Document EYnveKKOrj9v4JwdBe9ndVqj

FILE NAME: Calaveras (CALV) DATE: 1986 Apr 20 DOC#: CALV005 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION: Newspaper Article Town's roads contaminated with asbestos By Jane Kay EXAM IN ER EN VIRO N M EN TAL W RITER CO PPERO PO LIS, Calaveras County -- Tony Krajnovich's pick up truck hauls along the gravel road, sending thick clouds of a grayish-white dust into the air. His niece Meagen Coil's stroller created the same dull gray puffs of road powder when her mother and Santa Rosa [ Reno ] _ ... . California ! Nevada U ke/m . T a h ce\ i Carson WN City ' Sacramenl v ipw SW Stockton ijmcleo f 1Copporopolis | I f l l San Josa W ': 'Party- '-V- in the first year of her life. Last month her parents, Paula and Billy Coil, learned with the rest of this little Forty-Niner town that the road in front of their house contains high levels of the cancercausing mineral, asbestos. The Environmental Protection Agency suspects that the road fill came from the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the United States, which lies outside Copperopolis. The town's 16 miles of contami nated road are the first that the EP A has found in the West, but the agency suspects there may be hun dreds more such sites. In the High Sierra, the same geo logic activity that peppered the Mother Lode with gold nuggets also produced deposits of fibrous ser pentine. Serpentine, California's state rock, contains asbestos. temporary measure to halt a health-endangering exposure. The final solution will be to per manently pave the 16 miles in the 500-resident development, Copper Cove Village, at a cost of more than $1 million. More striking are the implica tions of the E P A cleanup. Mining officials agree with the E P A that tailings containing high levels of asbestos were used to build roadbeds in hundreds of locations in California. Fifteen counties once had asbestos mines, even though only two mines remain open - r in Calaveras and San Benito counties. Thousands more roads contain lower levels of asbestos in road-pav ing materials. Paula Coil, standing outside her S.F- Sun d ay Exam iner & Chronicle San Francisco Examiner s eer, was not in the office last week New and could pet be reached for com .mill ment,. . ---. pere -- From B-1 In 197,' the site was. purchased norc by 'the current owners, Calaveras 4* pres watched a truck followed by a cloud of dust go by on the road. "Don't anybody breathe," she said to her family gathered around her. Meagen is 20 months, and the baby, Elizabeth, is 5 months. "Meagen's grown up here. Do we panic and lock her in the house? "You think of the times ypu took her for walks in the stroller. The damage has been done. How do you correct it? " Now J wonder what drifts over here from the blasting at the mine six milts away. "Our furniture, our car are cov ered with the same fine powder. At the Save Mart in Sonora, a woman" was helpingme out with the grocer ies. She looked at the car and asked if I lived near a cement plant. I said 1 lived at Copperopolis, and she said, `Oh, that's asbestos.' Will that stop when the road is paved?" Coil asked. A Calaveras County health offi cial in San Andreas, Dr. Robert Mar shall, warned residents to drive slowly on the development roads and keep windows and vents closed in the car. Last week EPA officials said some parts of the road had been built with fill made up of 20 percent asbestos, Federal health officials are con Asbestos Ltd., according to Michael Deli Orto, director of purchasing, who has been an employee since -1967. The company's position is that the roads were built before it pur chased the assets from Pacific and, thus, it has no liability. Dell'Orto said the company pro duces about 36,000 tons a year of asbestos product, which is used pri marily for asbestos-cement siding and water and sewer pipes. The EPA's proposed ban of as bestos and asbestos products sever al months ago " almost killed us in the marketplace. No one wants to buy it and get stuck with it," DeirOrto said. Examliier/Katj'fiidtiaii Meagen Coil, 20 months, on the road outside her house that is heavily laced with asbestos % In addition to the loss to U.S. mine owners, the developing coun tries that rely on asbestos cement including ceiling tiles, insulation, gloves, hair dryers, brake lining and packing and pipe covering, and is now banned or proposed for ban ning in all of them. Thousands of workers who in haled the tiny, hard fibers have died from asbestosis, a disabling lung disorder that can cause breathing difficulty. Linked to as bestos exposure are mesothelioma, a cancer of the membranes that line the chest or abdominal cavity, and cancer of the lung, esophagus, posed, although brief exposures of as little as a month may produce disease. Reports of asbestos-linked death among shipyard workers had al ready been made public by the time the Copper Cove Village u n devel oped in 1969 by the Great Lakes Development Co. on the former site of the 5,000-acre Mitchell family ranch. Asbestos tunnel mining began at the current mine site at Central Ferry Road in the early tSOOs, re cording to historian and Calaveras Chamber of Commerce President Charles "Sonny" Stone. th e current open-pit site was started in i962 by Pacific Asbestos Co., which also had. a mil! .and a manufacturing plant. According to a former .employee, a Pittsburgh, Pa., companyvIi.K. Porter lnjM ook controlling interest in 1968 or' 1969. Keith Garrity, H.K. Porter's chairman and chief operating offi- pipe as a cheaper alternative to' steel or PVC pipe will suffer from a mining ban, he said. Dell'Orto estimates that 1,000 people have worked at the mine in the iast 20 years. The company em ploys 173people -- and 200at a time in previous years -- and the turn over is very high, he said. He has only known one person who has had lung cancer, he said. But in 1973, Dr. Irving Selikoff,' the pioneer asbestos researcher from Mount Sinai Medical Center in Si besti year shov latei D eysj mad B agre smal coul' tect Ir Copj the thin! asbe and M tion. li has resp seek men anyc crea was If aPPr whic until seek opoii cerned when the fibers make up stomach, colon and rectum. even 1 percent of the volume of According to federal health offi total material, Terry Brubaker, cials, the effects of asbestos expo chief of the EPA emergency re sure among workers may npt be sponse section in San Francisco, evident for up to 30 years or longer. said last week. The risk of disease usually in A creases with the amount of asbes The mineral has been used in tos-dust exposure and the length of SOOb nmrhw'tc in thp ITnitprl gtates lim p th a t a narsnn h a s bppti ev-  Sunday, April 20,1986 B-5 J -- ................. - ...........- - - - ........................... -- last week for com- turehased Calaveras o Michael irchasing, yee since )n is that )re it purtcific and. pany proa year of s used pri3nt siding as. ban of asjcts seve'rilled us in ? wants to with it," iss to U.S. ping coun:os-cement rnative to' fer from a that 1,000 he mine in. npany emX) at a time 1the turn ed. He has a who has g Selikoff, researcher il Center in if New York, ran tests on 64 Calaveras- mill workers. They showed that 39 percent of the individuals had ab- ? norma! chest X-rays, according to * press reports in 1978. % Selikoff warned that because as* bestos-linked illnesses take 15 to 3% years to develop, the workers migh,j| show signs of serious disease mucjj later. DelhOrto believes that the mon- ey spent on pollution controls have made the industry safe. "! But federal health officials dis agree. They say the fibers are so: small that no protective equipment could be developed that would pro tect the workers and the public. . In the close-knit community of Copperopolis, people are calm over. the road scare, even though they think they know who ordered the,, asbestos for the roads, who sold it and who hauled it. The E P A is seeking that informa tion. Under Superfund, the agency , has sent letters to five potentially responsible parties. The agency isi seeking information and agree ments to pay cleanup costs from; anyone who was responsible for ,t creating the hazard, even though it;; was not illegal at the time. If that fails, under a $150 million: appropriation from Congress, w'hich extended the Superfund law until the end of May, the EPA will seek to build a new road in Copper opolis.