Triangle Lake residents confront state and federal officials with questions on contamination allegations
Published: (Friday, Jul 15, 2011 04:25AM) Midnight, July 15
TRIANGLE LAKE — State and federal officials met with a standing-room-only crowd of residents from the Highway 36 corridor on Thursday to invite them to participate in an investigation of herbicides in the local environment, and to confront a range of tough questions in a session that lasted well over three hours.
The meeting at Triangle Lake Grange, an aging community building beside Triangle Lake School, included representatives from the state Agriculture, Forestry and Environmental Quality departments, and the Health Authority. Federal representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry also attended.
Officials plan to test people’s urine, their drinking water, their garden plants and the milk and eggs produced on their land, said Jae Douglas, a manager with the Oregon Health Authority.
The tests will be run twice — with the first round occurring this summer prior to any likely application of herbicides on nearby private forestlands, to get some baseline data, Douglas said. “Based on what we learn and what we see in those tests, we’ll do another round of testing in the spring,” she said.
The state hopes to test as many as 36 people from the local area, and another four people from outside the corridor as a kind of control group, Douglas said. State officials have conducted previous exposure investigations, but the scale of this inquiry is larger than usual, Douglas said.
Those who sign up for the testing will be given the results as soon as the state has them, she said. A final report on the investigation’s results will be released sometime in the summer of 2012, she said. “What we’re trying to do is assess whether or not exposures are happening to people in the Triangle Lake/Highway 36 area,” she said.
Dozens of people, from among the 100 of so who attended the meeting, posed some tough questions for the governmental visitors: How can you get my landlord to stop spraying Round-up? How do other communities with these same concerns get your attention? Why don’t you just ban these dangerous chemicals? How can we trust the state agriculture and forestry departments when they have been fighting us tooth and nail?
Also: Why aren’t you testing the air? Douglas said some air testing will be done, but the details of when and how are still being developed.
Local resident Dan Gee said he’s not waiting for the state and has already made plans to do his own air testing. Gee said he’s already tested his water and it’s clean. Like many other people in the room, he said he believes local exposure is happening through aerial spraying.
Low Pass Road resident J.D. Bell said he is grateful that the state and federal agencies are embarking on the study. Bell, who is retired and has lived in the area for more than 40 years, said everyone in his family has suffered a number of ailments over the years. His wife has a brain tumor and he has a tumor intertwined with his intestines that weighs 8 pounds and that his doctors don’t really understand, he said. All of his children have been plagued with health problems all their lives, he said. “I’m glad it’s being done. We’ve needed this for some time now,” he said.
Day Owen, whose group Pitchfork Rebellion has been agitating about suspected herbicide drift for the past seven years, said he was cautiously optimistic about the study, but he posed a question that the state and federal officials didn’t have a clear answer for: “If you determine what the pathway (for exposure) is, will you close the pathway?”
The inquiry by state and federal officials came about after testing by a respected researcher earlier this year found traces of herbicides that are commonly used to kill weeds in forest clearcuts in the urine of more than 30 people in the Highway 36 corridor. Some of those tested a second time, following aerial spraying of herbicides in April, showed even more herbicides than had been found in the initial tests.
Pesticides — a category of chemical products that includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and rodenticides — are so pervasive in the country that studies have shown most people have detectable levels of them.
But Dana Barr, the researcher who analyzed the Triangle Lake area residents, found 2,4-D and atrazine in all the samples. Nationwide, those chemicals are found in just 2 percent to 4 percent of the population, Barr said.
According to state records from 2008, the last year that Oregon collected such information, atrazine and 2,4-D were among the most common pesticides applied, with 2,4-D ranked seventh and atrazine 18th on the list of 100 most used pesticides.
In the North Coast region that runs from just south of Dunes City north to Cannon Beach and encompasses the Coast Range, 2,4-D and atrazine were the second and third most used pesticides, according to the state list.
Forestry is the target of just 4 percent of statewide pesticide applications. The vast majority of the products are used in agriculture.
Atrazine has been shown to damage the body’s hormone system. Some research shows that in very low concentrations it has altered the biology of frogs, converting males into females, who can mate with other males but who only produce male offspring.
In humans, some research suggests a link to prostate and breast cancer and infant mortality. Some evidence suggests that 2,4-D can cause cancer.
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