DALY CITY, Calif.—Carmen Vela moved to 35 Cypress Lane in Midway Village 18 years ago, thankful to find a federally subsidized house where she and her family could live in peace and safety.
Within weeks, her 19-year-old daughter, Maria, developed mysterious lung problems. Vela herself has trouble catching her breath. Gonzalo, her son, who worked every weekend in her garden as a young man, died of cancer last year at age 48.
The Vela women suffer headaches, memory loss and blood-red eyes _ just like the Williams family, who lived at 35 Cypress Lane before they did. The Williams children, now Vallejo residents, still can't get rid of various skin growths and rashes.
Next door at 33 Cypress Lane, Tonya Bishop needed to have her gall bladder taken out at age 15, while her 17-year-old brother, Kevin, had a tumor removed from his head. At 31 Cypress Lane, Milagro Garcia bought a breathing machine for her son, Danilo, after he developed severe respiratory problems.
Twenty years after the San Mateo County Housing Authority built Midway Village, nearly 40 percent of the 500 low-income, predominantly minority residents report serious illnesses _ including reproductive and neurological problems, breathing and digestive difficulties, cancer, skin discoloration and growths.
For more than a decade of that time, residents did not know that they lived amid toxic waste from lampblack, a powdery carbon, and coal tar left behind from gas manufacturing a century ago.
Now, although medical experts disagree on whether the harsh chemicals are linked to their health problems, some 195 current and former residents await a trial May 27 in San Mateo County Superior Court in a lawsuit originally filed six years ago.
``I'm kind of scared,'' says Garcia, whose pounding headaches wake her at night. ``People move in here to save money. But are we going to kill ourselves?''
The defendants in the case are PG&E, which owns the site where the toxic waste comes from, and the county housing authority, because it owns the subdivision. Both dispute charges that they exposed residents to harmful levels of chemicals.
Residents say PG&E and the state had known since at least 1980 that there was hazardous waste next door at Martin Service Center _ and at Midway Village since November 1989. Yet no one held a public forum about either situation until September 1990.
``This stuff started bubbling up in our yards'' as early as the late 1970s, recalled Ladonna Williams, formerly of 35 Cypress Lane, who now owns a Vallejo beauty salon. ``When it rained, it looked like black oil, and it smelled like mothballs or old garbage. Nobody told us anything. When it dried, it was kind of gooky and not like regular soil at all.''
After examining state records, residents learned that soil in at least three dozen of their front yards and patios—as well as in public play yards and part of Bayshore Park and the Bayshore Child Care Center—was contaminated with 51 chemicals, some at high levels.
Scientists working for PG&E found a potent carcinogen, benzo(a)pyrene, at 150 times normal levels around homes on the PG&E property boundary—where Vela, Williams, Bishop, Garcia and 32 other families lived. They found it at roughly twice normal levels in the child care center area.
These polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—previously known as polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, or PNAs—are linked to bladder, esophagus, larynx, lung, mouth, skin and stomach cancers in lab animals and in workers in some occupations.
Testing at Midway Village also turned up arsenic, dinitrophenol, phenol and toluene—all neurotoxins—in the soil.
PG&E disputes the claims that the lampblack from underneath Martin Service Center caused problems in Midway Village, saying that no doctor attributes the residents' symptoms to the chemicals.
Although the utility acknowledges that it's responsible for the lampblack on its own site, it says it didn't place the toxic waste on the Midway Village property next door. It also says it wasn't necessary to test for residues at Midway Village as a precaution over the years because lampblack is a heavy substance that generally doesn't migrate.
``We had no knowledge that the substance would have been outside the property line,'' said Mary Rodriguez, a PG&E spokeswoman. ``We had no reason to believe that there was any exposure off of our site.''
Peter Finck, an attorney in the San Mateo County Counsel's Office, agrees: ``We don't think there's any relationship (between the illnesses and the chemicals). It's my understanding that the concentrations found there posed no serious threat.''
According to state records, PG&E workers first complained to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1980 about chemicals uncovered during construction at the Martin Service Center. By 1982, PG&E had removed some of the toxic waste from the Martin site.
No one posted danger signs at the PG&E property line, and no one sent notice to the neighbors who lived in the tidy Visitacion Valley development.
``That is what floors me,'' said Williams. ``We have all these agencies that are supposed to be for the public's welfare, and they did not see the need to inform us in any way.''
Robert Doss, environmental services director with PG&E, says the state Department of Health Services—now the Department of Toxic Substances Control—didn't think it was necessary.
``The agency determined that since there was no exposure to a person walking along the site, it was unlikely that the casual trespasser or worker would have any exposure,'' he said.
But the neighborhood children always swarmed on mounds of dirt during construction projects, Williams said. There was no fence between Midway Village and its PG&E neighbor in the 1970s and early 1980s.
``The kids played in it,'' Williams said. ``They wallowed in it. They rode bicycles through it. They dug tunnels in it.
``My daughter and son, Tanesha and Joey, had bloody noses all around that time. When you see your kids, and their noses are running like a water faucet, that's something stuck permanently in your mind.''
In 1983, the state put the PG&E property on its state Superfund list, named after the federal program requiring the cleanup of the worst toxic waste sites. By 1984, according to PG&E, it had fenced off its property from Midway Village.
Two years later, PG&E notified the state that it was investigating at least 32 of its sites where gas was once manufactured from oil for cooking, lighting and heating. The EPA estimates that up to 3,000 sites left over from the gaslight era probably contain harmful chemicals.
The state told PG&E to test at Midway Village, and its consultants found residues in 1989. Then a records search found the 150-unit subdivision was atop contaminated fill—toxic scrapings from the next-door PG&E site—originally covered by World War II-era housing.
But it wasn't until 10 months after the discovery that the state began informing people, at a public meeting. Fourteen Midway Village residents attended, receiving a fact sheet saying there were no short-term health risks, but suspected carcinogenic chemicals that had been found posed a long-term risk.
Representatives of both the state and PG&E said they had agreed to wait to tell the public until they completed formal documents.
``There was no emergency situation and no condition of imminent and substantial endangerment to the residents'' when the state was notified by PG&E, Beth Bufton, state project manager for both sites, said in a recent interview.
``The ... contaminated soil was buried beneath the lawns,'' she said, ``and there was no direct route of exposure for Midway residents.''
But barely a month after the 1990 public meeting, a state toxicologist had reported that children playing in their own back yards in the most contaminated apartments were in contact with skin carcinogens. Weeks later, the state issued an order of ``imminent and substantial endangerment'' to PG&E, the U.S. Navy and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and placed Midway Village on the state hazardous waste cleanup program.
Lula Bishop, a former medical assistant who moved to Midway Village in 1978 with three children, first realized her neighborhood had a problem when she saw space-suited workers digging outside her house one day in 1990.
``Why are you wearing those suits?'' Bishop called out her second-story window to an army of men in white.
``For the same reason that you should get back in the house and shut that window,'' the man yelled back, Bishop recalled.
Amid the shock that they had lived unprotected for years with toxic waste, resident Matthew Laurence and his family filed the original lawsuit for damages.
In 1991 and 1993, as a way to cap the harmful residue, the state and the housing authority covered open trenches in Midway Village and open soil areas in Bayshore Park. They removed a top layer of soil and paved over yards and play areas, putting in sidewalks, parking lots, a slab under the park bleachers and gravel on the baseball diamond. PG&E paved over its earthen berm in 1994. By 1995, the cleanup bill had reached $3 million.
Last year, PG&E offered to pay the residents $1,000 a person to drop the lawsuit. The plaintiffs turned down the offer.
``We were outraged,'' said Williams. ``The illnesses and suffering that me and my family have been through and continue to go through? For years, we didn't even know the source of our illnesses.''
``I'll remember this forever,'' says Lula Bishop, now president of the Midway Village Resident Association. ``Some physician from Sacramento told us they had found some PNAs, and it wasn't really dangerous. It was the same as barbecuing chicken on a charcoal fire and kind of burning the chicken a little bit and eating a piece of the chicken. They said, `You can find PNAs in boxes of dried cereal.'''
Like the state's physician, PG&E's expert—Dr. Sarah Jewell, a toxicologist at UC-San Francisco—also concluded that the residents' health problems did not result from exposure to the PNAs.
The chemicals are commonly found in charcoal-broiled food, shampoos and grains, according to Jewell, who says it's unnecessary to track people exposed to them for future medical problems.
Another PG&E expert, Dr. Raymond Harbison, a toxicologist who works with the private consulting firm Ecology and Environment, found no evidence of significant exposure at Midway Village and did not find significantly higher levels than at other locations in California.
But environmental experts reviewing the records for the residents say that at least eight dangerous chemicals were found in a much higher percentage of Midway Village's samples, compared with so-called background samples.
Dr. Janette Sherman, a consultant for the National Cancer Institute who is testifying for the residents, concluded that exposure to the chemicals placed Midway Village residents at significantly increased risk of developing diseases—including those affecting the central nervous system, eyes, ears, nose and throat, and lungs, and the gastrointestinal, genital, skin, bone marrow and immunologic systems.
For children and those of reproductive age, there is an increased risk of future reproductive problems, including infertility and birth defects, said Sherman. Residents also are likelier to develop cancer.
In addition, in recent work Frederica P. Perera, a public health doctor at the Columbia University School of Public Health, and other researchers have found that people exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons suffered greater than normal levels of genetic mutations and other chromosome disturbances in blood cells.
Back at Midway Village, many families want to move, but they can't afford housing elsewhere without government aid.
``We moved because our kids were having too many problems with their health, and they're still having them,'' said Janie Anderson, who left Midway Village in 1995 for South San Francisco.
Anderson was lucky enough to get other subsidized housing after doctors' letters described the family's breathing problems, rashes and debilitating headaches. Her daughter Keana, 12, still has patches of damaged skin, burn-like spots on her eyes and sores above her lip.
``There's something in her system,'' said Anderson.
Laurence, the plaintiff in the original lawsuit, is afraid the chemicals are harming his wife, Maria, who's been ill since the beginning of the year. Only two months ago, he called the state to show cracks in his back patio, fearing that chemicals are released in dust particles.
His 14-year-old son, Aaron, has Bell's palsy—a condition in which the side of his face is temporarily paralyzed—and suffers nosebleeds. Aaron's sister, Christa, 9, has wart-like growths in her mouth as well as constant rashes and headaches.
Linda Taylor, a City of San Francisco employee and secretary of the residents' association, also believes the neighborhood's environment is still harmful. Her oldest daughter has a thyroid condition, rashes and nosebleeds.
``I feel that there's too much harm and endangerment to the hundreds of children in the area exposed to these toxins,'' Taylor said. ``I guess they think the problems are over. But we don't.''