SITE INFORMATION AND CORRESPONDENCE_FILE 1

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Waste disposal practices turned out to be one of the great skeletons in industry's closet. Discovery of waste problems often began with seemingly remote symp- toms, as in Lathrop. There, state investigators rooted out the pesticide DBCP as the culprit in the Occidental infertility cases. The widely used nematode killer had been handled for nearlv two decades as a material thought to he only mildly toxic to humans. More male workers were tested and more were found to have zero or extremely low sperm counts. Hear- ings were held and spokesmen for Occidental, Dow Chemical and Shell found themselves being publicly scolded by the staff of the California Department of Industrial Relations for their mishandling of what some thought was an early warning on the dangers of DBCP. A respected figure in the field of occupational health — Dr. Charles Hine of the University of California at Berkeley — found his professional ethics under attack. Hine, it was re- vealed, had performed the early re- search on DBCP for Shell, which had perfected the chemical as a nemati- cide in its laboratories. Hine's work on DBCP and on other projects for Shell as well as his re- lationships with other large cor- porations cast a shadow on the uni- versity itself and on practices, since discontinued, that threw the objec- tivity of some of the institution's sci- entific research into question. For its part, Occidental pro- claimed innocence of any role in sup- pressing unfavorable health data on DBCP, which had been a highly prof- itable product for the company. Shell, the recipient of the original Hine study, which had noted testi- cular atrophy in test rats, also claimed it had acted responsibly. The fact remained that dozens of workers were infertile because of their exposure to the nematicide. Some would slowly regain their fer- tility, others may never again be capable of producing offspring. The issue of liability seems des- tined to years of court manuevering. Several workers sued Occidental, Besides its immediate problems, DBCP had been found to cause can- cer, thus any traces in food crops were illegal under federal law. DBCP is reported to be the only material that can be applied directly to living plants — especially to fruit and nut crops which are continually beset by nematodes, microscopic soil worms which devour the feeder roots of the plants. The loss of DBCP — made perma- nent and nationwide this year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — is expected to have a major impact on vineyards. The older Tokay vines in the Lodi area have been particularly vulnerable to nematodes and thousands of acres are expected to be uprooted within the next few years. But DBCP wasn't Occidental's only problem. Hooker Chemical, a division of Occidental Petroleum Corp., the parent company of Occi- dental Chemical, was under a steady barrage of criticism in the East. Hooker, which runs all chemical manufacturing operations for Occi- dental, had been identified as the creator of a huge dumping ground of toxic wastes in Niagara Falls — the now infamous Love Canal. Hooker insisted that it had warned the Niagara Falls school board about the dump when the board assumed ownership of the land in 1953. As the months passed in Lathrop following the first DBCP revelations, Occidental looked forward to re- couping its public relations losses and starting on a new footing with its workers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were set aside to improve safety conditions in the Lathrop plant. A new safety manual, listing every chemical produced at the facil- (See Oxy, Page 6)