A YEAR INSIDE THE
MOTOROLA MESSSINNERS AND VICTIMS
By Terry Greene Wednesday, Dec 30 1992
A New Times Article
Thirteen months ago, Kathleen Stanton handed me a blue vinyl
three-ring notebook.
Kathleen, a reporter and co-worker I count as a friend, had
been cleaning out her office. She was leaving Phoenix, moving on to a
university job in a different town.
I knew Kathleen had always meant to do an investigative
piece on illnesses among high-tech workers. She never really had the time to
develop the project, though, because she had several beats.
The blue three-ring binder she handed to me that day had
been part of her research. It belonged to a former Motorola worker.
Kathleen Stanton knew that if she gave me any of her
material for uncompleted projects, I'd roll my eyes and sigh and throw the
binder in some corner and then pitch it in the trash after she was gone.
Which is probably why she said: "This is important,
don't throw it away."
Okay, okay, Kathleen.
Inside the notebook, which belonged to a woman named Dolores
Springer, were the names of people who had worked for the company, and had
since fallen sick.
Mostly out of blind duty to Kathleen, I paid Dolores
Springer a visit in January 1992. Dolores, a young mother, is crippled with an
autoimmune disorder.
Dolores struck me as a sincere, honest person who simply
wondered if her tenure on Motorola's assembly lines had caused her disease.
I didn't know the answer then, and I still don't know today.
But I was touched enough by her story to take a look at
environmental records relating to the Motorola Superfund sites in Phoenix and
Scottsdale.
There were thousands of pages of public documents--ten
years' worth. It was remarkable to me that there had been so little news
coverage of massive TCE contamination in two separate aquifers in the Valley.
After just a few hours, it was evident that this newspaper
needed to examine how city, state and federal regulators had dealt with severe
and extensive groundwater contamination they themselves had linked to Motorola,
the state's largest employer.
I didn't want to write the story Kathleen Stanton had in
mind when she gave me the notebook.
Nor was I out to write a breaking news expos‚ about events
that happened ten years ago.
I chose instead to write an explanatory piece that looked at
political, medical and economic aspects of groundwater pollution in a desert
city--areas that had inexplicably not been probed before.
What ended up happening was that the reporting for the first
story organically led us to ask more questions. Before we knew it, we had
sketched out a series that involved a year of my life.
We uncovered new "risk-based" federal Superfund
policy that could be disastrous for Arizona. We discovered that Motorola bills
the Department of Defense for some of its Superfund cleanup costs. We learned
that current technology may not purge aquifers of TCE for centuries, despite
state and federal regulators' assurances that "cleanups" are
progressing well.
We reported that the federal government itself had
associated TCE with various health problems--leukemia, disorders of the central
nervous system and kidneys--and that the University of Arizona had linked TCE
to heart defects in newborn babies. We discovered that in the Valley, there was
a sharp increase in pediatric heart defects.
Despite the problems with TCE, there have been few health
studies of the area. And we interviewed nationally known experts who concluded
that federal health assessments and state statistical studies of the Superfund
sites were cursory and incomplete.
We interviewed dozens of people with diseases that have been
associated with TCE who still wonder if their illnesses had been caused by
exposure to the chemical more than a decade ago, before contaminated
drinking-water wells were shut off. The government officials could not tell us
how long people consumed contaminated water. They did not know.
I learned that the sadness and frustration I sensed that
first day when I interviewed Dolores Springer, the young mother who gave
Kathleen Stanton the notebook, were not unusual among the ill residents of the
Superfund sites.
You do not see many articles in the press about groundwater,
contaminated or otherwise. Reporters worry that the stories will be tedious,
consumed with parts-per-billion paragraphs. Editors worry that no one will read
the copy.
But these stories captured the attention of U.S. Senator
Dennis DeConcini, as well as U.S. representative-elect Sam Coppersmith and
staffers at the office of U.S. representative-elect Karan English.
Senator DeConcini supports more health studies and wants
several points in our story brought up during upcoming Superfund
reauthorization hearings.
Sam Coppersmith stands behind researching alternative
technology for groundwater cleanup. It's a good way to put people to work, as
well as help the environment, he tells me. "We lead the world in
environmental technology. There's no reason to throw in the towel now.
Groundwater contamination is a problem internationally as well. We should
develop a technology that the world will want to buy. There's no magic wand, of
course, but clearly this should be a priority.
"We need to make sure people understand that jobs
versus environment is a false choice. We can have both jobs and a clean
environment."
Karan English's office has contacted citizen activists who
want complete health studies, a thorough investigation of the new Superfund
plan and an amendment to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
What happened after the publication of the first story in
May was that citizens began getting active in environmental matters.
Tupac Enrique, a Mexicano Chicano activist, and Velma Dunn,
a lively 64-year-old grandmother/real estate broker, are leaders of a citizens'
group that, today, really does command the attention of local officials, as
well as senators and members of the U.S. Congress. This unlikely pair of
activists is determined to change not only local environmental policy but
national Superfund regulations and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
I met Tupac a couple of years ago at an event on the Salt
River reservation. At the time, he looked pretty interesting. Piercing eyes, a
quick smile, a long braid of jet-black hair. He didn't talk much the first time
I met him.
Two years later, I finally got him to talk.
He told me that as a young man, he worked as an irrigator
for the Salt River Project. He would drive from one Phoenix neighborhood to
another, stopping to unlock the gates that released water from the big canals,
allowing it to flow into the smaller ditches and onto the gardens of the homeowners
who had hired him to irrigate their bermuda lawns and grapefruit trees.
Sometimes, he would sit quietly and listen to the water, and
think about how the modern Salt River Project canals followed the paths of
irrigation canals constructed a thousand years ago by the O’otham Nations ancestors,
the Hohokam.
Water, he said, is and always has been sacred to his people.
"Nahuatl" is an ancient word that recalls the sound
of water as it cascades down river rocks, he told me.
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| Indigenous Language Confederations of Anahuac |
The word "Nahuatl," is the also the name
of the language known as Aztec or Mexican which belongs to the ancient
language
family (Uto-Aztecan) that is shared by Tupac Enrique's indigenous
relatives in San Luis
Potosi, Mexico, as well as by the Hopi and Tohono O'odham and Pima and
literally millions of other Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.
These days, Tupac Enrique teaches high school kids about his
indigenous culture. He's also co-director of a Mexicano Chicano Human rights
organizaton called Maricopa County Organizing Project.
Suffice it to say that Tupac Enrique does not take lightly
the revelations about the groundwater contamination spreading from beneath the
Motorola plants.
He and other minority activists in the Albuquerque-based
Southwest Network for Environmental Justice have targeted Motorola plants
throughout the Southwestern United States, California and Mexico for a two-year
"environmental justice" campaign, says Southwest Network co-chairman
Richard Moore.
The point of the campaign is to ensure that Motorola follows
environmental and worker-safety laws and is diligent in attempting to clean up
pollution on both sides of the border, Moore tells me.
"It ain't just about the United States," Richard
Moore says.
Tupac Enrique and Velma Dunn have different brands of
activism, but the two styles complement each other. Tupac is quiet and
reserved. Velma is a pistol.
The two really joined forces last summer, after Tupac called
a meeting in South Phoenix. Activists and citizens who were interested in the
Motorola Superfund sites, as well as residents who lived around a former
Motorola plant in Tupac's neighborhood in South Phoenix, attended. Tupac has
started up a health investigation of people who used to work at that plant,
suspecting that because it was located in a Mexicano-Chicano area the working
conditions may have been less than safe, an allegation Motorola hotly denies.
At the meeting last summer, Tupac said a prayer, asking for
the Creator to guide those who wanted to care for The Water.
I think everyone in the room felt the power of that prayer.
Especially Velma. She sent out a Christmas card this year
that quoted excerpts from a letter written by Chief Seattle to President Franklin
Pierce.
"We know the White Man does not understand our ways," Velma's
card says. "One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he
is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs.
The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he
moves on."
Velma Dunn founded the 52nd Street Oversight Committee,
which represents residents living near Motorola plants, as well as Tupac's
neighborhoods. The group meets regularly with DEQ officials.
"We're communicating with the officials who are
supposed to protect us," says Velma, "that's what was missing all
along before."
Velma seems to get along with most state and federal
environmental regulators. She figures the regulators, for the most part, are
good people who have to follow bad laws.
So she wants to change the laws.
"You're a good person," she has said more than
once at meetings with regulators. "I have nothing against you. But your
study stinks."
I've only seen Tupac smile once in all those long hours of
meetings with regulators. That was when Velma asked an official if he was going
through menopause.
Velma is more openly aggressive than her friend. For
instance, Tupac stays away from lawsuits. Velma is active in a lawsuit in which
about 1,500 people are suing Motorola, claiming that the pollution caused ill
health and declining real estate values.
Throughout the summer, Velma and Tupac and other residents
kept up their organizing and meeting. They didn't seem to lose their momentum.
The activists began to rattle the cages of public officials,
who sometimes tried to duck tough questions.
If a public official tries to weasel out of answering
important questions just to save his political skin, reporters don't like it.
They don't like it at all.
Once I had to "bird-dog" Ed Fox, the director of
the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Bird-dogging is no reporter's
idea of fun, but we all have to do it.
Here is how bird-dogging works: You hang around a public
place for hours because you know an official is supposed to show up. When he
finally appears, you confront him and demand the answers to the questions he's
been avoiding.
Reporters have other challenges, of course.
Like trying to figure out what goes on in a foreign country.
I learned that firsthand when I looked into the Motorola semiconductor plant at
Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Francisco Navarrete has tried and tried to explain how
Mexicans feel about reporters from the United States.
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| The Rights of Mother Earth |
Francisco works at the Maricopa County Organizing Project.
He knows a lot about dealing with Mexico.
See, I wanted to learn more about Motorola's Guadalajara
facility. I made about 30 telephone calls to professors and government
officials and citizen activists who were supposed to be involved in
environmental affairs. I sent faxes. I wrote letters.
I didn't get a single response.
"Terry, Terry," Francisco told me more than once,
"They don't know who you are. How can they trust you if you call them on
the phone? You have to go down to Mexico, they have to meet you through someone
they trust. Then the next day, you go back and they'll talk to you."
What whetted my appetite were documents obtained through the
federal Freedom of Information Act that revealed a chemical trail from the
Motorola plant at 52nd Street and McDowell in Phoenix to the Motorola plant in
Guadalajara.
Tons of chemicals and toxic gases were shipped from Phoenix
to Guadalajara from January to August 1992 (the last month for which figures
are available) according to the documents, which are called manifests and were
obtained from the EPA.
As an American company, Motorola can legally do two things
with its hazardous waste in Mexico, an EPA official told me.
Motorola can pay the Mexican government a tax on the
hazardous materials entering Mexico. It can then dispose of its hazardous waste
in one of a handful of landfills approved by the Mexican government.
Or Motorola can return the hazardous waste to the United
States, as required by law, and dispose of it in an American landfill.
The EPA does not know what happens to the chemicals that
travel from Phoenix to Guadalajara.
The EPA has no jurisdiction over American companies in
Mexico.
It does not know how the chemicals in Guadalajara are
stored.
Or used.
Or disposed of.
Mexican citizens and activists face the same problem. There
are no right-to-know laws in Mexico.
"Guadalajara is indicative of problems in the interior
of Mexico," says Geof Land of the Border Ecology Project in Naco, Arizona.
"The United States public and the Mexican public don't
know where hazardous materials from American companies are disposed of. There
is no tracking system.
"This is a virtual black hole."
Jaime Palafox, a liaison for the Mexican equivalent to the
EPA, is stationed in the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. Palafox refused to
answer repeated, direct questions about the lack of community right-to-know
laws in Mexico. "We have public participation" is all Palafox would
say last week. "The public can participate by placing complaints against
specific companies if they think those companies are polluting."
Palafox even sent us Mexico's environmental laws that were
passed in anticipation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Not a single law deals with a citizen's right to know. When
we asked the activists about Guadalajara, they, too, were stumped. But in
typical activist fashion, they added the plant to their list of projects.
In Arizona, Tupac Enrique and Velma Dunn are lobbying their
Congress members and senators to push for right-to-know laws in Mexico as part
of amendments to the North American Free Trade Agreement. They want to alert
Mexican workers and people living near the American plants about the risks of
the chemicals that are being used.
Sam Coppersmith tells me the whole issue of telling another
nation what to do is tricky. It smacks of imperialism.
Motorola, for its part, sent me a written statement in
response to a list of questions about the Guadalajara plant.
The company says the Guadalajara facility uses chemicals
that originate in Mexico and the United States. However, the company refused to
provide documents on chemicals transported from Phoenix to Guadalajara because
"we cannot assemble the information in the amount of time allowed for your
deadline." (Ten days.)
When asked if it disposed of hazardous chemicals through its
sewer system, Motorola did not say "yes" or "no." Instead,
the company said that wastewater is treated before it is discharged through the
sewer.
The company "makes every effort to ensure the safety of
the employees and people who live around the plant" in Guadalajara, says
Motorola spokesman Lawrence Moore.
Like all the Motorola people I interviewed, Moore is
pleasant and courteous. I appreciated the fact that he always called me back
and tried to work within my deadlines.
One day when we were chatting, he summed his job up better
than I ever could. He said he's paid to be a "professional optimist."
Velma Dunn and hundreds of citizens have sued Motorola in
U.S. District Court in Phoenix, claiming the company's pollution injured their
health and caused a substantial decline in the values of their real estate.
In early 1992, another group of citizens filed suit in
Maricopa County Superior Court against Motorola and several other companies,
once again alleging that the chemical contamination caused ill health and a
decline in real estate values.
In both cases, Motorola denies the charges.
The lawsuits in Phoenix are not unusual. Across the nation,
citizens, feeling ignored by the government regulators whom they entrusted to
protect them, direct their anger at the polluting companies, providing a
fertile field for lawyers to plow.
Both the American Bar Association and the National Lawyers
Guild have told me that toxic tort cases are increasing.
They are not without controversy, I learned.
Lawyers who sue polluting companies say the lawsuits are the
only way to prevent further corporate environmental assaults.
"Unfortunately, in this country money talks,"
Denise Abrams, an Oakland-based attorney who heads the toxic tort committee of
the National Lawyers Guild, told me. "We have to shame the companies to
make them shape up."
One thing that's for sure, the Department of Justice hasn't
made the companies shape up.
In October 1992, the National Law Center at George
Washington University reported to Congress that the justice department
repeatedly refused to take prosecutable environmental cases to court, despite
recommendations from U.S. attorneys' offices that the crimes be prosecuted.
The report makes it clear that what we discovered in Phoenix
and Scottsdale is a story that plays itself out across the nation.
Companies pollute. People get sick. Then the sick people
wonder if their diseases are related to the exposures. The government, in the
minds of the people, sides with the polluters because it often denies that a
link exists between the chemical and the disease.
But sometimes they get no satisfaction in court, either.
Plaintiffs' lawyers are often criticized by regulators and
their lawyers for inflaming the citizenry in an effort to sign up as many
clients as possible. "I am not against attorneys per se," says
Barbara Goldberg, an attorney for the City of Scottsdale. Her gripe is with
California attorney Jeffrey Matz, who is Velma Dunn's lawyer in the lawsuit
against Motorola. Goldberg says Matz sometimes "scared little old
ladies" by exaggerating the environmental disaster in Phoenix and
Scottsdale.
DEQ even has a transcript of one of Matz's public speeches
in its files.
Matz exaggerated environmental data, which had the effect of
frightening citizens, says DEQ spokesman John Godec. Godec says Matz asserted
that TCE caused health problems and provided no documentation. "It's
immoral," Godec told me. Matz also exaggerated problems relating to
chemicals in the soil, schools, neighborhoods and even the sewer, Godec claims.
I found a couple of exaggerations in the speech myself. For
instance, Matz said that one Motorola plant "has a leach pipe that puts 22
gallons a minute of TCE and other VOC's into the crosscut canal, and they have
been doing that since the 1950s."
What makes Matz's statement questionable is the fact that
this plant is now an office building and, further, the company says it hasn't
used TCE for more than a decade.
Matz says he stands by the speech, and will prove each point
in court. "I believe what I say, and I say what I believe," he says.
Another controversy swirling over toxic tort lawyers is the
matter of fees. Plaintiffs who sign on to the lawsuits generally agree to give
their attorneys from 33 to 40 percent of the settlements, plus pay their share
of expenses, which are substantial. Medical experts are not cheap.
If the lawyers lose the lawsuit, plaintiffs still have to
shoulder the expenses, says Harriet Turney, an attorney for the Arizona state
bar.
But even if the lawyers win, some plaintiffs are bound to be
disappointed.
You only need to go to Tucson to find that out.
Last year, nearly 2,000 plaintiffs settled for $84.5 million
with Hughes Aircraft after a six-year court battle over drinking water that had
been contaminated with TCE in South Tucson. The lawyers got $37 million; the
plaintiffs divvied up $47.5 million.
Which means some were disappointed.
Three southside plaintiffs, who asked that their names not
be used, say the lawyers tricked them into thinking they would get large
settlements. The women got from $100,000 to $20,000 for diseases ranging from
lymphoma to breast cancer. The women, who are Latinos, are now convinced that
Anglos got larger settlements than Latinos.
"Some people get very, very angry," says Fred
Baron, a partner in the Dallas firm Baron and Budd, which settled the Tucson
case for the plaintiffs. "But hundreds of people got very substantial
settlements and are very happy."
What happens, Baron says, is that even the best medical
expert can't link each and every disease to contamination. So not each and
every sick person gets a good settlement.
"Typically, a community seeks help from the government,
which doesn't do anything," he says. "An entire community feels it
should take part in a lawsuit because they feel every illness is related to
contamination. We can't prove that's true in every case. People see their
neighbors got a lot more than they did. Then people become convinced that there
is a cover-up and the lawyers are in cahoots with the government."
But the troubles aren't over.
Since January 1992, two additional class-action lawsuits
against Hughes and other parties were filed.
I guess it could go on and on.
Velma Dunn insists that the fact that she is a plaintiff
does not affect her activism. However, she does admit that some documents she
turns up as an activist may find their way into court some day.
"My job is to get the truth out to the people,"
she says of her activism. "Our job is to change laws so that the
government can protect us."
Last week, Velma Dunn and her Oversight Committee, which
includes her new friend Tupac Enrique, drafted a list of citizen demands. Dunn
wants city, state and federal elected officials to take action on the Motorola
contamination. Among the requests:
- Thorough federal health studies of both sites.
- A federal disease registry to log cases of lupus, cancer and
birth defects in the Superfund sites.
- Specialized medical treatment and counseling for citizens
who have been poisoned by chemicals, to be paid for on a sliding scale by the
citizens and provided by the state.
- A "risk-assessment" study that would look at past
and present risks associated with living in the area, to be paid for by the
federal government and the state.
- The purchase of new county air-monitoring equipment that
would enable the county, and not the polluters, to report and monitor
air-pollution data.
- The rejection of the EPA's new Superfund plan to clean up
sites according to "risk."
- Spending a substantial portion of EPA's research dollars on
developing alternative groundwater cleanup technologies.
- A complete public accounting from the Department of Defense
that details monies reimbursed to Motorola for Superfund expenses.
- A financial mechanism, such as a trust fund paid into by
polluters, that would protect citizen consumers from paying for cleanup of
drinking water pulled from contaminated plumes in times of drought.
- Integrating into the North American Free Trade Agreement
amendments demanding that Mexico should have community right-to-know laws so
that the worker and environment would be protected and American companies
moving to Mexico would have to follow the same rules as in this country.
Dunn and Enrique may get some help from Senator Dennis
DeConcini, who says it is "crucial to examine" some of the issues
they raised.
The senator supports further health studies and the
development of new groundwater cleanup technologies, says DeConcini spokesman
Bob Maynes.
Upcoming hearings on the reauthorization of the EPA
Superfund in 1993 will be an ideal place to examine whether defense contractors
should be reimbursed for Superfund costs by the Department of Defense, says
Maynes.
The risk-based Superfund "revitalization" ushered
in during the waning days of the Bush administration and detailed by New Times
should also be investigated during the reauthorization, he says.
"Senator DeConcini is obviously going to be sure that
the new Superfund approach is evaluated very carefully," Maynes continues.
"The groundwater problems in Arizona may not be an 'immediate high risk,'
but in a desert environment eventually that water may be critical and
necessary. We will shoot ourselves in the foot if we ignore it until it becomes
an 'immediate risk.'
"The senator is concerned about any move on the part of
the EPA and the federal government that tends to write off those kinds of
problems. Senator DeConcini does not want to see federal dollars no longer
flowing in to deal with our kind of problems simply because someone defined
them away."
Right before Christmas, Velma Dunn got a telephone call from
Ed Delaney, a top aide in the office of representative-elect Karan English. She
says Delaney wanted to meet the second week in January. He'd just gotten a
letter from Dunn's committee.
On the agenda, according to Dunn: the North American Free
Trade Agreement, the new Superfund Plan, Motorola's backbilling the Department
of Defense for Superfund costs.
"I feel like we're finally getting light at the end of
the tunnel," says Velma Dunn. "And this time it's not a freight train
coming my way."
"This is nothing we can walk away from," says
Tupac Enrique.
We got the news out.
It feels great.
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| Colorado River Watershed |
