The Dead River: A Visit to the Dunsmuir Toxic Spill part 2

The Dead River

Copyright 1991 by Jim Martin

Part two (conclusion)

Kristi Osborn was an apprentice heavy equipment operator for Stemple-Weibelhaus Construction Company in Dunsmuir, California until a few days after the spill. She had been assigned to a site close to the river, fifteen miles south of Dunsmuir. On the Monday morning, one day following Sunday's spill, she and other workers were informed of the derailment and the job-site was evacuated. Some workers were told that it was "voluntary" to be working at the site the following day, Tuesday. (This "voluntary evacuation" was met with a little amusement by the workers . "I can evacuate any time I want to! I don't need your permission.") There was a recommendation that workers not be exposed to the air for more than four hours at a time, but not all the workers were informed. Kristi called in Tuesday morning and she was told she "had ten minutes to be here."

"We worked all day like nothing ever happened. I didn't know about the 'voluntary work status' or that there was a recommendation to work only four hours. I worked nine hours that day, just like normal. The next day, we got evacuated from the job site again because of the air quality. The next day we were evacuated again and Friday the job was shut down."

"My boss was aware of the 'voluntary work status' and the four hour maximum recommendation and he didn't bother to tell me. So when we finally went back to work I told him about it. I didn't appreciate him making that decision for me. He told me I had ten minutes to be at work and it didn't sound very voluntary to me. I got laid off two days later."

Other workers who had been on the job site had been asked to sign statements acknowledging that they had been told that the exposure was "voluntary". Kristi was not.

Alarmed at her local community's response to the spill, she began to help organize Concerned Citizens of Dunsmuir, mostly to gain more information about the nature of the chemical spilled into the river. She described herself as having kept a fairly "low profile" in the town she had moved to only a year before, and had never gone beyond "mouthing off" in terms of political involvement.

Dunsmuir and its closest neighbor, Mount Shasta City, are worlds apart in terms of their social makeup. Mount Shasta City, located at the foot of Mount Shasta, is a magnet for area environmentalists, tourists, spiritual seekers, and money. Dunsmuir, while not the railroad and logging town it once was, still hears the word "environmentalist" as a dirty one. Kristi said her group had tried to network with Mount Shasta's established environmental center, without much success. "It's like we speak different languages."

We interviewed her three weeks after the spill, and what she had learned had alarmed her even more. By-products of the breakdown of metam sodium included deadly hydrogen sulfide, which she had been previously trained to deal with in Wyoming. I asked her whether she felt confident that the water was now safe for swimming, as state agencies had assured residents and visitors. "Absolutely not," she said. "I got the reports and they all say, NO SAFE LIMITS ESTABLISHED. I don't know how they can determine that something is safe if they don't know what "safe" levels are. People are still getting sick. We've been warned by different sources that the stuff will be reactivated in the rain. When it rained a week after the spill, I hadn't gotten sick up till then, and then I got sick. They took the warnings posted along the river down too soon. At the initial hearing they said it would be six to eight weeks before that water was safe to go near. It was only a week later they took the signs down." Kristi was convinced that the water was still unsafe to swim in, but since the warnings had been taken down, kids could be seen in the river.

What were the symptoms that she and others had been complaining about? "Nausea, headache, sore throat, breathing difficulties... it feels like you have a real nasty case of the flu. I've been having this fever that's been up and down and won't go away. I'm sicker now than I was before. The apparent cause is immune system problems. It's not always something you can trace back to the spill, but how often do you have a flu epidemic in the middle of summer? We have had perfect weather, not too hot, not too cold, it's been beautiful."

"Everyone's immune system is different. Everybody's getting hit in their weak spot. A lady who has had a bladder infection or two in the past ended up getting a kidney and bladder infection that she had to be hospitalized for. People are getting pneumonia, people with a little bit of asthma here and there are getting horrible asthma attacks."

This called to my mind an interesting parallel between the symptoms Kristi described and those described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich in The Oranur Experiment. He identified the symptoms of radiation sickness in the early 1950s as a biological reaction of the organism to the noxious effects of an atmospheric assault: a metallic taste in the mouth, headache, nausea, and in particular: each person reacting by getting "hit in their weak spot." Since symptoms of the toxic reaction vary from individual, it is an easy matter for medical and political authorities to dismiss the victims as suffering some sort of psychosomatic illness, rather than a reaction to the toxins. I didn't mention this to Kristi at the time, but she continued to draw the analogy.

"It's so varied. In the beginning everybody had the same symptoms: a metallic taste in the mouth, an inability to concentrate, and the headache and the nausea, sore throat, breathing difficulties. Those were the main things. Now you're seeing a lot of joint pain in kids, really strange."

"People won't even go to the hospital anymore because they're only getting treated for the symptoms, not the cause. Why bother? I've never even gone. Southern Pacific told people that they'd pay for them to go up to the local hospital. So everybody is going up to this hospital and they're making tons of money they never dreamed about, but they're not fixing anybody. They're not helping people, then they make fun of people. Tell 'em it's "all in their head," really belittle their problem. Why would I want to go there? Now Southern Pacific's not even paying anymore. They've determined there's no cause for it."

A newborn baby born in Dunsmuir days after the spill was found to be dropping weight precariously, and the family's doctor told the parents they needed to move the baby out of the area. Having no money, they placed an ad in the local Mount Shasta City paper: "Donations needed. Our sick 2 1/2 week old son needs to be moved from the area on doctors orders. Father will work for it." It was a heart-rending indication of the impact of the spill.

Kristi said, "This is a poor community. A lot of people are on assistance, doing odd jobs here and there. And what was the first thing they were told? Having symptoms? Get out of the area. Well, where are these people going to go? With what money? This one girl I know, she's on welfare, has two kids and lives right down by the river. She was horribly ill. Her eyes were so sore she couldn't see. It hurt her to close them, let alone keep them open. She tried to go the Southern Pacific claims office to get them to help, and they said, well, the voluntary evacuation's been lifted; we can't help you."

After many attempts to get hard information from the state about air quality figures, Kristi's group was informed that on a scale of 1 to 100 (100 being "possibly fatal") tests showed that the air quality at a local riverside resort registered at 140. But this information was given out on the phone, and Concerned Citizens of Dunsmuir is still waiting for the report in writing. Sympathetic people at California's EPA would like to release it, but superiors won't allow it, Kristi said. The EPA office in San Francisco did not return my calls, either.

Reports began to come out three weeks after the spill that the chemical and its airborne by-products had a deleterious effect on fetuses. "The announcement, which came two weeks after officials said there was no evidence that metam sodium could cause birth defects, stems from a review of data that has been stored in secret files at the California Department of Food and Agriculture for several years, officials said.

"'We have found that high exposure to metam sodium causes birth defects in rats and in rabbits at high doses,' said Richard Jackson, a Department of Health Services Official who has directed much of the state's response to the spill.

"They also noted that the possibility of defects in animals does not necessarily mean the same danger exists for humans, but said they were making the announcement in an effort to be overly cautious." (Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 6, 1991)

Instead of being more forthcoming, EPA changed its policy regarding the distribution of information to the public. Now, written requests must be sent to Sacramento, and if approved, will be forwarded to Berkeley, so that another bureaucrat can attach a cover letter along with the information. I asked Kristi if she thought that information about the spill was being suppressed.

"Well, have you heard about any 'possibly fatal' air quality reports in the media?" I hadn't and I had been tracking the story carefully. It appears that the reports of fetal deformation had been a leak; immediately the EPA played down the report, saying they didn't want to upset anyone and that the chances of any effects on fetuses was very small.

I asked Kristi about a report that had just come out that the California Department of Forestry (CDF) ordered Southern Pacific not to pull the tanker from the river immediately. CDF was concerned about possible erosion of the river banks and damage to vegetation along the banks. "I guess you could kinda sympathize with them. There were so many agencies involved, and no one wanted to make a decision. First they spent a few days trying to figure out who was the boss. Then when they decided who was the boss, they still couldn't make a decision. This was completely new territory. Nobody wanted to make a mistake. They didn't have anything to base their decisions on, they were just guessing. So basically they did nothing, and the water kept moving, and this thing went into the water supply."

So it seemed that even if Southern Pacific had wanted to move quickly to clean up the spill, they wouldn't have been able to without the approval of the proper authorities.

"There must be some common sense, and you have a moral obligation above and beyond the law. Laws are not written for every single circumstance. Southern Pacific was within the law - barely - all across the board. They could have pumped, they could have stopped the flow from the tanker. They could have done a lot of things that they didn't do because they weren't required to. No one was stopping them from doing any number of these things. As far as moving the tanker, yes. But by the time they were seriously arguing about moving the tanker, it had all gone into the river anyway. So it didn't really matter."

"One of the biggest questions is why they didn't block the flow further down the river, where the water is low and slows down to a trickle. It's surrounded by bare ground. They said there was no access, but people can drive their cars down there and camp. Okay? There is no reason why they couldn't have blocked that off, with six days to make the decision."

"One of the problems with that idea is the problem of flooding, but there's a dam above the spill where they could have stopped the flow while they pumped. There are a number of spots along the river where a temporary dam could have been constructed to allow the stuff to be pumped out."

Our conversation drifted back to the response to the spill by state agencies. I asked Kristi how people had been alerted to the spill in town. "A lot of people never did get alerted. They found out through the grapevine. It wasn't like people were running around knocking on each other's doors saying, 'get out of town - something bad's happened.' People in small towns are afraid of raising a fuss. After I heard about it, I came into town expecting a ghost town. The freeway was closed. But there were the city workers with jackhammers, working as if nothing had happened. They had evacuated us from our job, and it's like everything is normal in town. This really got me: a lady with a baby in a stroller walking along the river. I stopped her on a bridge and said, hey, did you know you're not even supposed to out here? No, she didn't hear anything about it. I told her to go into BP and check it out, they had some information over there. I went home and checked the news to see if they had anything about it: nothing. Nobody knew anything. I went back to the bridge about a half hour later and that lady was still standing on that bridge with her baby. I could not believe it. She had no idea what was going on. Some people didn't even know there had been a derailment or a chemical spill at 3 o'clock in the afternoon Monday. The city didn't officially notify me until Wednesday. A little late. The only way I knew about it was from listening to CalTrans scanners on the job.

"I called the evacuation center, and they said 'The freeway's closed. If you want to evacuate you have to come here.' Does it make sense to keep people being evacuated in the same town where the spill is happening? They said they've closed the roads, you can't get out. I said, what, are we being quarantined? This is the evacuation center, the information center, for the town. They said you have to go to the high school, you can't leave town. The fumes were just as bad at the high school as they were anywhere else! People were getting oxygen, people were getting sick, and they were making them stay in it for days! I'm sure it was better than their house right on the river, but by how much?"

She felt that the whole town should have been evacuated. "How ridiculous to keep these people here! People are still getting sick."

In an age when we are forced to coexist with ever-increasing levels of chemical compounds in our atmosphere, serious questions remain about how state and federal regulatory agencies respond to disasters such as the spill at Cantara Loop. It appears doubtful that efforts now being made to restore the North Coast fishery can succeed while fumigants are poured into watersheds.



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