Not in Their Back Yard

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So began the effort to live in El Dorado Hills without coming into contact with the earth. In the park and the school playing fields where the epa had collected samples, workers trucked in clean soil to replace two feet of topsoil, as the agency had recommended. The county banned using leaf blowers on town property, "except for emergency situations." Residents were encouraged to take precautions such as removing their shoes before entering their homes, driving slowly with the windows up on unpaved roads, and "limiting time spent on dirt." Home-builders agreed to spray down building sites and rinse off their trucks' tires after work. Any sightings of "fugitive dust" were to be reported to a new "dust enforcement" team.

Life in El Dorado Hills under the new regime was "manageable," said Baumann. That seemed to be the point of the show: If you took a few precautions, there was no need to panic. She proudly pointed out that the dust hot line rarely received a call. Gerri Silva, the interim director of the county department of environmental management, told me the measures had worked so well that in all of El Dorado Hills, "there is no dust."

In the town's main coffee shop, Bella Bru, languor pervaded as well. An engineer named Matt Parisek said that asbestos was "pretty much a fake issue." "It's pretty obvious [the epa] selected this county because of our conservative Republican reputation," he said. And, wondered retiree Carole Gilmore, "If asbestos is all over California, I don't know why they zero in on El Dorado Hills."

Real estate broker Charles Hite, who is the current resident of Terry Trent's old house, pointed out that none of his neighbors had died. "If it is such a health hazard," he asked, "why are people still buying and building? Why are real estate prices going up? Why doesn't government shut the city down?"

There was a circular logic at work. The local government had told everyone to stay calm, and so residents weren't afraid. And if no one was scared, then perhaps there was nothing to fear. "The vast, vast majority" trusted that they were safe, said Baumann. But, she added, there remained "a very, very small centralized group that keeps pushing issues and pushing issues to the extreme." She specifically mentioned Terry Trent, who to this day sends regular, dire emails to residents, reporters, and scientists. The group of extremists who "do not represent our community" also included, in Baumann's view, some members of a community group that meets monthly to discuss asbestos.

Vicki Summers had joined the Asbestos Community Advisory Group as part of her effort to educate herself. When someone would mention the low body count as evidence that nothing was wrong, she could now cite the UC Davis study, or note that the latency period for asbestos-related diseases is about 30 years. Who lived in these hills back then, she asked, "a dozen ranchers?" Other parents assumed that if they couldn't see asbestos in the air, it wasn't there; Summers could picture invisible fibers burrowing into her kids' lungs. "It never disappears," she said, wide-eyed. "That's the scary thing. And it's a known carcinogen. has And if we know that, we know it's not good for our kids."

Summers said she was thinking only of her family when, at a community meeting, she passed a note to an epa official, asking, "Should I move?" After that was reported by a newspaper, she received an answer in an anonymous, late-night phone call: "Vicki Summers, I think you should move!"

Short of evacuating, there are only two ways to solve El Dorado Hills' asbestos problem: Either pave over every asbestos deposit in town—an impossible task—or make the asbestos magically disappear. Soon after the epa report came out, Superintendent Barber got in touch with the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, an industry trade group, which commissioned the R.J. Lee Group to scrutinize the epa's data. In 2000, it was reported that R.J. Lee's president, Richard Lee, had been paid about $7 million for testifying more than 250 times on behalf of the asbestos industry. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found asbestos in Crayola crayons, it was Lee who did a study that discovered none. When people began getting sick and dying in Libby, Montana, R.J. Lee found that local asbestos levels had been overstated by the epa.

As in Libby, R.J. Lee declared that what the epa had been calling asbestos in El Dorado Hills was, in fact, not asbestos at all. Some of the fibers were not the proper size; others contained a bit too much aluminum. The epa had, in other words, completely goofed.

Supervisor Baumann hailed "a study that has profound information in it." Barber bustled off to Washington, D.C., at taxpayer expense, carrying news of "this startling scientific development." And Wayne Lowery, the town manager, admitted it was hard to get excited about controlling asbestos "when you've got two different interpretations of the same data."

At a meeting of the Asbestos Community Advisory Group in the fire station last winter, Summers and a handful of other residents met with the epa's Jere Johnson to try to understand how asbestos could vanish before their eyes. Two builders were also at the table. Baumann seemed to have been thinking of them when, at an earlier county supervisors' meeting, she had issued a "public thank you" to "the very, very smart people attending those meetings, making sure another thought process is heard."

One of the builders introduced R.J. Lee's report and started to expound on "cleavage fragments," mineral composition, microns, and the like. "I don't want to get bogged down with these semantics," a fireman interrupted. "We know we have it here." The group's chairman shushed him, though, saying he didn't want to get bogged down in semantics either, "but I think we almost have to." The builder persisted with his mantra of scientific uncertainty. "We all wish science to be this nice black-and-white thing," he said, "and sometimes it isn't." The debate seemed essentially over by the time the epa's Johnson clarified the topic: It was not geology but public health. "The body can't tell the difference between a fragment and a fiber," Johnson said. Whatever you called it, it would still get stuck in your lungs.

For Summers, the starkness of the issue had again faded to gray. When she started looking for a safer place to live, she was alarmed at first to realize there were cancer clusters and crime everywhere, and then she had taken comfort in danger. If nowhere on Earth was completely safe, she reasoned, why should she leave El Dorado Hills? Perhaps it was as Vicki Barber had said: Risk is a part of all of our lives. Her family could stay, she decided, as long as she took precautions, such as wiping down her home with damp rags, and kept pushing to get all the facts. And if new studies revealed the asbestos to be "just fragments and dust," well, she admitted, she'd be "thrilled to death."

But she knew otherwise, didn't she? She knew that asbestos was here, and she knew that it was bad? The question silenced her. "I don't want to know it, though," she finally answered. "I don't want to know it. That's when I can't sleep. I mean, I love it here. I love it here. That's why it's hard. Part of me wants to be in denial."

After reviewing R.J. Lee's report on El Dorado Hills, the epa declared last spring that the company had violated "generally accepted scientific principles." R.J. Lee, in turn, discovered "a number of important differences of opinion as well as factual misstatements" in the epa's response. The epa at last asked the U.S. Geological Survey to step in and do its own testing. In December, the usgs announced that its analysis confirmed that "material that can be classified as tremolite asbestos is" in El Dorado Hills. But the geologists were uncomfortable assessing the health risks, and so the controversy continues.

Supervisor Baumann thought the epa should just leave El Dorado Hills be. Her constituents had "really calmed down, been educated." Why, she wondered, would anyone want to excite them again? The publichealth debate seemed to have come full circle when Sweeney, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors, griped about the "extreme cost" of dust controls, saying, "We're putting our public at risk by telling them to do things that are absolutely unnecessary."

Up on the ridge, behind the high school, Terry Trent stood beside a driveway with a piece of tremolite in his hand. As he tossed the rock back to the ground, there was the sound of a small engine starting. "Watch this," Trent said, and a smile broke over his face as a gardener passed by with a leaf blower, dust billowing all around.

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Photo: Wyatt Gallery

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