Kettleman City residents, especially those families touched by the tragedy of a child born with a birth defect, feel betrayed by health officials who failed to point the smoking gun at the single cause that brings such anxiety and misery to the natural and joyful event of childbirth.  So is the Cal EPA look at what’s going on in Kettleman City over now?

It took years of effort and pressure on all sides, even from the governor and Barbara Boxer, to get Cal EPA to put significant effort into figuring out why 11 babies have been born with cleft palates and other birth abnormalities in the city since 2007.

What about living with the cumulative impacts of surrounding pollutants?

I searched the Cal EPA report of March 2010 and December 2010 and did not find one mention of cumulative impact.  They’re not dummies at Cal EPA; their scientists  understand the issue, but it’s hard–and expensive– to define indirect and cumulative impacts, and how those impacts interact.

For example, the hazardous waste operation run by Chem Waste may be an obvious culprit. Over the years, Chem Waste has been fined about two million dollars for improper disposal of truly, truly harmful substances, among them PCBs. But it’s not the only culprit.

When you pile on the indirect and cumulative effects of pesticide and herbicide sprays, the contaminated water, and the air filled with diesel fumes from the highway, natural gas and oil extraction and production–they all add up–along with whatever disperses in the air and leaches into the water from Chem Waste. How do they interact?

It’s an institutional and political decision not to tackle the very real problems that cumulative impact or Environmental Impact Assessment studies pose. In the words of OEHHA Director Dr. Joan Denton. “In doing so, we generally found pollution levels in Kettleman City to be similar to those found elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley.”

There may not be enough money in the entire state of California budget to study pollutant levels in the entire San Joaquin Valley.  And if you found problems what would you do about it?

These are some of the reasons why cumulative impact studies are so hard:

• How do you draw boundaries around the area that will be included?  Boundaries cross ecosystems, watersheds, and county or district boundaries.
• How far into the future and how far into the past do you go to capture past, present and reasonably foreseeable effects?
• How do you deal with the statistical horror of finding reliable numbers of cases, and study a small number of babies and rare medical events?
• The environment makes unexpected and complex interaction responses to pollutants.
• How do you account for living in the anxiety of poverty and a poor diet?
• How do you prove the pathways the pollutants took into mother’s bodies? All mothers don’t react to pollutants in the same way.
• Most difficult: you’ve got politicians, budgets and funding issues, interfering with setting up and carrying out the study.

But things are changing and there is hope in the world of public health research and environmental monitoring, and studying “cumulative impacts”.

The national EPA has allocated $39 million in all to study the health impacts of exposure to multiple pollutants at once.  Environmental Justice activists such as the relentless Bradley Angel of Greenaction.org have pressured them into this. They didn’t decide on their own to tackle the hard stuff. We’re still left with making state or federal agencies take regulatory action, and then making the polluters comply. It’s not over yet.

Whenever I hear people say oh, things will never change. You can’t fight city hall. Oh, yeah? Think seat belts? Helmets? Picking up dog poop? Smoking in hospitals? Four martini lunches? Condoms? Recycling? Things do change.

There was a time when expecting society and industry to adopt new ways of thinking and acting were unthinkable. That was then. This is now. It needs to happen in Kettleman City.