Scientific specialists who have worked for the state, monitoring water quality and other pesticide-related issues, say they sometimes were overruled by their superiors when they tried to ban pesticides they considered dangerous.
While the chemicals involved were approved for use nationally, the
specialists say conditions in
"We were hired to protect the health and welfare of the people of
Some of the specialists say the
influence of large agrochemical companies and unhealthy relationships between
the firms and top state officials are the problem.
"There was a little group of people who basically worked for DuPont and the
other chemical companies," said Tom Greenhalgh,
a former water contamination investigator for the Florida Department of
Environmental Protection, referring to
agriculture department supervisors who reversed recommendations made by
specialists.
Simons agreed. "The problem is the whole matter became politicized," he said. "They were in close contact with these companies, and things were being decided over our heads."
While an agriculture department spokesman confirmed that agrochemical companies could play a role in the department's decisions, he said the reason was different from that alleged by the specialists.
"If a manufacturer sues us for preventing him from selling or someone using his product, we better have a pretty good reason," Terry McElroy said. "Since we are the ones who can be responsible for paying damages, the final decision rests with us (the department)."
But McElroy could name only one such suit that was filed — by DuPont — and the state never had to pay damages.
The four former specialists interviewed no longer do pesticide and ground-water work for the state and stopped doing so between 1997 and 2002. But they believe the same problems exist today because many of the top state agriculture officials, whom the specialists accuse of hiding pesticide-related dangers from the public, are still shaping state pesticide policy.
Those officials include: Marion Fuller Aller, head of food safety; Steven Rutz, chief of agricultural and environmental services; Dale Dubberly, who heads the state's main pesticide monitoring office, the Bureau of Compliance Monitoring; and Richard Budell, assistant director of the Office of Agricultural Water Policy. None would comment for this story.
'They wouldn't listen to you'
The scientists interviewed were all hired in the 1980s and said their
ability to influence which pesticides are used in
"When I first started there we could do our jobs, but that changed," said Simons, who is 63 and has a doctorate in soil sciences. He "quit in disgust" in 1997 after 11 years of service.
His colleague, Theodore C. McDowell, 65, who has advanced degrees in plant
pathology and horticulture, quit the agriculture department in 1996 after 10
years, only to transfer to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection
(FDEP), where he encountered similar problems until he retired in 2000.
"They wouldn't listen to you," McDowell said in a brief interview in
a
The two other specialists interviewed both monitored water quality for FDEP. "I used to write reports," recalls Greenhalgh, 47, a geologist and 17-year department veteran.
"We used to oppose the registration of a product because of its potential to contaminate ground water, and it would still get registered. It was a total struggle and fight all the time.
"There is lot of ground water in
Mark A. "Tony" Murray, 46, who earned undergraduate degrees in both biology and chemistry, also was an environmental specialist for FDEP.
"The people I was working for
were always looking over their shoulders, afraid that if they didn't make the
right registration decision they would lose their jobs,"
Bayer removes product initially
rejected
In the 1990s, Greenhalgh and Murray spent several years analyzing the damage done by the contaminated DuPont herbicide, Benlate, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to farmers and nursery owners in Florida and elsewhere.
In 1996, the two men called for a federal grand jury to investigate possible criminal actions by their superiors, who they accused of trying to help DuPont cover up the extent of the disaster.
Greenhalgh and Murray acted after they both suffered nose bleeds and resistant fungal infections following an inspection they performed at a Leesburg nursery affected by Benlate. They also were prompted to act, they said, after DuPont — with the help of agriculture officials — was allowed to deposit the Benlate-contaminated soil in unlined public landfills, which they say put the public at risk.
No grand jury was ever convened.
Earlier this year, the former top health department official for pesticide monitoring, epidemiologist Omar Shafey, told The Palm Beach Post that the health department had abandoned its responsibility to protect the public from pesticides by ceding its responsibilities to the agriculture department.
McElroy of the agriculture department defended the procedures used to
approve chemicals for use in
McElroy said many pesticides approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency in
"But others are put under further testing, ones that could have a different impact or react differently in our environment," McElroy said.
He said the results of those tests — outlined by the state but conducted by
the chemical companies — are then presented to the Pesticide Registration
Evaluation Committee. That body consists of scientists from the state
agriculture, health and environmental protection departments and the Florida
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Those scientists file reports as to
whether the product should be approved for use in
But the scientists sometimes were overruled. Greenhalgh said that in some cases scientists felt the chemicals were dangerous to ground water.
One case, he said, involved a product made by Bayer named Nemacur, used to kill worms. The product came up for re-registration and was opposed by DEP scientists because of water quality concerns, he said, but won approval from the agriculture department. Years later, in 2004, under pressure from the federal EPA, Bayer removed the product from the market.
Science vs. 'potential benefit'
Other cases represented dangers to the environment. One 1995 case involved a herbicide, Manage, produced by Monsanto.
Mary Williams, chief of the Bureau of Drinking Water Resources for FDEP,
expressed her concerns in a letter to agriculture officials. Scientists had
"continuing reservations regarding the registration of the Monsanto
product, Manage" and products with similar properties, called sulphonylureas, Williams wrote. She said the chemicals
could cause collateral damage to aquatic plant life in
But six days later Marion Fuller Aller, then head
of the pesticide bureau, granted Monsanto a "conditional
registration" and Manage was used in
McElroy said the department measures the "weight and defensibility" of the state's scientific evidence against "the potential benefit" to agricultural producers. But Simons sees it differently.
"The real reason was that the
big chemical companies were pushing those products right then," Simons
said. "We wanted them not to be used in the state. They were too dangerous
and the companies were pushing this stuff."
McElroy counters that criticism by pointing out that there is no evidence Manage has ever caused the collateral damage the specialists feared.
Growing tensions between the scientists and their superiors in the 1990s is evident in personnel files. Both Simons and Greenhalgh were criticized by their superiors for arguments with representatives of DuPont and Monsanto.
Deputy sent to break up secret
meeting
McDowell also was outspoken. In 1996, he gave a deposition in a civil suit against DuPont related to the Benlate disaster. McDowell said under oath that at times he was expected to make up the causes of environmental damage that actually had been caused by chemicals.
"We heard that 100 workers have been poisoned and Chemical X is running through the stream and 53 ducks are dead," McDowell said. "We would look over the situation and say, 'It probably could have occurred due to this reason, or it could have occurred due to this, or it could have been a heavy hailstorm.' "
"Are you telling us that you were asked to, at some point, make statements that you believed to be false?" the deposing attorney, Camille Godwin, asked McDowell.
"Yes," the scientist answered.
"Can you recall any instances of that occurring?"
"I could list 100 or so,"McDowell said.
Despite those tensions, none of the men ever received negative overall job evaluations and none was fired.
Simons and Greenhalgh
said the scientists from the agriculture and environmental protection
departments felt so undermined that, in late 1995 or early 1996, they decided
to hold a secret meeting at an FDEP office to come up with solutions to the
problem.
"But this deputy sheriff showed up, a guy in uniform, and told us that the meeting we were holding was illegal," Simons recalled. "He told us we had to break up the meeting and we did." Greenhalgh confirms the account.
Simons believes it was supervisory
officials at either the agriculture department or the environmental protection
department or both who sent the deputy.
He said the two groups never rescheduled the meeting, and he quit about a year later.
(Emphasis added)
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