarily a good thing in a dominant agricultural area like Tulare County.

"Any time there's an incident like that where innocent people are affected by some adverse pesticide application, there is a huge public outcry to either reduce or modify ag chemical use," he said. "These always result in enormous pressure to further regulate or reduce whatever the chemical. Everyone loses when there's a pesticide drift — everybody."

But people have to remember, Kunkel said, that there are benefits to pesticides when they are applied safely. And when consumers demand to have products at the market that look good, are free of insects and surface blemishes, pesticides can help.

"Things are safer to eat nowadays because of the treatments, I believe," he said. "If pesticides are used safely and appropriately then you get applications that will be safe. When that happens it's more likely that agriculture will have them available."

For DeAnda, who for the past four years has worked for Californians for Pesticide Reform, the changes that have been implemented across the state and in Tulare County to deal with pesticide drift and decontamination are a good start. She said she is still curious to see how the county plans to deal with decontamination efforts.

"I'm not secure until I see [the plans]," she said. "It's so hard to implement. We're still working on it. We're long from being done."