Buzz Kill Crop dusters
spray pesticides on homes, animals and people while the Arizona Department
of Agriculture does little to stop them
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/2001-06-14/feature.html/page1.html
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entitled: Buzz
Kill Crop dusters spray pesticides on homes, animals and people while the
Arizona Department of Agriculture does little to stop them By Jennifer Markley
The rumbling engine of a crop duster's airplane jolted
Frances Sebring awake.
The cooler in her mobile home was sucking in the vapor of
chemicals that were supposed to have landed on a nearby cotton field. The cloud
of insecticides swept across the mobile homes of Sebring and her two neighbors
on the outskirts of Florence, leaving a path of dead fish and panicked families.
"I thought he [the pilot] was taking the top of the
roof off," says Sebring, who ran outside, trying to escape the choking
stench. "I couldn't go anywhere to get away from it."
The 68-year-old found her backyard canal, and another pond
and canal next door, littered with floating fish. But she was more worried about
her son-in-law next door, who had terminal lung cancer.
"The odor is part of living in the country, but you
don't expect it to be dumped on you," says Sebring, who has lived in the
small farming community for 14 years. "You can have your life ruined with
one application."
This wasn't the first mistake by the pilot of the
crop-dusting plane, John Pew. Two weeks earlier, Pew's misdirected spray
suffocated dozens of nine-pound White Amur grass carp in Chandler and broke
David Maldonado's heart.
Pew had sprayed Thiodan and Checkmate over a cotton field
to kill the common whitefly, and the toxic cocktail had accidentally misted over
a Salt River Project canal. Within hours, Maldonado, a biochemical supervisor
for SRP, received a report that fish were leaping out of the canal. Jumping into
his truck, he rushed to the canal, where his treasured algae-eaters -- put there
as an environmentally friendly answer to chemicals -- were floating belly up,
suffocated by pesticide spray.
"I love my fish," Maldonado says. "When
something happens to them, it bothers me a lot."
The fish kill cost SRP $4,000 to replace the bottom
feeders, Maldonado says. It cost Pew a fine of $113. For dousing Sebring and her
neighbors, Pew paid $182.
The violations by Pew, who operates Sarita Aerial
Contractors Inc., were his third and fourth in six years for allowing pesticide
drift to hit a target other than the crop below his plane. But by the time the
investigation into Pew's last complaint was finished, the Arizona Department of
Agriculture recognized only one prior violation, slapped on an extra $69 and put
Pew on probation for five months. Even if he committed another violation during
probation, he would face only a slightly larger fine and a suspended license for
10 days.
Pew says the back-to-back violations were unfair. He didn't
know that the ponds and canals had fish in them, and at night, the ideal time to
spray, it's difficult to see where, exactly, fish might be.
"I go in there and do an application to the best of my
ability, and I end up getting a fine and a violation and possibly my license
taken away," he says. "It was one of those things I couldn't
fight."
Sebring says the unfairness is how lightly Pew was
penalized. Her son-in-law -- who has since succumbed to the cancer -- was
already too ill to leave the house that morning in August 1999. But Sebring and
her daughter went the next day for a medical examination. Although the two were
spared any lasting damage from the pesticides, Sebring is still livid. "I
would have thought he would be fined hundreds, if not thousands, for
endangerment."
At the Department of Agriculture, the possibility that
someone could be hurt or killed doesn't count for much when it comes to
punishing errant crop dusters, according to five years of cases reviewed by New
Times.
Even when a pilot is grossly negligent, it makes little
difference in the penalty unless there is evidence that someone did get hurt.
And the evidence required to meet that burden of proof is high.
The result is that pilots rarely pay more than $150 for an
unsafe pesticide application. And when the violations pile up, the penalties do
not. Even with dozens of violations for spraying everything from schoolyards to
the department's own investigators, pilots are usually fined less than $100 more
for a repeat offense -- about one day's worth of work. Pilots, who can earn
upward of $100,000 a year, cut the department a check and carry on.
A review of more than 500 pesticide compliance and worker
protection files at the agriculture department revealed that the bulk of unsafe
crop dusting has been carried out by a small group of pilots and the companies
they work for. Among the more than 50 pilots licensed to apply pesticides by air
in Arizona in the past five years, at least eight were repeat offenders, none
with fewer than four violations in the last decade. Two of those pilots had
broken state pesticide laws more than 10 times. They faced no costly fines or
sanctions to their licenses.
There was Joe Henderson, a crop duster from Gilbert who was
found at fault in at least 18 of 27 complaints against him from 1989 to 2000.
Before he died in a plane crash last year, the highest penalty Henderson ever
paid for a single violation was $496, according to department records.
Chris Carranza and Robert Moseley are in the same crowd.
Carranza, who has been found at fault in more than half of 15 complaints, has
never been fined more than $117. And the highest penalty ever paid by Moseley,
whose history is packed with 11 violations from 26 complaints, was $267.
In many cases it is difficult to pinpoint the number of
violations a pilot has accumulated because the agency keeps such bad records.
Paper records are destroyed after five years, and about a year ago, the
department began deleting computer records more than five years old.
Even records for the last five years, which are used to
determine a pilot's prior violations, are incomplete, which means there may be
more repeat offenders than records reflect. Some pilots with complaints against
them have no case histories in the department's database, and several pilots
have case histories that are missing complaints.
Records on crop-dusting companies are just as weak, often
showing only a fraction of the complaints and violations involving their pilots.
Of the more than 17 companies that have sent pilots out to spray crops in the
last decade, about half accounted for the bulk of unsafe sprays. These
businesses faced no penalty for their pilots' offenses.
The problem with recordkeeping is that the system has
changed through the years, and workers have entered data differently, says Jill
Davis, a department spokeswoman. "It isn't a perfect system, so it would be
difficult to have an exact number of what someone's done."
Yet a pilot's history is supposed to figure into his fines,
so when records are incomplete, the department relies primarily on employees'
memories to fill in the gaps.
Davis says Jack Peterson, manager of the environmental
services division and a seven-year veteran of the department, can usually recall
when a case is missing and take it into account. "We feel it's adequate for
that purpose," says Davis.
Perhaps worse than the sheer volume of repeated pesticide
violations is the harm the pilots' negligence could have caused. In case after
case, pilots are fined a small amount for what could have turned into a
disaster. So far, the department says, it has been lucky, at least in avoiding
cases where damage to humans or the environment could be proved.
Don't tell that to Carl Hegi's
family. They believe pesticide spray killed their father.
A longtime dairy farmer, Carl Hegi worked at a time when
new chemicals to control pests were a godsend, and environmental and health
concerns had not yet boiled to the surface. John Hegi, Carl's son, recalled days
on the family farm in Buckeye, where he and his brothers would play with the
pesticides, spraying them on the barn.
"He grew up in an era when that was the future,"
says John Hegi, a groundskeeper for the University of California at Santa Cruz.
"He would have been the last person to say anything bad about the
concept."
Retired and 74, Hegi was riding his bicycle to his
brother's farm in August 1990 when he was caught in a crop duster's spray. Hegi
arrived drenched in methyl parathion, a highly toxic chemical commonly used to
kill insects on cotton. High-dose exposure to the compound, which is similar to
nerve gas, for even a short time can cause loss of consciousness, difficulty
breathing, blurred vision and death, according to the federal health
department's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Hegi was in his chemical-drenched clothes for at least half
an hour. Three weeks later, at John C. Lincoln Hospital North Mountain, his
lungs and kidneys began to fail and his stomach started bleeding. By October 3,
1990, he was dead.
A toxicologist ruled out pesticide poisoning, saying
exposure weeks earlier wouldn't explain Hegi's symptoms, according to the
pathology report. Symptoms from that type of pesticide typically appear within
hours, even minutes, toxicology experts say, and deaths are usually because of
respiratory complications (which Hegi had).
Symptoms of pesticide poisoning often mimic other health
problems, making illness or death from pesticides difficult to determine, says
Ernest Arvizu, a state epidemiology specialist who evaluates pesticide exposure
cases from the agriculture department. Doctors could offer no other explanation
for Hegi's death.
"No unifying disease process was found to explain the
patient's pulmonary and renal failure," medical records state.
Hegi's family still blames pesticide exposure.
"He had always been healthy, so it was
surprising," says John Hegi, who expected his father to live into his 90s,
as Carl's brothers did. The family sued the applicator, Pierce Aviation, but no
doctors would back up a cause of death because of pesticides, says Ian Neale,
the family's attorney.
"The obvious reason was that he had been drenched from
head to foot by methyl parathion," says Neale. "We were absolutely
stymied by their medical opinion and the autopsy."
John Hegi says the lawsuit was settled for a token amount.
Jim Pierce, owner of Pierce Aviation, remembers only that Carl Hegi's daughter
contacted him, but he doesn't recall the details or the lawsuit. Pierce's lawyer
wouldn't comment.
John Hegi says he's not sure whether his father's death was
reported to the Department of Agriculture. Officials say they do not remember
the case. "We would have liked to know about this," says Peterson,
manager of the environmental services division.
Les Davis, executive director of the Arizona Agricultural
Aviation Association, was surprised and skeptical when told about the Hegi case.
It's critical that people have proof before they accuse aerial applicators of
injury, he says. A lot of people complain about pesticide odor, noisy planes and
the nuisance of crop dusting, but the evidence of damage is often not there.
"I have never heard of anybody in Arizona being killed
by being sprayed by a pesticide. It's just the family saying that's why he
died," says Davis, who has operated an aerial application company and is a
longtime advocate of pilots. "It's a disservice to agriculture when people
make these claims."
Davis, who is adamant that the name "crop duster"
be replaced with "aerial applicator," was the last administrator for
the Board of Pesticide Control before it was eventually folded into the
Department of Agriculture. "I helped write the rules operating right
now," he says.
Those rules require a burden of proof that is so high,
critics say it is extremely difficult for a pilot to receive a serious penalty
and a steep fine.
Poor enforcement was the theme of a scathing report on the
department's pesticide compliance program by the Arizona Office of the Auditor
General last September. The crux of the problem: Fines are too low to be a
deterrent. The auditor found that the point system for determining fines, even
when used liberally, was incapable of awarding the maximum fine of $500 for a
non-serious violation, a Class 1 misdemeanor. Serious violations, a Class 6
felony, carry a maximum fine of $10,000, but nearly all violations in the last
five years were deemed non-serious, even with clear evidence of serious
misconduct.
When the audit -- by far the most critical of seven audits
of the department's programs -- was released last fall, it was virtually ignored
by the media, lawmakers and Governor Jane Hull, who signed a bill to continue
the department after its 10-year sunset review.
"It's not a question of getting into some sort of
brinkmanship in a sunset bill," said Francie Noyes, a spokeswoman for the
governor, when asked about the audit. "The governor is confident that the
agency is doing its job."
Peterson agreed, saying the audit didn't sound the alarm
bell. "I don't think they found any glaring problems."
If any pilot should have set off alarm bells, it was Joe
Henderson. The department investigated 27 complaints against him, fining him in
half the cases -- none considered serious.
Pesticide from Henderson's plane hit cars, horseback
riders, a plant nursery and a day-care center, according to department records.
He sprayed a manufacturing plant while employees were working inside -- twice.
He sprayed an entire subdivision in Queen Creek, where neighbors ran for cover
from the pesticide that eventually killed the trees lining their front yards.
And three years before his death in a plane crash, Henderson killed 80,000 fish
in one morning at the University of Arizona's Maricopa Agricultural Research
Center.
Fellow pilots say the number of complaints against
Henderson should be taken in context. His company, San Tan Dusters, did a high
volume of business, and Henderson's clients were primarily farmers whose land
came right up next to subdivisions from the East Valley.
"He had a wonderful operation," says Davis.
"He was very careful with chemicals and one heck of a pilot."
But to some people on the ground below, Henderson was a
daredevil. He was once fined $240 for a complaint that he was "flying like
a maniac," department records show. Bill Day, a Chandler rancher, pulled
out a rifle and shot Henderson's plane when he continued to buzz Day's horses,
according to news accounts in April 1994. Day was charged with aggravated
assault and criminal damage, and Henderson was cleared of any wrongdoing by the
Federal Aviation Administration. About the same time, Cheryl Livermore told the
media that she and two friends were "blitzkrieged" by Henderson while
horseback riding.
Agriculture department officials acknowledge that they have
repeat offenders who need to be regulated differently, yet they seem mired in a
system that favors industry over public safety. Leaders from industry, the
Legislature and the department are reluctant to push for change.
"We do our best to make sure we know what people are
doing," says Peterson. "By doing this, people are always on their
toes, and we have compliance with the law."
The auditor general didn't find that to be true. Besides
finding that penalties are too low to deter violators, auditors also found that
regulators almost never know when or where crop dusting will take place. Pilots,
even chronic violators, don't have to report what they sprayed until they've hit
-- or missed -- their targets.
Setting up a system like the one in California, where all
pilots must get permission ahead of time to spray, would not be worthwhile,
department officials in Arizona say, because less than 1 percent of the
estimated 30,000 pesticide applications ever result in a complaint. Asked
several times about monitoring repeat offenders -- a recommendation of the
auditor general -- Peterson agreed that it should be done. But he wouldn't make
any promises.
"Our people are busy all the time," says
Peterson. "We'd have to look at the priority of things and decide."
What regulators do want to change are the definitions of
serious and non-serious violations so more violators could be kicked into the
serious category. They want more gradation in the point system, assigning more
points for a higher level of misconduct.
Under the current system, they say they are hamstrung in
calculating penalties by the ranges set by state lawmakers. Increasing those
ranges -- another recommendation by the auditor -- would require a proposal to
the Legislature. Department officials say they would support increased fines if
lawmakers approved them, but they refuse to make such a proposal themselves,
saying it is not their place to do so.
A proposal from the Legislature, however, appears unlikely,
given the stance of a key lawmaker.
"What [fines] we have now are adequate to get their
attention," says Representative Mike Gleason, R-Sun City West, chairman of
the Natural Resources and Agriculture Committee. Gleason has a doctorate in
plant physiology and 50 years of experience in agriculture.
"These guys [crop dusters] are professional, by and
large, and they do a good job. It's more a matter of being able to identify
these people [who violate pesticide application laws], and go out and talk to
them," Gleason says.
Talking is just about all the department does to pilots who
commit violations. Administrative hearings are available if pilots and
regulators disagree on discipline, but officials say they can recall only one
such hearing in the last decade. Most cases are settled over the telephone.
Pilots sign a consent agreement and send a check.
"We can be heavy-handed when we want to be, but our
emphasis is compliance," says Sheldon Jones, director of the department.
Inspections of pesticide sellers, buyers and applicators maintain oversight of
the industry, he says.
Gleason says Jones has turned the department around,
reorganizing the agency so that staffers are accountable to department heads
instead of members of industry. (Before there was one agriculture department,
industry leaders were often put in charge of separate agriculture commissions.)
But there are signs that the agency is still closely tied
to the industry. The department has opened up its rules for revision, using a
process dominated by a long list of people who either work for the department or
have ties to the agricultural industry. Thirty-three people, including
representatives from the Arizona Farm Bureau, the Arizona Cotton Growers
Association and the Arizona Crop Protection Association, are updated by e-mail
as the revisions progress. Penalties haven't come up yet.
"I don't think anyone is going to come out and support
penalty increases," says Marilyn Martin, executive director of the Arizona
Crop Protection Association, which represents the pesticide industry and people
who are certified to advise farmers of which chemicals to apply. "We'd
really raise our eyebrows at raising penalties on anyone."
Peterson says the department is getting input from all
sides and plans to hold public meetings before the formal rule-changing process
begins.
Some biologists say fish are the environmental equivalent
of the canary in the coal mine. Fish die instantly when exposed to many
chemicals and are especially sensitive to pesticides, which are water soluble
and ingested immediately through their gills, says Tony Porti, a research
specialist and aquaculturist for the Maricopa Agricultural Research Center.
"We need to get fish in the water all around us
because . . . if the canary falls over, maybe there's a problem," says
Porti, who raises thousands of fish for use in canals across Arizona. "It's
important because we're ingesting that water."
It was fear of poisoned water that worried Fernando
Mezquita, a former deacon of Immaculate Conception Parish who ministered to
migrant workers in the Yuma area. Three years ago, Mezquita got a call from a
woman who was afraid her husband would lose his job on a farm if she called
authorities. A pesticide sprayed the night before had killed all the fish in the
canal, she told him. Mezquita was afraid that the workers were drinking the
canal water.
"People who live there just put up with it [pesticide
spraying] because they're migrant workers and don't have a place to go," he
says. "I was concerned about the little ones, the kids, because it may take
years to show up in their systems."
Mezquita called the Department of Agriculture.
Less than two hours later, investigator Frank Zamudio
arrived at the labor camp at Texas Hill Farms, east of Yuma. Workers told
Zamudio that, yes, they used the canal water in their homes, but it had been
shut off when they discovered the dead fish, according to a report on the
investigation.
A sample of water taken from one worker's house came back
negative for organophosphates. Tests of dead fish from the canal, however, were
positive for endosulfan, an organophosphate that is toxic to fish, birds and
other wildlife, and can affect the central nervous system in humans in high
doses. The label warns against releasing the pesticide within 300 feet of lakes,
ponds and other water sources.
Water from the canal was never tested, the investigator's
report said, and it's unclear whether the farm workers were told when they could
turn their water back on. The department's job is to figure out where pesticide
drifted, Peterson says, and testing the fish did that.
"We can make every effort to protect public health,
but again, we have to regulate the applicator," he says. "We've shown
the stuff is there. . . . It's an expensive process to run each one of these
tests."
Cody Pierce of Pierce Aviation was the crop duster who
dropped endosulfan less than 75 feet from the canal. Pierce, who had no prior
violations, was assigned points for human exposure, for water contamination
(despite the absence of water samples) and for knowingly committing the
violation. No points were assigned for killing fish. The department labeled the
case non-serious, and Pierce was fined $99.
"He got the maximum fine you could give him,"
says Peterson.
Giving Pierce more points for human exposure would have
required proof that someone got medical treatment. The only category in which
Pierce could have gained points was wrongfulness of conduct. His violation was
ranked "substantial," the second highest category. To call it
"aggravated," which would have bumped him to the serious category,
would require proving "substantial probability" of serious physical
injury, sustained medical treatment or enough environmental damage to pose a
threat to public health, safety or property. The case did not rise to that
level, says Peterson.
Neither did the cases of Erin Petersen and Cort Bacon, even
though they received medical treatment for pesticide exposure. The Rural/Metro
firefighters were sprayed while refilling their fire truck beside a canal in
Yuma. Because their hospitalization lasted less than 12 hours, the penalty
against the pilot, Jeffrey Kottenbrook, was $99.
One of the agriculture department's repeat offenders,
Robert Moseley, received only a warning letter for letting pesticide drift hit
three retirees on Mountain View golf course in Laveen in February 1996.
"It was kind of bizarre because all of a sudden there
was a plane that looked like it was going to get us," says Paul Fanning,
who suspects that the pneumonia he caught soon after the golf game was
pesticide-related. "It surprised me that they didn't fine him because
you're using a chemical that affects citizens."
Other states give more weight to the probability of harm to
humans, animals and the environment, even when none has been found. The North
Dakota Department of Agriculture, for example, penalized two people with fines
of $2,575 and $4,500 for possible human exposure to pesticide drift, although
the health effects from exposure were never proven. One case involved workers on
an oil rig who claimed they were sprayed by a crop duster. The other was a
12-year-old girl who was sprayed while running a tractor.
"Pesticide damage is very, very difficult to
prove," says Jerry Thompson, the North Dakota department's pesticide
coordinator. "We look at the potential for injury."
Peterson says Arizona does take into account the likelihood
of harm, but he is leery of giving too much weight to something not supported by
evidence. "It just leaves you open to legal challenges over and over
again," he says. "If there are situations where problems have
occurred, we will address it."
Although Peterson says evidence of damage is a prerequisite
for a serious violation and steep fine, that was not the case in one of the rare
$6,000 fines levied against a pilot.
Penny Freeman was flashing her headlights, but she couldn't
stop pilot Tommy Socha from spraying methyl parathion as his plane dived under a
power line, flew over the road and crossed a field south of Coolidge. The spray
coated her windshield, but more important, Socha hit a field of alfalfa that was
later harvested as hay for livestock. Investigator C. Ray Peery was worried that
the chemical, which can cause serious problems for livestock, had contaminated
the hay.
Peery warned the farmer who harvested the hay, but tests of
the alfalfa showed safe levels for methyl parathion, and for acephate and
chlorpyrifos, two chemicals left over from a previous application by Socha.
Just two years earlier, Socha paid only $42 for a complaint
that pesticide exposure at a mobile home park caused four children to vomit.
In the alfalfa case, no people, crops or animals were
damaged. The $6,000 penalty was based partly on how close Socha came to
contaminating livestock's food, which could lead to contaminating the human food
supply. A bigger issue was Socha's negligence, says Peterson. The pilot actually
sprayed the car and the field, as opposed to allowing drift to hit an unintended
target.
By avoiding similar violations during a year of probation,
Socha ended up paying $2,000. The case is one of the few the department put in
the serious category.
Southwest of Phoenix, fishermen scooping up poisoned fish
from a canal didn't warrant the same concern.
Dove hunting season was under way, and Kevin Ellis and
fellow officer Steve Middleton from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had a
farmer's permission to monitor hunters on September 1, 1997, at Paloma Partners
Ranch southwest of Phoenix. But instead of watching birds become prey, the
officers watched a black plane spray pesticide dangerously close to a canal
bordering a cotton field.
An hour after the spraying, fumes still hung in the air.
Ellis peered into the canal and saw water rippling with the jerks and twists of
fish struggling for oxygen. Ellis drove down the canal for six miles, watching
thousands of fish turning belly up.
Then he saw something more frightening: fishermen dipping
their nets into the canal, scooping out the floating fish and loading them into
their vehicles for food. Ellis says he ran up to them, pleading with as many as
he could not to take the poisoned fish, but more people were coming to the water
as he spoke, and he wasn't sure if he stopped everyone in time.
The incident was reported to the federal Environmental
Protection Agency, which turned over the case to the Arizona Department of
Agriculture.
The fishermen apparently meant little to the department.
Daniel Bossard of Pierce Aviation, the offending pilot, received points for
killing fish and for knowingly committing the violation. No points were assigned
for evidence of human exposure, water contamination (the pesticides Lorsban and
Thiodan were detected), or bird kills (Middleton found a dead turkey vulture
near the canal, which wasn't retrieved or tested by the department).
Asked about the void of penalties for possible human harm,
given the water and fish contamination, Peterson says that aspect was
considered, but the department threw up its hands when it discovered that the
canal, the water and the fish all belonged to Paloma Partners Ranch. "Those
people [the fishermen] would have been trespassing," says Peterson. Had it
been a public water source, which it wasn't, the outcome would have been
different, he added.
Bossard's violation, his fourth complaint since 1990, was
deemed non-serious, and the department fined him $113. His case history includes
investigations into the spraying of a trailer park and its pool area in
September 1991, and pesticide drift onto a romaine lettuce field in March 1994.
Further information was not available because of the destruction of paper files
after five years.
Bossard was not surprised by the fish kill, according to an
investigator's report. Although winds were calm, and nothing unusual happened,
Bossard told the investigator he faced a number of obstacles: fish stocked close
to a cotton field, a pesticide that tends to hang in the air, and humidity that
makes drift hard to avoid.
"We'll never be able to get away from drift. It's
going to be there," says Pew, the pilot whose pesticide drift killed
neighbors' fish in Florence and fish in an SRP canal in Chandler.
Nonetheless, the industry has made changes to minimize
drift, he says. Booms on planes have been shortened for a more narrow line of
spray that's easier to control. Nozzles are larger, creating large droplets that
hit their target better than a fine mist. And flaggers who used to stand in the
field, marking off rows, have been replaced with cockpit satellite positioning
systems, which outline the pilot's route.
"We're not renegades out there running around,"
says Pew, a Mesa native who started his crop-dusting business in Coolidge nearly
two decades ago. "The cowboys are gone. This is a highly sophisticated,
expensive business."
Pilots routinely postpone applications when the winds
aren't right, Pew says, and they will turn down jobs if nearby homes or other
obstacles make spraying too tricky.
Arizona has buffer zones that restrict pesticide
applications within one-fourth mile of schools and day-care centers. In
designated urban areas next to farmland, pilots must notify the state 24 hours
before spraying.
But the state's crop-dusting industry is shrinking, putting
pressure on crop dusters to take jobs if they can.
Several decades ago, there were 60 crop-dusting companies
in Arizona. Today there are 17. Farmland is shrinking, and what's left is farmed
with new pesticides that require fewer applications. The widespread use of bt
cotton, genetically engineered to produce a toxin that kills the dreaded pink
bollworm, has reduced the need for pesticides on Arizona's largest cash crop.
On the perimeters of Phoenix, farmers are more likely to
use ground rigs than an airplane to apply pesticide, sparing the farmer
headaches when neighbors complain about a plane spraying nearby.
"Our family made a commitment to do everything by
ground," says Kevin Rogers, a fourth-generation farmer on land in Mesa,
Scottsdale and Laveen. "It makes us better neighbors because we're so close
to town."
With fewer pesticide-spraying companies competing for less
business, pilots admit the combination can lead to risk-taking. Jobs that aerial
applicators might have rejected as too close to a home or a fish pond are flown
to keep their business going.
"If you really don't want to do it, you can say no,
and I have," says Joel Cyr, a pilot who operates Cyr Aviation Inc.
"But can I afford to say no on this case?" That's always the question,
he says.
Even as pesticide use drops, farmers don't want to lose the
option of aerial spraying.
While the use of many chemical compounds has dropped
dramatically, the application of others, including Methamidophos (used on
cotton, potatoes and tomatoes) and Imidacloprid (used on vegetables, fruits and
other crops), has remained steady.
Davis of the Arizona Agricultural Aviation Association says
the industry is just becoming more specialized. Aerial applicators will always
be relied upon for certain types of crops in rural Arizona, which is the
nation's top producer of iceberg and romaine lettuce during the winter months.
Rogers, the Valley farmer, says even though his pesticide
use has dropped as much as 80 percent, he and other growers fear that bugs will
become resistant to bt cotton and new pesticides. They don't want to lose the
option of spraying by air.
Stiffer penalties could hurt crop dusters, the farmers say,
and crop dusters agree.
"If they go to a higher point system, it will
devastate us," says Pew, who has started Farm Plan, a type of credit card
system for growers who can't immediately pay the hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of dollars it costs for each pesticide application. "It will put us out of
business."
"The aerial applicators are a dying industry,"
says Rogers. "I wouldn't want this to be the final blow to push them out of
business."
Davis says the important thing to remember is that
agricultural aviation is a field of professionals, not mavericks from the 1940s
and 1950s.
"It's not the old crop duster who put a scarf on, and
off he goes in an open cockpit," he says.
It's not unusual for today's pilots to have master's
degrees and be community leaders. Pew, for example, is a bishop for the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Besides, pilots have too much invested in
their half-million-dollar planes to be mavericks, Davis says.
But the image of professionalism is lost on many people who
have been caught in a crop duster's spray. David Hart says he was sure the pilot
flying back and forth over his house in Willcox nearly two years ago could see
him swinging his arms. After several more passes, Hart had enough. Grabbing his
gun, he aimed it at the crop duster, Tracey Williams of Ag-Air, using the scope
to read the numbers on the plane. The pass was the pilot's last over Hart's
property.
"I was hoping that it would at least move him
away," says Hart. Tests for chemicals on his yard came back positive, and
the department issued Williams a warning letter.
"I never saw the guy to begin with," says
Williams, who insisted he was flying above the field on the other side of the
road. "I don't like anyone who's going to point a gun at me. Why he was
upset, or why he has rage, I don't know."
Kristi Herbig says she wouldn't resort to violence or
intimidation to stop the planes that constantly fly over her horse farm in Eloy.
She just wishes pilots could see the damage of one unfortunate flight.
Herbig is an early riser, tending to the nearly 20
championship quarter horses she breeds. One August morning in 1999, Herbig could
barely get out of bed to vomit. Her husband, an asthmatic, was coughing.
Dragging herself out the door, Herbig followed the trail of dead frogs, rodents
and birds to the fish floating in her horses' water tank.
Remembering the plane she had heard flying over the house
the night before, Herbig realized that her property had been sprayed. But her
biggest concern was for her livelihood -- the horses, some of which were
coughing and not eating. Several months later, she wondered if the dead foal
from one of her mares was caused by pesticides.
Herbig filed a complaint with the Department of Agriculture
two days after the incident, but it was closed without action when evidence
indicated that no drift occurred. Several weeks later, the department reopened
the case when delayed laboratory analysis showed high levels of pesticide
residue on her property.
The pilot was fined $141.
Most disturbing was that Herbig lives 675 feet from the
crop that was sprayed, and there are no homes nearby.
"They're snooping," she says of the crop duster.
"If they have to fly that far out of their way to hit my house, they're
doing something wrong."
The regulators are doing something wrong, too, when they
fail to adequately penalize crop dusters, says Sebring, the woman whose mobile
home, backyard canal and terminally ill son-in-law were hit with pesticide
spray.
"I don't think anyone would deliberately do that, but
he [the pilot] was negligent," she says. "If you live near farms, you
have to put up with crop dusting. But I don't accept being sprayed on."
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/2001-06-14/feature.html/page1.html