Residents’ Distrust Builds Over Extent of DDT Threat : Pollution: Word of 1980s settlement raises suspicions. Neighbors angry despite partial cleanup near Torrance.

When the spotty red rash erupted on 11-year-old Jamie Swiger’s stomach, her mother assumed it was the chicken pox. Then it spread to Jamie’s hands, crept up her body to her face and refused to fade away. Soon schoolmates had a nickname for the pretty blonde girl: “Mosquito.”

Only three doors away, Cynthia Babich was staring in the mirror at a strange rash on her face. Across the street, Carmen Herrera puzzled over the rash that traveled from her face to her neck, her shoulders, her hands, her back and her legs.

Not until DDT was unearthed in two back yards did many families on and near West 204th Street east of Torrance begin comparing notes about rashes, headaches, dizziness, nausea, aching joints and morning nosebleeds.

Suspicions began spreading that these mysterious ailments may somehow be linked to two toxic chemical sites. That suspicion deepened with the discovery that other residents had complained of similar symptoms 10 years ago, that they had lobbied hard for government agencies to pay attention--and that some of them quietly moved away after receiving payments in the wake of a secret legal agreement.

Once-complacent families have turned disbelieving and angry, especially when three sets of government tests in recent months found DDT in the soil behind two homes--each test reading higher than the one before it, the most recent showing the banned pesticide 45 times the level considered safe.

Today, such deep distrust pervades this community that residents routinely videotape their meetings with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“The EPA, the government, I don’t have faith in them now,” says Jamie’s mother, Marla Frame. “Anyone who lives here has a raw deal.”

Environmental and health officials have attempted to soothe residents, telling them that no evidence connects their ailments with the sites of a former DDT manufacturing plant and a long-dismantled synthetic rubber factory. They cite years of testing and a 1987 health study that did not turn up increased patterns or unusual rates of cancer or mortality in the area.

“The evidence does point away from a significant and important health risk for a great majority of people in the neighborhood,” said Dr. Paul Papanek, chief of the toxics epidemiology program at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Despite such assurances, the neighborhood remains on alert.

Many homes stand empty along West 204th Street after 25 families were moved to hotels at federal expense for the duration of the two-week DDT cleanup. Work started Thursday to excavate more than 8,000 cubic feet of soil.

Other signs hint that something is amiss. Monitoring wells dot the streets, part of a system of more than 100 wells intended to detect the benzene and other chemicals that have contaminated ground water 60 to 90 feet underground.

The chain-mesh fence separating homes from the Del Amo toxic waste dump is hung with signs warning “Caution! Hazardous Waste Area.”

Even the mail brings reminders that the area is under surveillance: a special EPA newsletter and a polite letter about well monitoring from Shell Oil Co. and the Dow Chemical Co., two companies that are among the potentially responsible parties at the former rubber factory site.

Such is daily life next to two toxic chemical sites--one a federal Superfund site, the other a Superfund nominee--and some weary residents say they have had enough.

Babich, who has emerged as a community leader since DDT was found in her yard, thinks the government should permanently relocate residents--a step the EPA calls unlikely and unnecessary. She is reluctant to return home.

“I could go back and play house again,” Babich said. “But it’s playing house on top of a chemical dump.”

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Until recently, few people had heard of this pocket of small, one-story homes hidden deep in the manufacturing heart of the South Bay.

The community lacks a local government or even a name of its own.

“Just call this Chemical City,” Herrera quips.

Sandwiched between Torrance and Carson, it is unincorporated county territory, meaning that residents have no city council to lobby for them. It is sliced into two congressional districts, further diluting its political clout.

Some were drawn here by the prospect of low rents. Babich, a former office manager, and her husband, a machinist, rent their small, two-bedroom home on West 204th Street for $500 a month.

Their street, the epicenter of the DDT controversy, is a hodgepodge of spruced-up bungalows, boasting gardens abloom with roses, alongside tumbledown houses with scraggly lawns.

Barely out of view are manufacturing plants, oil refineries, tank farms, railroad tracks, freeway intersections and the two toxic chemical sites.

The former Montrose Chemical Corp. DDT-manufacturing plant was added to the federal Superfund list in 1989. Close by is the Del Amo Study Area, once a synthetic rubber factory and now a proposed Superfund site. About 26,000 people live within a one-mile radius of the Del Amo site, which flanks homes on the north side of West 204th Street.

The experts’ prognosis is that the amounts of DDT found in the neighborhood are too low to cause acute health problems such as throat, eye and skin irritation. Although high levels of benzene and other chemicals have been found in the shallow ground water and in the Del Amo Pits waste-disposal area immediately north of West 204th Street, the EPA says there is no known way for residents to come into contact with those chemicals.

Yet uneasiness gnaws at those who live here.

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A meeting with EPA was winding down when Babich abruptly passed out a sheaf of legal papers to the government officials and Shell representatives around the table.

She was angry, her voice shaking. She had found this document shoved in her mailbox in the middle of the night, she told them, and now she seriously questioned whom she could trust.

“This, to me, looks like a really big cover-up,” Babich exploded.

The document appears to be an unsigned draft of an old legal agreement between a group of neighborhood families and a long list of companies, including Shell. It says the families and their attorney would be paid $207,000 as part of a settlement. A clause states that the families could not notify the media about the settlement, nor make claims of liability against the companies to reporters or to government agencies.

Court records show that 39 plaintiffs, including children, filed suit against 13 companies in 1984, alleging health problems caused by chemicals from the sites. Plaintiffs included some leaders of a community group that lobbied in the 1980s for cleanup at the sites.

A Shell spokeswoman, Tomi Van de Brooke, declined in an interview to make public a signed copy, saying the oil company is bound by confidentiality. However, she said, “We do not dispute what’s in the version that you have.”

She said that Shell believes the families lacked evidence linking their health problems with the Del Amo site, and that they “chose a minimal financial settlement that would at least cover their legal costs.”

Van de Brooke defended the confidentiality clause, saying, “It prevents a tidal wave of similar unsubstantiated claims by people who are attracted to the prospect of money without proof.”

The settlement was not a cover-up, she said, and did not prevent people from talking about health problems. Moreover, it required title disclosures on the affected properties owned by plaintiffs, notifying prospective buyers of the settlement, Van de Brooke said.

Two plaintiffs who declined to be identified by name confirmed that they received money--less than $10,000 per family--in the settlement. They said they decided to settle and move away because they were weary of the prolonged tug-of-war over the chemicals.

For families who remain, news of the settlement simply seems like more evidence that they do not know the whole story.

California law requires a seller to disclose environmental hazards to a buyer. But many residents are renters, and one of them, Robin Hatch, the mother of two, said she rented an apartment in February with no idea that a chemical dump was nearby.

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In a yard where a lush jungle of vegetables and vines flourished last fall, the earth sits barren.

The chickens have been removed, their coop dismantled in readiness for the DDT cleanup. And Babich, who once prided herself on gardening without the aid of pesticides, now frets about what her garden really contains.

Two months ago, Babich had just finished turning the soil for spring planting when the EPA notified her that high levels of DDT were present in her yard and that of her next-door neighbors, Guillermo and Leticia Aguirre.

The pesticide was found when federal officials tested soil from the yards of 14 homes on the north side of West 204th Street to make sure that heavy metals and other contaminants had not migrated there from the Del Amo Pits.

Although no appreciable amounts of metals were uncovered, investigators were baffled to find DDT in the yards, even though the pesticide is not known to be buried in the pits. When they dug beneath the surface, the level of DDT soared as high as 4,509 p.p.m. The source of the banned pesticide remains unknown, and EPA plans to do more soil tests in 100 to 300 yards.

A suspected carcinogen, DDT can affect the nervous system in high doses, and long-term exposure is believed to cause changes in liver function.

Babich would learn that the eggs laid by her chickens contained DDT, and state health officials have cautioned her not to give those eggs to pregnant or breast-feeding women. She plans to have her nine chickens and one rooster destroyed.

Babich, 34, now thinks the rash on her face first appeared more than a year ago, right about the time she broke ground for her garden. She wonders about the cause of the huge dermoid cyst that grew in her abdomen less than two years ago, forcing the removal of an ovary.

Next door, Aguirre, 47, recounts how he mowed the back yard this winter and, hours later, rushed to a hospital emergency room to be treated for shortness of breath. He suffers from asthma, but now he wonders if his breathing problems were made worse by chemicals.

Longtime residents say they are all too familiar with a whole spectrum of smells, which they compare to burnt oil, to onions, to rotten eggs, to paint thinner, to Raid.

Amid the turmoil, Babich has evolved into a neighborhood leader in her role as co-founder of the Del Amo Action Committee. With her long, wheat-colored hair and a fondness for environmental T-shirts, Babich had seemed the quintessential Sixties-style gardener last fall as she devoted her days to harvesting the tomatoes and nurturing the grapevines.

But in the past few months, she has shown herself as intensely stubborn and capable of mustering surprising political clout. She went toe-to-toe with the EPA recently with her demand that more families be relocated during the pesticide cleanup. She threatened that they would do their own “self-relocation,” marching out of the neighborhood to set up a tent city while the television cameras rolled. Finally, EPA agreed to move the families, explaining that their health was not in danger but that the agency wants to demonstrate its concern.

Two neighbors have become Babich’s comrades-in-arms. Frame, 35, a stoic mother of seven, remembers riding a dirt bike through the Del Amo Pits as a teen-ager. Herrera, 54, holds neighborhood strategy meetings at a big table in a yard bedecked with pinwheels, pink flamingos and bird houses.

With each report of high DDT levels, the women’s phones start ringing anew with inquiries from residents feeling a mounting sense of uncertainty.

“It’s a high level of anxiety. I feel my blood pressure up right now,” says Frame’s mother-in-law, Jessie Frame, who, along with Herrera and some other homeowners, has filed a lawsuit against some companies associated with the Del Amo site.

“What you can’t see,” Jessie Frame adds, “can hurt you.”

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That fear of an invisible threat --whether in the air, the soil or ground water--is shared by neighbors of many of the nation’s 1,200 Superfund sites.

As the Superfund program undergoes review in Washington, some industry officials and lawmakers are arguing that current federal cleanup standards are too stringent. But from the perspective of environmental groups and Superfund neighbors, the government is not moving fast enough or thoroughly enough.

It is not uncommon for people living alongside toxic dumps to report physical symptoms even if a clear cause is not known. Some wonder if residents are overreacting or experiencing stress-induced problems; some question the veracity of the tests.

Environmental activist Penny Newman, a veteran of the Stringfellow Acid Pits debate, chides the government for focusing too much on test results rather than treating health complaints as a clear signal that something is wrong.

“We always do it backward,” said Newman, a Riverside County resident who is assisting Babich’s group. “If we don’t find the levels, we deny anything can be here.”

The EPA has promised to clean the back yard soil to the level of 26 p.p.m. of DDT, which is more stringent than the 100 p.p.m. standard employed in the past. The change reflects the agency’s increased concern about what effects chemicals might have on children rather than adults, EPA officials say.

Some experts say EPA is taking a cautious approach.

“I think our opinion would be that when dealing with DDT, and its known hazards, prudence is very important,” said Ellen Silbergeld, senior toxicologist with the Environmental Defense Fund.

UCLA toxicology professor John Froines agreed.

DDT is “a chemical that sticks around, and one can be exposed to it over a number of years, so it’s not trivial,” he said.

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Even as the DDT cleanup begins, neighborhood activists are readying their next offensive: lobbying for a clinic where residents can be examined free of charge, their rashes and nausea and other problems taken seriously. Gathering ammunition, Babich is planning to survey residents’ complaints. Health officials caution that although they will review the survey, they do not anticipate easy answers. They note that rashes, for instance, could be caused by all sorts of allergies and irritants.

Another battle in the offing is how to clean up the Del Amo Pits. EPA was supposed to recommend a plan in March, but has postponed its decision.

Alternatives include placing a protective cover over the pits and monitoring ground water, projected to cost $3.69 million, and excavating the wastes completely, at a cost of $83 million. Excavation, it is estimated, would take as long as 15 years.

Many say they cannot wait that long. Even a stalwart such as Herrera is considering giving up and moving away, frightened that her bouts of dizziness will worsen or that she will develop cancer.

This week, as blue-suited cleanup workers scooped up dirt in Aguirre’s yard, he and his wife talked of finding a new house to rent, far away from West 204th Street.

“I don’t want to go back,” Aguirre said, “because, whatever job they do in my back yard, they’re never going to clean everything up.”

Neighborhood Cleanup

Families from a section of West 204th Street near Torrance have been moved to hotels at federal expense during the cleanup of high levels of DDT found in two back yards this year. Although the source of the DDT is unknown, its discovery has rekindled neighborhood concerns about two nearby toxic chemical sites.

1) Montrose Chemical Corp. manufactured DDT from 1947 to 1982. The Normandie Avenue facility later was torn down and the ground covered with an asphalt cap. DDT has been found in soil in and near the 13-acre site, and the solvent monochlorobenzene and limited DDT have been detected in the ground water, which is not used for drinking. The site was added to the federal Superfund list in 1989.

2) The Del Amo Study Area is the former site of a synthetic rubber manufacturing plant. Shell Oil Co. bought the plant in 1955 and ran it until 1969. The 280-acre site includes an industrial park, offices and a hotel. Tests have found contaminants such as benzene, a carcinogen, in ground water and in a waste disposal area. The ground water is not used for drinking. EPA officials say they have no reason to believe workers are in danger.