In the 2,000 households of the leeward O’ahu town of Village Park, parents have more than the usual worries about mortgages, car payments, and schools. For the last four years, dozens of them have become alarmed over what they say is a suspiciously high number of children in their community that have birth defects and learning disabilities.
To the worried parents, the handicapped children appear to be popping up like daisies watered by poisoned wells. Village Park has had a history of contaminated drinking water supplies. In addition, the boundary of the Del Monte Superfund site lies barely a mile to the north and upslope of their town, and many people believe that soil contaminated with EDB and DBCP – two pineapple pesticides banned by the Environmental Protection Agency more than a decade ago – was used as fill during Village Park’s development.
For all these reasons, many in Village Park have come to believe that the epidemic they see of birth defects is the result of exposure to toxic chemicals in the air, water, and soil that make up their everyday environment.
Despite their claims, the state Department of Health can find nothing wrong in Village Park. A study it did in 1995 found that the rate of birth defects in children born to women who had lived in Village Park for any part of their pregnancy was at a level equal to or below rates in leeward O’ahu and the state at large. The rates for children enrolled in special education classes were also unexceptional, the Department of Health found.
Are the Village Park parents wrong?
Not necessarily. Disease clusters are notoriously difficult to prove. A recent non-fiction work, “A Civil Action,” by Jonathan Harr, describes the years-long saga of families in Woburn, Massachusetts, who claimed water polluted by industries in their town had led to a cluster of leukemia deaths among their children. (While their claims were later vindicated by the Environmental Protection Agency, their civil suit against the polluters can best be described as a nightmarish stand–off.) Early in the book, Harr describes how easily the mind is tricked into seeing a “cluster” where none really exists.
In the passage, a minister is talking with a mother who has come to believe her child’s leukemia is traceable to drinking water: “The minister had often heard Anne talk about her water theory during their trips to Boston. Usually, he just let her talk. But now he felt obliged to intervene. When Anne brought up the water again, he told her about the experience he’d had after buying his car, a Volvo, that they were riding in. He had suddenly noticed Volvos everywhere he looked. But that was an illusion, he said, a trick of the mind. There really weren’t a lot of new Volvos around; he’d simply become more aware of them. He suggested to Anne that she was experiencing the same sort of phenomenon with leukemia.”
It’s a simple but plausible theory. Whether it applies to Village Park remains a puzzle.
“Come on,” says Cheryl Yamane. “You tell me, honestly, can you walk outside your house and find one, two, four kids with Down’s [Syndrome] on the same street? Or go down one street below me and find another two kids with Down’s? Or go up two streets and find three kids that have trisomy–18 problems, trisomy-8 chromosomal problems?”
Yamane, whose three sons all exhibit developmental disabilities, sits at her dining room table piled high with papers about pesticides and drinking water contamination and letters to and from government officials.
Yamane continues, her words growing louder and coming faster: “We know DBCP causes chromosomal problems. We know that. It’s been published. It’s been written about.” DBCP, or 1,2-dibromo-3-chloro-propane, is a pesticide once used by Hawai’i’s pineapple growers to control nematodes. Farmers in 49 states had to stop using it in 1979 because the Environmental Protection Agency had identified it as a health hazard, but pineapple growers in Hawai’i were allowed to continue using it until 1985.
In 1981, the state found DBCP in drinking water wells in Central O’ahu, including the Kunia Wells II, which provide Village Park’s water. The chemical TCP (1,2,3-trichloropropane), a pesticide byproduct, was also found in these wells.
Yamane has spearheaded a community effort to find a reason for the “speech and heart problems, and all the boys [who] have problems with their testicles,” to name a few of the more common afflictions.
Further suggesting an environmental cause is the similarity of the defects. Nearly all the affected children have respiratory problems. Many boys have the same testicular disorder (undescended testicles). Down’s Syndrome is frequent, along with attention deficit disorders. Several mothers of these children have experienced miscarriages.
“That’s not something you’re going to find out at a public meeting,” Yamane says, “because parents aren’t gonna sit there and talk about their boys’ private parts, but, you know, it just so happened it came up one evening and everybody said, ‘Whoa, my son, too.’”
Yamane’s “Little Brian” was born in 1993 with Down’s Syndrome and two holes and a missing chamber in his heart. At the time, her middle child, Robert, was a special education student at Kaleiopu’u Elementary School. Back then, parents noticed only two small buses shuttling special ed children to and from school. By the end of the year, they were seeing six buses.
“People thought well, it’s the same bus; they’re just dropping off different children,” she says, but then people realized that the identifying numbers on the buses were all different.
Meanwhile, Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) planned to install poles and power lines in the area. Eight or nine parents concerned about the possible harmful effects of the electromagnetic fields (EMF) coming from the lines banded together to fight the project. These were parents whose children attended special education classes at Kaleiopu’u, Yamane says, and who would now and then pass each other on campus, inquiring about the health of one another’s children since, she adds, “a lot of these children are very sickly.” As a result of their inquiries, they discovered their children shared many of the same problems.
Their fight against the power lines was unsuccessful. But shortly after that battle, the parents all had their homes tested for magnetic fields. The tests showed that no house had unusually high levels, so the parents ruled out EMF as a possible source of their children’s health problems.
After that, Yamane says, “We all got together and the group started to grow.” Parents of more than 60 children are now involved in the loose association Yamane heads.
Looking For Answers
In 1993, when Yamane gave birth to Brian, there had been no history of birth defects in her family. Her doctor told her to look for an environmental cause.
As concern about the growing number of disabled children spread, Cheryl hosted a meeting on January 20, 1994, with four other Village Park mothers with developmentally disabled children, then-state Representative Annelle Amaral (Kunia, Makakilo, Ewa) and her assistant, Jalna Keala. Together, they hoped to devise a plan to pinpoint possible environmental health threats.
Four of the five mothers had experienced miscarriages while living in Village Park, with two having had more than one miscarriage. By contrast, children who had been conceived and born when these same women lived outside Village Park show no health problems.
Minutes of this meeting show that the mothers’ suspicions ran the gamut: They questioned their water quality, contaminants in the ground, electromagnetic fields, and soot and smoke from the burning of cane and pineapple residue. They expressed curiosity about contaminants that might be stored in the military bunkers above which their houses had been built.
The parents had asked the Department of Agriculture to test their soils for contaminants, “only to be told that the DOA has no chemist to do such testing,” the minutes state.
What the community needed was state cooperation to help investigate its fears and concerns for its children. However, what it got during the 1994 legislative session and afterward was – in the eyes of some Village Park residents – precisely the opposite.
“We were trying to get answers why special ed was growing and what could be making these children sick,” Yamane says, “and there was a meeting coming up at Del Monte,” referring to the proposed listing of the Del Monte Plantation in Kunia as a Superfund cleanup site. At the time, she continues, “we didn’t even focus on the possibility of [the problem] being in the water or the soil.”
On the advice of Amaral, Yamane attended the meeting.
About five miles from Village Park, in Kunia, lies the heart of the Del Monte pineapple plantation. Near a well in Kunia used by the camp for drinking water, a massive spill of ethylene dibromide occurred in 1977. Like DBCP, EDB is a fumigant that was used to control root nematodes. Since proposing that the site be added to the National Priorities List (the Superfund list), the EPA has discovered that the plantation is also littered with at least 22 sites where DBCP or DBCP-contaminated wastes were buried. Water in the well at Kunia Camp showed EDB present at levels thousands of times the Department of Health’s maximum contaminant level (MCL), while levels of DBCP were hundreds of times the state’s MCL.
The site was formally included on the Superfund list on December 16, 1994. Today, Del Monte is in the first stages of the Superfund process – preparation of the remedial investigation/ feasibility study (RI/FS). In this step, Del Monte’s environmental consultants investigate the extent and nature of contamination.
As part of the Superfund listing process, on January 25 and 26, 1994, the EPA held a public meeting in Wahiawa to which nearby residents – of Kunia Camp in particular – were invited. The meeting’s purpose was to give residents a chance to obtain information and ask questions of officials about health risks resulting from the contamination.
A month earlier, Yamane had been given an article in the newspaper that listed all the different health effects from the range of contaminants found in Hawai’i’s groundwater. Included in the list were DBCP, EDB, and TCP. The first two were chemicals used by Del Monte at the Kunia Plantation, while the third was an ingredient in DD, another pesticide Del Monte had used since the 1950s. All were identified as probable carcinogens. EDB may also cause infertility, damage the liver, gastrointestinal system and adrenal glands, while DBCP is known to affect male reproductive organs, the liver and kidneys, and is a probable mutagen. TCP affects the central nervous system, blood cells and also the liver and kidneys.
Some residents who remember the construction of later phases of their community speculate about Del Monte’s possible role in the pollution of Village Park. Trucks operated by Horita Construction (the developer) would go up Kunia Road and return with water that they would spray for dust control. Some residents also remember trucks carrying loads of dirt that were used to sculpt the subdivision’s “view lots.”
Such recollections, now viewed in light of what residents have learned about Del Monte’s activities in the 1980s, have further focused the suspicions of Village Park residents in the direction of the Del Monte plantation.
After the EDB spill in 1977, Del Monte began an enormous excavation project in a crude attempt to deal with the contamination. More than 18,000 tons of EDB-contaminated soil and rock were removed from the area around the plantation’s pesticide storage and mixing area. Most of the soil was spread over a 20-acre field so that the chemical could volatilize.
Del Monte also has a history of using its EDB- and DBCP- contaminated water for non-crop irrigation and as a dust suppressant. Some in Village Park suspect that at least a part of Del Monte’s contaminated soil and water was sold and used in the construction of their town.
Just four days after the mothers’ meeting, Yamane attended the January 1994 EPA meeting, despite living a mile outside the Superfund site’s four-mile radius. When she got there, she says, Department of Health officials met her at the door and told her that she did not belong there, that it did not concern her or the people of Village Park, and that the meeting was only for the residents of the Del Monte camp in Kunia.
“The Department of Health people told me it [the newspaper article] did not exist and I did not know what I was talking about,” Yamane says. As a result of officials’ efforts to keep her out of the meeting, she says, it took her more than 20 minutes to get through the door.
That was her first encounter with the Department of Health.
Is It The Water?
Before the month had ended, the Department of Health’s Office of Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response (HEER) released a site inspection report on Kunia Wells II. The EPA had required the state to inspect the wells, which were identified as a potential hazardous waste site and entered into the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System (CERCUS) in November 1983.
The wells had been known to be contaminated since 1981, when the state screened drinking-water wells on O’ahu and Maui for the presence of DBCP. At that time, both DBCP and TCP had been found at levels above the maximum contaminant level. Not until 1983 were the wells taken out of service, however. For at least two years – and probably much longer -Village Park residents had been drinking and bathing in contaminated water.
From 1983 to 1986, Village Park’s water was taken from the Ho’ae’ae wells. These wells were also contaminated – with TCP and atrazine, a herbicide used in Hawai’i on sugar – but at levels below the MCLs, according to Chester Lau of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply.
According to the HEER’s report, the Department of Health had conducted a preliminary assessment and site inspection of the Kunia Wells II as early as April 1984. The purpose of the assessment is to measure the impact of identified contamination on public health, welfare, or the environment, and to determine if further investigation of the site for possible Superfund listing would be warranted. Apparently, the results of the assessment were serious, as the site was proposed for listing on the Superfund later that year. A final outcome of the process would depend on locations of the contaminant source or sources.
The 1984 site inspection report identified 14 potential point-sources (i.e., localized, as opposed to dispersed) of contamination that fell within a four-mile radius of the Kunia Wells II site. These included four empty fumigant container disposal areas in Del Monte fields; one former drum storage area Del Monte used in the late 1940s; Air Force storage tanks and sludge landfills in Waikakalaua and Kipapa; a spill of 50,000 gallons of jet propellant from a Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants (POL) pipeline; and six Aviation Gas (AVGAS) spills from the POL that released a total of 300 gallons of EDB (also used as a fuel additive). Of these potential sources, “none appear to be a source of the groundwater contamination at the site,” the report states.
Del Monte used DD – a source of TCP as a soil fumigant from the mid-1940s to 1983, and DBCP for much of the same period. This legal use of pesticides, the report concluded, was apparently the source of the contamination: “Based on the groundwater flow, contamination of other area wells, and areas of pineapple cultivation/pesticide usage, it appears that the contamination of Kunia II wells is due to legal application of pesticides.”
The report similarly absolved the jet fuel spills and the 1977 EDB spill at the Del Monte plantation as a source of well contamination, noting that “EDB has not been confirmed to be a contaminant in the groundwater of Kunia Wells II.”
In the end, the proposal to list Kunia Wells II on the NPL was rescinded based on the lack of a point source for the contaminants. (However, in the article, “Spoiled Soil,” appearing in the Summer 1989 issue of The Amicus Journal, Natural Resources Defense Council scientist Lawne Mott claims that a lack of resources caused the EPA to reject a proposal to allocate Superfund money for five groundwater-contamination sites in Hawai`i – Kunia Wells II being one of them. “Pesticide contamination is more and more ubiquitous,” she said, “and the Superfund resources are not enough to clean up the already designated sites.”).
In May 1986, the Kunia Wells II were fitted with granular activated carbon filtration (GAC) systems to reduce the level of the contaminants in the water and the wells came back on line. Carbon filters are often used to filter organic chemicals such as DBCP and TCP because organics are adsorbed strongly by activated carbon. Since that time, the levels of contaminants have been below levels that can be quantified by the tests used by the Department of Health (although they may still be present).
After her January 1994 meeting with Village Park mothers, Amaral introduced two legislative measures – House Bill 3651 and House Concurrent Resolution 145/House Resolution 134 – intended to help the community. The first sought to push the state departments of Health and Education to cooperate in the identification and investigation of any increases or significant clusters of disease or illness suspected to be related to environmental contamination. The resolution asked for the military to reveal the contents of military bunkers in the area. Neither made it past two hearings, despite strong support from Village Park residents.
In addition, Amaral sought support from the federal government, sending letters in February 1994 to U.S. Representative Patsy Mink and Barry Johnson, assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).
In her letter to Johnson she writes, “The community was developed on former sugar cane land, and because a number of other plantations are going out of business, more residential development of this kind is taking place. The implications of environmental contamination go far beyond Village Park, as many thousands of acres of sugar and pineapple land are taken out of agriculture in an island state where land is extremely precious and housing greatly needed. I believe that we may have the opportunity here to set some important testing standards and parameters before, rather than after, the fact.”
Amaral asked Johnson’s assistance in identifying the chemicals used by Del Monte, in communicating the seriousness of the situation to Village Park, and in discovering the contents of underground storage tanks and or bunkers.
A Grassroots Survey
Encouraged by Amaral’s help, in early 1994, the Village Park Community Association distributed a survey asking residents if their children suffered from any chronic medical disorder or physical or learning disability. It was a cursory survey, meant merely to identify those families that had children with disabilities that could be linked to environmental contamination.
Eighteen hundred surveys were mailed; 337 were completed and returned. The results: 21 percent of the respondents, or 70 families, reported a chronic medical disorder in the household; 55 of those households had children. Twenty-one respondents indicated that their child had a physical or learning disability. The average residency for those reporting chronic medical disorders and families with children with physical/learning disabilities was 7 years, and more than half of the respondents said they used purified or bottled water.
Amaral wrote in July 1994, “This is a first step in what could be a long process of trial and elimination. The next step will be to follow up with those families who have indicated on the surveys that there is a problem.”
On January 24, 1995, two representatives from the ATSDR met with Amaral and some Village Park residents at Yamane’s home. Mark Weber, a geologist from the agency’s Atlanta office, and Bill Nelson, a senior agency representative from San Francisco, explained the role and function of the ATSDR and listened to Yamane and other community members describe Village Park’s problems. It was the beginning of a federal investigation, or at least so it seemed.
Against the backdrop of what residents felt was a burgeoning relationship with the ATSDR, Village Park residents geared up for a second round in the state Legislature. In 1995, Amaral introduced two measures nearly identical to the ones she had sponsored a year earlier. These, too, did not pass out of hearings.
According to Yamane, deputy Health Director Bruce Anderson attempted to put a happy face on Village Park’s situation, telling her at one of the legislative hearings that, “It’s not uncommon for women over 40 to have children with Down’s Syndrome or to have any type of chromosomal damage.” Yamane was 32 at the time she gave birth to her son.
She says Anderson also suggested that lead often caused learning disabilities of the sort that the Village Park children displayed, although he had no knowledge of the specific disabilities that they had. “We never went into that in detail,” Yamane says. “So when we finally got the Department of Health to come out and take a look at what’s going on, the only thing they would offer was lead screening.”
DOH Action
Although the Legislature did not act on Amaral’s measures, the Department of Health was coming under increasing pressure to investigate Village Park. According to Amaral, in March 1995, Family Health Services Division Chief Lancy Kunta announced tentative plans to have public health students conduct a house-to-house canvass, the results of which would be used to create a database of health problems in Village Park. Before then, however, the department organized a question-and-answer meeting with Village Park residents and DOH representatives, Kuntz, a pediatric neurologist, and Jim Cooper, an epidemiologist who had done five cluster surveys.
At this meeting, Cooper explained that there would be an initial assessment of existing data – “things like the special education registry, the birth registry” – before a community survey was conducted or even formulated. “Talking to some of the parents that are willing to share the medical histories will help,” he said, while promising that, eventually, the DOH would formulate a survey. In the meantime, Kuntz offered to arrange a lead screening, as part of the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, for which the DOH had a small amount of federal money.
The mothers say they never suspected lead was the culprit; the Board of Water supply announced in June 1994 that Village Park homes showed no detectable lead in household tap water. Still, the Department of Health tested Village Park children for the element, well known as a cause of a wide range of disorders and defects, including brain damage and learning problems, in children.
Parents advertised the testing by printing up fliers and distributed them door to door. On April 21, 1995, 64 children, ages 6 six months to 11 years, were screened at the Village Park district park. None, according to Kuntz, were identified with elevated blood lead levels.
The news did not surprise anyone in Village Park, a subdivision too new to be subject to the old lead hazards: lead-based house paints, lead plumbing pipes and leaded gasoline.
Normal or Better
After lead was eliminated as a possible cause of health problems in Village Park, Yamane and the other parents were hoping the DOH would begin the more in-depth health study they had discussed at the March 1995 meeting. But before that could occur, as Cooper had explained it, the department would analyze existing birth-defect data.
In January 1996, the department released its analysis, based on the state’s birth defect registries and Department of Education data on special education enrollment. Authors of the study were Cooper and Philippe Biarez of the University of Hawai’i’s School of Public Health. In almost every category, Village Park seemed to score at levels that were normal or better than normal.
Analysis of birth certificates from 1982 through 1992 indicated that Village Park’s birth defect rates, overall, were lower than the rest of the state.
The Hawai’i Birth Defects Monitoring Program collects medical records from all birthing centers statewide and collects data on congenital anomalies diagnosed within one year of birth. Analysis of this registry’s data, for the years 1988 through 1994, found that Village Park’s proportional prevalence rate (PPR) of 31.9 birth defects per 1,000 live births was lower than the state’s overall rate of 41.33 birth defects per 1,000 live births for the same period.
Cooper and Biarez also analyzed data on special education enrollment status for children living in Village Park. Here, too, they found nothing unusual. For the period studied, “a student residing in Village Park was less likely to have been classified as having a special education need as a student living elsewhere in the state,” they found. They did note that the rate of increase in special-ed classes at Kaleiopu’u Elementary School experienced “an upward trend in enrollment” for the three school years from fall 1992 through spring 1995. This, they said, “should be monitored to see if this increase continues. It is quite likely that this increase was caused by programmatic changes or changes in the screening protocols for learning disabilities rather than an increase in the underlying prevalence of disease in the community.”
In addition, the report said, that 1994 survey conducted by the Village Park Community Association was not useful, inasmuch as it could not be statistically analyzed due to low response rates and lack of specificity in the reported diagnoses.
The report concludes by noting that while “there are limitations to the data used for this evaluation, there is no reason to suspect there is a geographical bias in reporting that would cause an under count of health events in Village Park when compared to other communities or the state as a whole. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that these data may be used for an initial evaluation of a suspected disease cluster.”
Yamane was not satisfied. The birth defects registry is incomplete, she believes, as is the tumor registry. “Children who turn up with problems, they’re not always identified until they become of school age. And unless it’s a problem that’s identified at birth, then it will not turn up in any birth defect registry. My children, even my very youngest, who has heart defects and who has Down’s Syndrome, his Down’s Syndrome wasn’t diagnosed – they weren’t sure at birth – for about a month and a half later. They had to wait for those chromosome studies, so he’s not even listed on the birth defect registry. And there are how many others out there. You’ll hear that especially from a lot of the chromosome families, with chromosome problems, with neurological problems because they’re not always identified at birth.”
The limitations of the data are acknowledged in the report. For the first five years of the study (1982 through 1987), information was collected from the state’s birth certificate registry. Information there, the authors say, is “incomplete and birth defects are not reported with the detail necessary to distinguish major from minor conditions.” However, the authors state, “it was assumed that these limitations in the data contained no geographical bias and could therefore be used for comparison.” Since 1988, the state has maintained a more complete Birth Defects Registry, which collects medical records and reports all “major congenital anomalies diagnosed within one year of birth.”
Empty Offices
Yamane believes that this report does not satisfy the Department of Health’s promise to conduct a health survey for Village Park residents. Since the report’s release, however, the department has done little further work on Village Park.
“On the Department of Health side,” Yamane complains, “they say it’s because all of the cutbacks they have. That’s why they can’t do it.”
That may indeed be part of the reason. Investigations of reported clusters can be extremely expensive. After initial studies reveal a probable cluster, finding a cause can involve a number of burdensome and costly surveys, with no guarantee of scientific success.
Alvin Onaka, state registrar of vital statistics and the acting chief of the Office of Health Status Monitoring, told Environment Hawai’i that the state does not have sufficient personnel to do the studies Village Park residents want. The position of state epidemiologist has been vacant since Rick Vogt recently moved to the mainland. Cooper; who worked on the earlier Village Park study, has been transferred. “We’re very short-handed,” Onaka says.
Yamane is not wholly discouraged. “We’re still trying to work with the state,” she says. “We’re trying to work with the federal EPA that’s working with Del Monte and also the ATSDR.”
Still, prospects cannot be encouraging. Del Monte denies any connection between its Superfund site and the Village Park concerns and has refused to extend its Superfund-related studies beyond the standard four-mile radius from the Kunia well spill. Village Park lies a mile outside that perimeter. According to Yamane, if and when Del Monte reaches that four-mile perimeter and still finds contamination in the soil and water, then it might extend its study to Village Park.
It’s a remote possibility and Yamane isn’t holding her breath: “You know that spill happened back in the 70s,” she says. “We’re at the late 90s and they’re only now working on it, and they’re not moving very fast.”
— Teresa Dawson
Volum 8, Number 7 January 1998
Leave a Reply