CLEANUP CLOSE TO END; EFFORTS AT SITES NEAR MOJAVE AND ROSAMOND DOWN TO FINAL FIVE.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

Back in 1986, Kern County officials were investigating an unusually high number of cancer cases in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of McFarland when they made a surprising discovery.

There also was an extraordinary glut of childhood cancers in Rosamond: Nine cases, five of them involving a relatively rare brain tumor, had been diagnosed between 1975 and 1985 in a town with fewer than 1,000 youngsters.

State and county health officials opened an investigation to determine whether anything in the town's air, water or soil was responsible for the cancer cluster. Alarmed residents turned out by the hundreds at community meetings.

State health officials mounted an ambitious study of 34 sites around Rosamond and Mojave where they suspected hazardous waste might have been illegally stored or dumped.

Now, 13 years later, the state effort is slowly but steadily winding down. After the initial investigation of 34 sites, 20 sites were deemed to need further work. The others were dropped after officials determined no chemicals were used there or after soil tests showed no contamination, officials said. The cleanup effort is down to its last five sites, and two of those are in the final stages of being certified as safe and available for industry or business.

``Considering the magnitude of the effort, our cleanup is proceeding at a rocket pace,'' said Jane Williams, a member of Desert Citizens Against Pollution, the Antelope Valley-based group that has been monitoring the cleanup.

The Rosamond childhood cancer cases were considered unusual because there were so many in such a small community. The cluster was especially worrisome because so many were of the single, rare type of medulloblastoma.

Investigators never determined a cause for the cancers. However, they did identify several defunct recycling businesses, dumps and other sites contaminated by toxic chemicals such as dioxin and heavy metals such as lead.

The Rosamond cancer cluster, and an earlier childhood cancer cluster in McFarland, prompted the creation of cancer registries in California.

``Until then no one kept track of cancer cases in the state,'' said Ron Talbot, laboratory director for the Kern County Health Department. ``That's one of the things that happened since the cluster that I think is good.''

Kern County health officials said the cancer registries have recorded nine more childhood cancer cases in Rosamond in the 12 years since 1987, the same number as in the original cancer cluster.

Normal numbers

But this time the numbers aren't considered unusual because of the population growth in the community, now with four to five times as many children as in the late 1970s, and because of the nature of the cancers.

``We are seeing as much childhood cancer as we would expect to see in a booming, suburban community,'' said Paul Mills, an epidemiologist with a cancer registry in Fresno. ``The second question we ask is, Are the kinds of cancer in Rosamond different than what we would expect? The answer is no.''

Typically, about 50 percent of childhood cancer cases are leukemia and brain cancers. The rest are a hodgepodge of various types of cancers. That is the pattern being seen in the most recent Rosamond cases, Mills said.

And community anxiety generated by the toxics investigation has faded over the years, much of it relieved by a 1989 report from the state's Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology Section.

Tests on soil and on locally produced eggs and pork showed that the soil was safe and that the produce contained no more dioxin than supplies found in food at the supermarket, the report said.

``For the first two or three years, there was a lot of concern. You had to deal with the stigma,'' said Rosamond attorney Olaf Landsgaard. ``By focusing on the sites, the community is now healthier than it was.''

Cleanup sites

The cleanup list has fluctuated as sites were added and dropped or certified as being cleaned up.

Of the five final active sites, only one is in Rosamond. S.R. Kilby, a defunct auto repair shop, is believed to have lead contamination in its soil. A company hired by the state is expected to begin soil sampling later this year to determine the location and extent of any contamination.

The $100,000 soil sampling work is expected to begin in about eight weeks. It will take about three months to get results, said project manager Adam Palmer.

All of the other active sites are located in an industrial area south of Mojave along United Street. All of the Mojave sites, except for the Commodity Refining Exchange, are defunct businesses.

Two of the sites, at the former United Metal Recovery and the Silver Queen junkyard, are in the final stages of cleanup. Companies working for the state entombed the contaminated soil under concrete caps.

State toxics officials are working to get a deed restriction for United Metal Recovery, which had lead- and copper-contaminated soil, that will limit the property's use to industrial purposes and would restrict what can be placed on the concrete cap.

At the Silver Queen junkyard, a concrete cap is curing, entombing 1,800 cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil. A contractor will have to remove wood debris and weeds. Once that is done, a deed restriction will be sought as well, said Danny Domingo, the cleanup project manager.

``I would like to see that done this year,'' Domingo said.

At Commodity Refining Exchange, the company is paying to entomb copper- and lead-contaminated soil in pits similar to those at United Metal Recovery and Silver Queen. The work is being done in phases as the company can afford and will probably take about two years to complete, Domingo said.

Commodity Refining Exchange already has signed a deed restriction and an operations and maintenance agreement for the upkeep of the concrete cap, Domingo said.

Expensive cleanup

The final site, Mobile Smelting, has been more problematic for state officials. The state already has spent more than $3.5 million on cleanup efforts on the 11 acres, including removing more than 330 tons of material.

Dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical, was found in levels as high as 323,000 parts per billion in ash that had been stored in a trailer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends industrial sites be decontaminated if they have dioxin at levels greater than 5 parts per billion.

The ash, which came from furnaces used in a metal recovery operation, have been sealed in containers on site. State officials considered shipping the ash out of state but dropped those plans in face of opposition from Desert Citizens Against Pollution, which did not want to inflict their waste on another community, and by environmentalists at the proposed disposal site in Kansas.

In the meantime, the state is planning to conduct more soil sampling on the site to characterize the extent of the contamination and determine feasible cleanup methods.

While the speed of the cleanup has not been questioned, the cleanup methods have been. Environmentalists don't like the practice of consolidating contaminated soil in a pit and covering it with concrete.

``Right now they either burn material or they bury,'' said Williams of Desert Citizens Against Pollution. ``Those are not solutions - that is just a Band-Aid.''

The state, Williams said, must make greater use of soil washing, a technology that involves using water, sometimes combined with chemical additives, to scrub soils.

Consolidating and capping was the preferred option for many of the Rosamond and Mojave sites because of cost and questions of the effectiveness or practicality of other methods, state officials said.

In one case, the John Alexander Research site in Rosamond, the owner paid for a trial run for a new soil scrub system, but the test had poor results.

``Soil washing is technology that works in some cases, but it is very expensive,'' said Domingo, the project manager. ``And you have to treat the liquids used to wash the soil, which could cost as much as treating the soil in the first place.''

The U.S. EPA notes soil washing has been used effectively in a number of sites across the country but says it has limitations.

``Removal of contaminants can often be improved during the soil-washing process by adding chemical additives to the wash water,'' according to an EPA pamphlet. ``However, the presence of these additives may cause some difficulty in the treatment of the used wastewater and the disposal of residuals from the washing process. Costs of handling and managing the additives have to be weighed against the amount of improvements in the performance of the soil-washing process.''

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Photo

PHOTO (Color) Edwin F. Lowry of the California EPA looks at the Silver Queen junkyard, as part of a regional toxic cleanup effort.

Jeff Goldwater/Daily News