This poor, Hispanic town in California has been fighting a local toxic waste dump for 35 years
Tons of PCBs have been deposited in Kettleman City
Nobody knows where the birth defects came from, but the citizens of Kettleman City have a suspicion. Since 1982, the town of 1,500 nestled in the fertile San Joaquin Valley has been host to a hazardous waste facility. Throughout years of wariness and suspicion concerning the dump, its neighbors had lacked visible indication of its dangers. That was until about ten years ago, when a disproportionate number of Kettleman City’s infants began inheriting birth defects, including cleft lip, cleft palate, and heart murmurs. Some babies have even died.
Kettleman City sprang up in the 1920s as residence for oil workers. Today it is occupied by a 95 percent Hispanic population, many of whom work on the neighboring farms where almonds and blueberries are grown. Many families have lived there for three generations, and maintain a tight and small community. About half the population lives below the poverty line.
By the 1970s, Kettleman City was already primed as a dumping ground. For several years petroleum companies had deposited oil waste there. In 1979, Chemical Waste Management, a subsidiary of Waste Management, bought a site and three years later obtained a permit to deposit PCBs and other toxic chemicals in the area. Soon, dozens of trucks were daily carting loads of PCBs, benzene, asbestos, and other toxic waste with just a few miles of town.
That same year, PCBs, a now banned transformer fluid, made headlines. In 1982, the EPA established an emergency landfill in a poor and predominantly black North Carolina community to dispose of and treat soil contaminated by chemicals dumped illegally along the highway. The response to the hazardous waste landfill is credited with galvanizing the cause of environmental justice, and involved weeks of protests in which over 500 were arrested.
Yet the construction of the Kettleman Hills Hazardous Waste Facility was completed with little objection from residents, who lived just four miles away. But alarms rang a few years later, in 1985, when newspapers reported that the company was to be fined $2.1 million for operating supplemental and unauthorized waste ponds in the area.
Ever since that point, the relationship between Waste Management and Kettleman City residents has been defined by anxiety and suspicion. In 1988, tensions erupted again as citizens and outside environmentalist groups fought against a proposal to install a toxic waste incinerator. In one 1989 town hearing, 200 hundred residents gathered to express their disapproval. They objected to the common thread of hazardous waste sites, that they were almost always built in communities of the poor and disenfranchised, disproportionately affecting people of color. Activists cited a report commissioned in 1984 by the California Waste Management Board spelled out such a strategy. It was best, the report said, to select “a site that offers the least potential of generating political opposition.”
With the help of Greenpeace, Kettleman City citizens mounted a lawsuit against Waste Management, claiming the company had cut legal corners and failed to release a Spanish version of the report for residents to read. They won. Chemical Waste Management aborted the incinerator project, and the ensuing years were defined by comparative calm.
The facility, which emphasized that only a fraction of the site was dedicated to hazardous waste, operated on as normal, and no major signs of injury or legal malfeasance was evident. That was until a small blip in 2005, when Chemical Waste Management was fined $10,000 for failing to abide by monitoring restrictions for PCBs.
Then came a true resurgence in environmental consciousness. In 2009, thanks to an analysis by the organization Greenaction, Kettleman City was found to have been host to an alarming number of birth defects. From 2008–2009 alone there were 14, including a handful of cases of cleft lip and cleft palate. When resident Maria Saucedo’s daughter Ashley was born, “the doctors told me that there was something wrong with her,” she reflected.
“They told me that Ashley wouldn’t live more than one or two months.” Ashley defied the prognosis for a time, but died in January 2009, only ten months old.
Within months of the reports of birth defects becoming well known, Chemical Waste Management applied for an expansion of their hazardous waste facility. For practical reasons, legislators had good reason to allow expansion. County regulations had it that 10 percent of revenue earned on hazardous materials was to be collected as tax. Combined with property taxes, that meant the Kettleman Hills facility was worth $2 million in annual county revenue.
Despite financial incentives, officials agreed to halt the dump’s expansion pending better understanding of its health risks to Kettleman City residents. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, encouraged an investigation by the Department of Health. The California EPA got involved, asserting they would not allow a dump expansion “unless we are confident that the facility does not present a health risk to the community.”
Yet finding conclusive scientific evidence that chemicals from the hazardous waste site caused birth defects was more or less a doomed project. First it would involve testing chemicals in the environment and tracing them to their origin in the waste facility. Then a biological trail would have to be established to connect those chemicals to human absorption, and then from the chemicals to the maladies and symptoms observed in the town’s infants and children.
Adding to the difficulty is the fact that Kettleman City is polluted on several fronts. Not only does it host the largest toxic waste facility west of Alabama, the town, though bordered by the California aqueduct, relies on well water contaminated with high levels of benzene and arsenic. Wind and water also bring in pesticides from the farms where residents work, and intersecting Interstate 5 and Highway 41 provide a parade of engines sputtering exhaust and diesel fumes.
The sample size, too, proved challenging. To find more than a dozen babies with defects, among three to five dozen total town births, is doubtlessly alarming, but not enough to for scientific certainty. “I understand why people are concerned about it,” said Dr. Michael MacLean, the county’s public health officer, but added, “If I had to bet the farm on it, I think that this is just a statistical anomaly.”
During the investigation into birth defects, it was discovered the facility had again flouted proper disposal practices. In 2011, Waste Management agreed to pay $400,000 in fines and commit $600,000 to repairs on site. The residents and the waste site have been increasingly at odds. In 2014, the facility was granted permission to absorb more toxic waste, while in September 2016, residents gained historic concessions through a civil rights complaint that claimed the poor and Hispanic community had been dismissed from the decision process.
But it’s hard to say what these decisions mean for the likes of Ivan Rodriguez, whose son was born with a cleft palate, or Magdalena Romero, whose five-month-old daughter America died in 2008, and the dozens of Kettleman City families like them. No one may know what, if anything, has been causing the rash of birth defects in Kettleman City. But the lives of its residents add further proof to James Baldwin’s thesis that it often costs so much to be poor.
