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Bhhs decorated oil derrick cancer Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-04-28-bevhills-usat_x.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-04-28-bevhills-usat_x.htm
Members of the Beverly Hills High School track team run wind sprints past a colorfully-decorated oil derrick that looms over the school's athletic fields.
By Reed Saxon, AP
Lawyers calling Beverly Hills High a hazard
By Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Allegations that elite Beverly Hills High School is the site of a "cancer cluster" are scaring parents and swinging the spotlight again to the environmental sleuth profiled in the movie Erin Brockovich.
The real-life Brockovich and her boss, lawyer Ed Masry, allege that toxic fumes from oil wells on the campus have caused 280 cases of Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and thyroid cancer since the 1970s. For the size of the population involved, "these statistics are 20 times higher than the national average for these three specific cancers," Brockovich says.
Masry's firm on Monday filed 25 personal-injury claims for damages with the school district and Beverly Hills, a famously wealthy city of 34,000. Masry says he expects to name the two government entities and three oil companies as defendants in dozens of individual lawsuits in November.
Government air-quality regulators and a cancer epidemiologist are telling worried parents that the wells at the 2,100-student school pose no unusual health risks. But under pressure from influential parents, officials are testing the school's soil, water and outdoor and indoor air.
Julia Roberts won the best-actress Oscar for portraying Brockovich in the 2000 film hit. Albert Finney played Masry. The screenplay centered on the $333 million that Masry's "toxic torts" firm obtained for 600 residents of Hinkley, Calif., in a 1996 settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric, which had polluted water with an industrial solvent.
Masry says he's not ready to name a figure for his Beverly Hills damage claims, but he says that "it's potentially more than Hinkley. We've never been involved with such affluent clients in a toxic case."
Beverly High, as the school is known, outranks Brockovich in connections with Hollywood. Many children of the rich and famous go there. Former students include actors Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfuss, Carrie Fisher, Rob Reiner, David Schwimmer and Alicia Silverstone, as well as musician Andre Previn and former presidential intern Monica Lewinsky.
An oil- and gas-drilling operation next to the athletic fields predates the school's opening in 1928. Pumping 450 barrels of oil and 400,000 cubic feet of natural gas a day, 18 active wells there bring the school system and the city a combined $700,000 a year in royalties.
Looming over the pumps is the school landmark: a 150-foot-tall oil derrick. Venoco, its operator since 1995, named the drilling rig the Tower of Hope in 2000, when the company unveiled a brightly colored soundproofing wrap with flowers painted by hospitalized children.
To some Beverly High parents, the Tower of Hope has become the Tower of Fear.
The cancer scare began in February with a report on Los Angeles' KCBS-TV. The station, tipped by Masry's firm, said tests by the firm of the air at Beverly High showed high concentrations of the toxic oil-field chemicals benzene, toluene and n-hexane.
At school board meetings, irate parents demanded that the wells be shut down. One boy's parents removed him from the baseball team. Other parents began asking doctors and air-quality officials whether they should pull their children out of school.
"I feel sorry for the neighborhood, because it's panicking," says Wendy Cozen, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
Cozen says she has tried to ease parents' concerns by citing favorable results of air samplings that the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) has taken at the school on seven occasions since February.
Government monitoring "has not shown readings of benzene, hexane and other air toxic levels that are considered abnormal," says Barry Wallerstein, the regional smog agency's executive officer.
School Superintendent Gwen Gross says that tests by a scientist hired by the school system also found the level of airborne toxins to be "well below health limits established by the state."
Wallerstein, who is a Beverly High graduate, says the law firm's test results "don't appear to be logical." He says the firm's samples might have been "inadvertently contaminated."
Masry defends his firm's tests. "The AQMD, frankly, doesn't know what it's doing," he says. "It's not qualified to handle a toxic situation involving children."
The law firm has signed up dozens of Beverly High alumni as potential plaintiffs since 1992 graduate Lori Moss told Brockovich last year that she had discovered a pattern of cancer at the school. In 1996, Moss was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the immune system. That cancer is in remission, but Moss, 28, now is being treated for thyroid cancer. "I feel betrayed and angry," she says.
Brockovich, the law firm's research director and host of a Lifetime cable show, Final Justice, says it's hard to persuade some potential plaintiffs to link their cancer with their school years.
"It's just that it's Beverly Hills," she says. "You look at the glamour and the beauty and the sunshine and the happiness of it all. To think that something like cancer lurks under the surface is maybe someplace we don't want to look."
Proving in court that the oil wells cause cancer won't be easy. Cozen, co-director of a program that tracks all Los Angeles County cancer cases, says statistics indicate that there is no more Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma or thyroid cancer among Beverly Hills residents than in other area neighborhoods. The cancer numbers that the law firm gives for Beverly High graduates "would be so unusual that I just find it unlikely," Cozen says.
Beverly Hills has a high rate of one form of thyroid cancer, but so does the rest of Los Angeles' west side, Cozen says. Some cancer specialists say the high rate could stem from affluent residents receiving large numbers of medical X-rays.
"None of these cancers is well linked to petroleum or petroleum products," Cozen says. "There's oil wells all over L.A., and no cancer pattern is associated with neighborhoods with oil wells."
Studies typically have linked thyroid cancer with radiation, not with pollution from oil wells. Benzene has been linked with leukemia in oil-refinery workers, but Masry isn't alleging that the school's wells have caused leukemia. The EPA does not list toluene or n-hexane as suspected human carcinogens.
Masry, who initially blamed current oil production for health problems, now is focusing on 25 abandoned wells that he says were inadequately sealed. He blames ChevronTexaco and Occidental Petroleum, oil giants with deeper pockets as potential defendants than small, privately owned Venoco. Masry alleges that Occidental and Chevron (now part of ChevronTexaco) were the original partners that obtained leases to drill in Beverly Hills.
ChevronTexaco spokesman Rod Spackman says Chevron sold its leases before the 1920s. Company officials are checking whether Getty Oil, later bought by Texaco, operated wells here 60 years ago. "Our exposure here is very little, at best," Spackman says, "and it would go back many, many years ago, and we still question that."
Occidental says it has never owned or operated oil wells on the campus. "I have no idea what kind of fishing expedition these guys are on," Occidental spokesman Larry Meriage says.
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