A little rocket fuel with your salad?

• Author: Ayres, Gene

I SPENT TWO DECADES living in Southern California, during which time I married, fathered a child, got divorced, and became a single parent. I finally left the Golden State in 1989, taking my young son with me because I was concerned about his health. It wasn't just the smog, although that was bad enough around our house in the San Fernando Valley, where chronic inversions turned the sky over the San Gabriel Mountains the color of dried blood. My son had been born with myriad allergies, and had experienced a terrifying reaction to the DPT vaccine (screaming fits suggestive of being tortured).

Then came the medfly. It was 1988, and I can still recall the sight of the State agricultural commissioner going on TV and dramatically drinking a glass of malathion to reassure a panicky public that, despite the conspicuous presence of a skull and crossbones on all malathion containers (the pesticide was readily available at most garden centers), it was really quite harmless. Of course, we only had the man's word on that, as well as on what was really in his glass, but it was a classic case of the "as-seen-on-TV" school of credibility.

What had prompted this extraordinary demonstration was the discovery of a single medfly in the Port of Long Beach, some 20 miles south of Los Angeles. The big citrus producers had few, if any, commercial groves south of Ventura County, which was two mountain ranges north of Los Angeles. No matter. The medfly was capable of destroying entire groves of citrus, which would cost state growers untold millions. Governor George Deukmejian declared a state of emergency. The Air National Guard was called out to begin spraying with malathion, despite howls of protest from the 11 million inhabitants of Los Angeles. Within a matter of weeks, as the panic in Sacramento spread south along the Central Valley, scores of choppers swarmed the skies over southern California, coming out at night like bats, to saturation-spray the entire urban area. It soon became apparent that malathion could take the paint off your car, but we were assured it was harmless to humans.

At the time I was recently divorced, and my son's mother and I had separate households a few miles apart. We would trade phone calls, warning, "They're coming!" "Move your car, they're headed your way!" And then a nervous, "They're here!" Our son was acting up by then, having increasingly bad attacks of asthma, and developing behavioral problems. By age four, to make matters worse, he'd been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD).

We decided we'd had enough. It was agreed I would pack up, take the boy, and head for Florida, where my parents lived.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ROCKET FUEL

Florida, however, proved to be anything but a safe haven. Within a few years of our move, a medfly turned up in the Port of Miami. Florida's response, while it didn't include drinking pesti cide on TV, was if anything even more draconian. Florida, like California, is the turf of large agribusiness concerns, especially citrus growers. Like their West Coast counterparts before them, they flew into a panic. This, of course, led to the now no-longer-unprecedented decision to mount a preemptive strike. The state legislature quickly passed a new law, written (as since has become common practice) by the affected industry. The Florida law required that all citrus trees within 1,800 feet of an infected tree (the evident roving range of the average medfly) be destroyed. In the years since, the flies have continued to creep northward, and commercial groves and private yard trees alike have fallen before them. Lawsuits, protests, and petitions have done nothing to slow this preemptive juggernaut.

Not long after my move to Florida, my thyroid gland ceased functioning. I learned later that my ex-wife, as well as my brother Ed, both of whom had lived in California in those years, had also suffered hypothyroid disease. Doctors still don't know the cause, although--as we'd eventually learn--they have some suspects. In my case they blamed an unknown virus.

It wasn't until years later that we found that malathion wasn't the only toxic chemical to which we'd been exposed during our time in California. On December 16, 2003, The Wall Street Journal published an article by investigative reporter Peter Waldman on the history of California's experience with a chemical called perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel dating back to the first solid-fuel rockets of World War II. Perchlorates are actually a group of salts--ammonium perchlorate, potassium perchlorate, sodium perchlorate, cobalt perchlorate, and a score of others. They were developed mainly as oxidizer components for propellants and other explosive materials (including flares and fireworks) in the 1940s, emerging into a full-bore industry during the Cold War buildup of the 1950s. They have more recently turned up in such diverse products as automobile airbags and certain fertilizers, particularly those produced in Chile.

Despite repeated efforts by California water managers and regulators to stop the dumping of rocket fuel and related toxic chemicals into the state's groundwater and wastewater systems, defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Aerojet General pumped and dumped millions of gallons of these chemicals into unlined pits or holding ponds, or injected them deep into the ground. They did this with impunity, considering themselves answerable only to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), whose view on the subject, according to Waldman, was that "its job is national security, not environmental safety." That view seems to persist today, as reflected in the recent push by DOD to attain wide-ranging exemption from environmental regulation and restriction.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a very different view than DOD, although no one in either organization denies that perchlorates are...