Attributing cancer to a particular cause is notoriously difficult. Aside from the contaminated water, Fuller Acres’ approximately 600 residents are hemmed in by traffic, agriculture and heavy industry. A giant oil refinery sits across the street from the community. Abandoned oil wells dot the landscape. Trucks blast fumes into people’s homes as they travel along State Route 184, which borders the community. Pesticides from nearby almond orchards and grape fields routinely drift into homes, residents said, and because many people are farmworkers they’re also exposed to pesticides at work. A lack of sidewalks means dust and dirt accumulate along the sides of the road and get kicked up by the wind and into people’s lungs.
On the day the California Health Report visited the community in November, a heavy smog coated the landscape, rendering the skyline invisible beyond about a half mile. The forecast for the day was “haze.” The air quality was “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” a few index points short of “hazardous” for everyone. The air smelled of diesel and manure. Residents said it was a typical day.
The preponderance of contaminants in the Central Valley make it virtually impossible to tease apart the extent to which individual chemicals like 1,2,3-TCP are responsible for ill health effects, said Colleen Naughton, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at UC Merced. There’s also a lack of community-specific health data that’s accessible to the public. Many residents, some of whom are undocumented immigrants, also don’t have access to health care.
Still, Naughton and one of her graduate students recently tried to assess the cancer risk posed by another common Central Valley water contaminant — nitrates. They found that people living in low-income communities with nitrates in the water suffered twice the rate of thyroid cancer.
Naughton said she’d like to study the correlation between cancers and 1,2,3-TCP next, although funding for that type of complex research is limited. In the meantime, she and Hauptman have urged the federal government to adopt the same 1,2,3-TCP regulations as California. The chemical has been detected in groundwater in other states, including Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina and New Mexico. There is currently no federal limit for 1,2,3-TCP in drinking water.
Hauptman said residents want and deserve to know what chemicals like 1,2,3-TCP are doing to their health. “It’s the first thing people ask,” she said.
It may be challenging to come up with a firm conclusion, but Hauptman thinks “you could probably find patterns if you look at enough data points.”
Allowing the links between water contaminants and health consequences to remain vague benefits polluters, Tratnyek said.
“There’s no way the community can really pin that down in a specific, smoking gun kind of sense,” he said. “And the chemical companies are very good at arguing that you can’t prove that.”