BY DAVID BROWN
UCLA Today
Imagine yourself in this position: You’ve
just learned that your house was built on land contaminated
by toxic waste, and the yard where your children used to play
is laced with poisonous chemicals. Then, you are informed that
the only solution is for you to leave your home in the care
of government officials who will clean up your property by excavating
soil from your yard and under your house.
When you try to ask questions, you get unsatisfactory
answers. The government officials from organizations such as
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are probably telling
you the truth. But you are frightened and slightly disoriented,
and you don’t know if what they are doing is best for
the future of your home and family.
That’s what residents of a Torrance neighborhood
experienced when startling concentrations of DDT were discovered
in the soil. And that’s when U.S. Rep. Jane Harmon (D-Redondo
Beach) turned to UCLA Chemical Engineering Professor Yoram Cohen
to help them through this crisis.
The community comprises approximately five
square blocks in the Del Amo area where DDT had been found in
“concentrations that were alarming,” Cohen said.
The contamination was the result of decades of production of
the pesticide in the area.
As remediation got under way, “they uncovered
at one point essentially what amounted to pure DDT,” Cohen
said. A frightened community became even more alarmed and turned
to Cohen.
By then, the Del Amo Action Committee had been
formed and “an adversarial relationship between the community
and the EPA was not helping to ease the community fears,”
Cohen said.
Up until that time, residents had to rely on
the EPA for information.
“That wasn’t good enough for the
community,” Cohen said. “And, as often is the case,
suspicion developed.”
For example, at one point, neighborhood residents
tried to take a duplicate sample from a “hot spot”
but were prevented from doing so by EPA officials because the
residents lacked the necessary training in hazardous waste sampling.
“The community wanted someone to come
in and give them an unbiased opinion,” Cohen said. “One
of the major problems is the lack of communication between the
EPA and the community. There’s a lack of trust,”
said Cohen, who has also worked with an Alaskan community on
air pollution problems. “They needed an honest broker.”
That’s the role Cohen took on, at Harmon’s
request. When the EPA finished a cleanup of the area, Cohen
and Stanford Professor Perry L. McCarty did a study reassuring
the community that the cleanup was adequate, but they also recommended
ongoing monitoring to protect residents from possible exposure
to DDT if there was ever new construction in the area.
The scientists also had concerns about the hazardous
material that was removed from the site. Although safely collected,
the containers of contaminated soil could still be seen by residents.
“They drive by and see all this contaminated material,
and it is not very conducive for good feelings or healing,”
Cohen said.
“As scientists, we often forget about
the social implications of what we do,” he said. Acting
as independent advisers on projects such as these gives them
an opportunity to change that.
“This would be an excellent opportunity for university
faculty to use their knowledge to help the public,” he
said.
