Rise in Aerial Spraying Comes Amid Population Shift Into Farm Belts

Despite the emergence of organic farming, aerial spraying of pesticides is on the rise in California. And with the frequency and scope of this airborne assault on bugs, it is inevitable that people, not just crops, are occasionally dusted with chemicals.

Paul Gosselin, assistant director of the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, said problems are arising because homes are moving into farm belts and people are more aware of the risks of pesticide exposure.

Residents of Lompoc and parts of the Central Valley have been especially vocal.

“This whole problem is growing and growing,” Gosselin said.

In California, the acreage treated from the air increased 34% in 1995, exceeding 50 million acres, according to the state agency. Aircraft sprayed fields 833,000 times in 1995, a 26% increase.

In that same year, 239 people reported exposure in what the state deemed “definite, probable or possible” cases of pesticides drifting from farm fields.

Last Sept. 21, farm workers near Fresno were hospitalized after being hit with a crop-duster’s spray. But farm laborers aren’t the only ones at risk. In 1993, a cloud drifted off a field in San Joaquin County and exposed seven people nearby, five of whom said they became sick.

In 1991, nine people in Monterey County were eating lunch in a business parking lot next to a broccoli field as it was sprayed from a helicopter.

Environmentalists say California’s penalties for violations are too lax: When people are exposed, pesticide applicators face a $400 fine.

Jay Ellenberger, a senior regulatory specialist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide division, said drift complaints remain fairly rare. Forty states that report to the EPA record about 2,500 complaints a year out of millions of aerial and ground applications.

Even when crews follow all the proper procedures, from 1% to 5% of the pesticide drifts into unintended areas, Ellenberger said.

“It’s very unlikely a pesticide application can be made without some amount of drift,” he said. “But obviously the operator wants to minimize it so they are wasting less.”

Spray nozzles that make bigger droplets and other new equipment have reduced drift, and government officials and the agriculture industry recently teamed to develop new guidelines to minimize the health risks.

Dr. Michael O’Malley, former medical coordinator at the state pesticide agency, said pesticide poisoning can cause upper respiratory irritation, blurred vision, nausea and headaches. But linking such health effects to an incident is difficult; even in farm workers sprayed with large doses, usually no trace is found in their bodies.

“Drift cases in general are often difficult to evaluate,” O’Malley said.

“The ones that involve organophosphates you can check for systemic poisoning, but it is unusual to see any evidence when we do blood tests.”

Even more uncertain is the health risk of long-term exposure. Many pesticides in animal tests have caused birth defects, cancer and reproductive damage at high levels of exposure.

“It’s a heated emotional situation,” said Don Wood, project officer of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional pesticide program. “People see planes and think they are too close to their homes and smell something 10 minutes later. They wake up in middle of the night and they’re worried. It becomes a really hard situation for regulators to disentangle.”