Water Cost Pits Residents Against Dupont, Officials

By JOHN LANTIGUA Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

It’s like living next to a haunted house.

Residents in the Mapp Road North area here say worrisome phenomena emanate from the 13-acre property that was once the Loxahatchee Nursery.

Specifically, they believe their well water may contain dangerous chemicals connected to the nursery’s 45-year history of pesticide use. They also insist their neighborhood is home to an unusually high rate of cancer.

To their distress, government officials at the local, state and federal levels have studied the site and deny those dangers exist.

“The truth is not being told,” insists Marie Ecchio, 71, one of the residents. “At this point, I don’t believe anything anybody in government tells me.”

Kevin Neal, district manager for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, backs the official conclusions but is mindful of the cancer fears.

“Obviously, people are distrustful and emotions are heightened,” Neal says. “They don’t want to depend on government data.”

Public officials and the angry residents do agree on one thing: County water should be piped in to replace the well water. But when it comes to who should pay for it, once again they are at war.

The state has agreed to pay for part of the job. But some 180 households must pony up about $5,800 apiece for new water mains under the streets.

Each owner would also have to pay to connect his or her house to the system.

As of last week, the last time figures were released, 84 households had voted to pay the fee, but 46 had said “no,” and 50 hadn’t responded.

Use leads to settlements

“Why should we pay for it?” huffs Jane Hildebrandt, 68, a former nursery inspector for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, former nursery owner and a leader of the “no” vote. “DuPont ruined our well water. Let them pay for it.”

Ecchio says the state should pay. “And they can go after DuPont later, if they want.”

Their accusations date back to 1992 and the closing of the Loxahatchee Nursery, directly across the street from her house on Mapp Road. The site was one of thousands, not only in Florida but also as far away as Hawaii, that were damaged by the DuPont Corp.’s contaminated fungicide, Benlate 50 DF.

Benlate burned root systems. Farmers and nursery owners who applied the pesticide were plagued with ruined crops, plants, trees and contaminated soil. Benlate 50 DF eventually was taken off the market.

According to news reports, DuPont disbursed more than a billion dollars in Benlate settlements nationwide. The owners of the Loxahatchee Nursery were among those who settled and closed down.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

In the North Mapp Road area, toxic chemicals were later detected in residents’ well water, according to county officials. It was mostly small amounts, below drinking water danger limits. But public inspectors ruled that water filters should be installed on the wells of four houses where levels of chemicals exceeded normally acceptable state limits.

The most prevalent chemical reported by investigators was “1,2 dichloropropane,” which comes not from Benlate, but is a fumigant used to kill nematodes, a kind of worm. Dichloropropane has, in large doses, been linked to cancer in lab animals.

Other chemicals were also found in the well water. They included endosulfan, diazinon, chlordane and benzene, all of which, in large enough doses, are potentially hazardous to humans.

DuPont cites reports

Tests were conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Florida’s DEP. The investigators say the amounts of those chemicals and others found in the water were only small traces and not dangerous. They did not specify whether those chemicals were connected to the use of Benlate, or came from some other source on the nursery or off.

In a Sept. 29, 1998, report – six years after the nursery closed – the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry inspected the site, studied the water surveys and determined the former nursery “poses no apparent public health hazard from chemical contamination.”

The agency is a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The Florida DEP stated recently that “substances previously identified on nursery property are not impacting private wells.”

DuPont cites those opinions in its own defense.

“We are not aware why the residents think DuPont should pay,” says company spokeswoman Kathleen Forte.

Hildebrandt’s response is terse.

“Their testing I don’t trust,” she says.

Hildebrandt insists that when conclusions were reached in the 1990s, the investigators did not have information from DuPont about the chemicals used at the site, data needed to do complete testing for possible contaminants. Benlate’s main chemical agent was benomyl, but other chemicals were used as additives, and one or more caused the contamination. She says DuPont never made that information available.

She buttresses her argument with internal memos and letters written by state officials that show they could not get data from the corporation because DuPont was being sued at the time and refused to part with what it considered “proprietary information.”

Investigator scolds state

The ATSDR report also states that apparently DuPont had done testing on an irrigation well on the site back in the early 1990s, but that the agency “was not able to find any other information on this irrigation well, including the sampling data.”

The main contaminant the residents worry about is a fungicide named flusilazole. It is a substance that in clinical testing has been connected with cancer in lab animals. And it had never been approved for use in the United States, which makes Hildebrandt and the other residents even more wary.

“Nothing about the health risks was publicized, the cancer risks,” says Hildebrandt. “The state covered up for DuPont.”

Hildebrandt waves a copy of a report written by a Florida DEP investigator at the time, Mark A. Murray.

Drafted in 1997, the report stated that Florida officials knew of the presence of the banned chemical but did not adequately test for it.

“By effectively having done nothing to assess the presence or impact of flusilazole in Florida’s soils or ground water, Florida state agencies have sanctioned these actions by DuPont,” Murray’s report stated. “The checks and balance system that should be in place to protect the environment and health and welfare of the citizens of Florida is not working.”

According to DEP officials, flusilazole eventually was tested for in 1998, after Murray’s report, and no dangerous level of the chemical was found.

Murray and Hildebrandt attacked the methodology used in those tests, but the DEP says the testing methods were approved by DEP’s Quality Assurance Section.

Development defeated

Still, that history, the potentially dangerous nature of the chemicals in question, plus what they believe is a high cancer rate in the neighborhood, has left the residents extremely skeptical of government.

Martin County officials, who test some wells nearest to the nursery site on a regular basis, say the worrisome chemical levels went down over the years, and all those wells now meet safe drinking water standards. No filters are necessary.

At a recent meeting with concerned residents, DEP officials agreed to do further testing to try to determine where the remaining level of dichloropropane comes from. But they also say there is no proof that the small chemical traces now found in the water samples have anything to do with the nursery.

They could come from petroleum products runoff, which has seeped into the ground water, or from chemical solvents used elsewhere.

But those officials still say the safe thing to do is to pipe in water. Bob Washam, Martin County director for environmental health, says the number of possible chemical contaminants in well water is, theoretically, in the thousands.

“You are never going to be able to test for everything,” Washam says.

The Martin County Commission is expected to vote on the assessment before the end of the year.

Piping in water is not enough for some of the residents. Twice in the past 10 years, developers have tried to build small houses or condominiums on the site. On both occasions, residents have objected, and the projects have not proceeded.

“Nobody has ever cleaned up that property,” says Hildebrandt, whose husband, Gilbert, died of cancer in 1994. “Why should people live on a contaminated lot? Would I want to kill somebody’s child? To even consider putting kids in there blew my mind. I don’t want my grandkids on there.”

In addition to not paying for the new water pipes, the dissident residents want new tests done of the Loxahatchee Nursery site by a laboratory approved by the residents, including tests for Benlate byproducts. And they want decontamination done, if necessary.

Karen Gordon, 43, who lives behind Hildebrandt, recently lost a pet lovebird, Rainbow, to illness. The autopsy by a local veterinarian determined the bird had two forms of cancer, and Gordon suspects it came from well water the bird was exposed to in a fountain.

Ground water sometimes floods part of her back yard, and her son, Benjamin, 7, wants to play in it.

“Our son wants to catch pollywogs, but I won’t let him near that water,” Gordon says. “People here just have a feeling that there is something wrong. Wherever I turn, someone has cancer.”

Washam, the environmental health director, says surveys were done in the area but did not reveal a high cancer index.

Bruce Hunt doesn’t believe it. Hunt, 79, who lives three blocks from the nursery, bought his house around 1992 and lost his wife, Elaine, to cancer in 2002. He says that in the five years before they bought, the house had two other owners and they both died of cancer.

“The house directly to the east, a Mr. Birmingham, died of cancer, and two houses to the east of him, that man died of cancer, too,” says Hunt. “Even my Australian shepherd died of cancer.”

“I had a dog with cancer, too,” says Sue Swain, 64, “and another neighbor down the street had a dog with a cancer.”

She suspects it is the ground water under and around the nursery site. “You worry about the currents under there and what is going where.”

Hildebrandt says she worries about the currents that run between government and industry in Florida.

“I was brought up to believe this government was protecting us,” she says. “Now, I think nobody is protecting us.”

Staff writer Eve Samples contributed to this story.

john_lantigua@pbpost.com