Woman’s death after chemical spill leads to search for answers

Hope Goodwin moved to Valley Center to retire with her mother, Joye, two decades ago.

Together, the two raised championship horses and Great Danes, grew dozens of organic fruits and vegetables and were about to go into the business of farming organic garlic and Sea-buckthorn.

It was a return to a life of farming but a break from Joye’s previous life — a nurse for more than four decades, and founder of Children Having Children, a southeast San Diego non-profit that supports teen parents and works to prevent teen pregnancy.

But the Goodwins’ lives would forever change on Nov. 16, 2006, when an EDCO garbage truck lifting a dumpster in their back yard ruptured a hydraulic line, spraying fluid on to the ground, into the air and across the property.

Joye, who was gardening outside and already had trouble breathing, may have inhaled some of the fluid.

“We could smell the fumes in the house for weeks,” Hope Goodwin said.

The mature cottonwood trees near the spill would eventually die, as well as fruit trees and crops planted in the ground farther away. The Ice Man, a 23-year-old Irish-bred thoroughbred, had to be put down. Another horse lost 300 lbs. Alraune, a German-bred Holsteiner, may have had cancer.

Finally Joye’s health deteriorated. She died in the morning hours of March 20, 2009, the first day of spring.

“All we wanted them to do in the beginning was to clean up and put things back the way they were,” Goodwin said.

She wants to leave the property but claims no real estate agent will list it. Her lawsuit against EDCO — for the depletion in property value and emotional damages for the waste collection company allegedly failing to finish necessary cleanups — is set to go to trial in March.

Goodwin still doesn’t know exactly what was in the potentially toxic hydraulic fluid she, her mother, the plants and animals were exposed to. Anywhere from 15 to 36 gallons of hydraulic fluid was spilled; the actual amount is disputed by both sides.

Cleaning up the mess

After the spill occurred, an EDCO cleanup crew came to the house and worked two hours that afternoon and six the next day.

In all, 400 pounds of contaminated soil was removed from the property, EDCO vice president Jeff Ritchie said in an e-mail. He added that EDCO contends the alleged change in property value to be without merit.

Soil was removed within a 20-foot radius of the spill and oil absorbent rags were placed on the brick patio, said EDCO director of fleet maintenance Garth Nogalez.

Arrangements were made for an additional cleanup the morning of Nov. 22, 2006, but EDCO employees claim Hope wasn’t cooperative.

Goodwin said she had a doctor’s appointment that day and needed to bring the dogs to the veterinarian and didn’t want a cleanup done without either she or her mother there to see it. But she canceled her appointments and called the Valley Center Fire Department to supervise a third cleanup.

“My impression was that (the EDCO employees) went above and beyond as far as clean up is concerned,” Captain Saul Villa Gomez stated in a deposition.

Though a report was filed by the department, neither Gomez nor anyone else at the scene had any particular experience with hydraulic fluid or petroleum hydrocarbons, said Goodwin’s attorney Mark Plummer.

“He wouldn’t know a toxic chemical if he fell over it so his opinion is meaningless due to a complete lack of training in the field,” he said.

An offer was made for remaining cleanup to be done by an EDCO employee but Goodwin and her mother declined.

“It seemed as though as soon as I told her a professional was coming out there, she did not want us to do the cleanup,” said Kelly Roe, an EDCO interim safety director. Especially after a worker told them he “had been up all night doing his homework,” they didn’t trust his qualifications and wanted a neutral professional to finish cleanups, according to the lawsuit.

Soil analysis ordered by EDCO and performed by Bryant Geoenvironmental in Spring 2007 said further investigation was needed, but recommended additional removal and testing. EDCO contends it attempted to do this but their efforts were rejected by Hope Goodwin, a claim she denies.

An estimate requested by the Goodwins and carried out by Advanced Cleanup Technologies in October 2008 said a more extensive cleanup, including the removal of the brick patio and allegedly impacted portions of roof tiles and windows, would cost more than $175,000.

Goodwin claims that because EDCO employees had no specific knowledge or training on how to properly clean up hydraulic fluid, no consideration was made of oil which may have seeped underneath the brick patio or spread further from the direct site of the spill.

From square dancing to paranoia

As the back and forth continued, Joye Goodwin’s health got worse. Dr. Karen Ziolo, a pulmonary specialist and one of several doctors she went to see after the accident, suggested the women leave their home for a hotel, which they did for the two weeks they could afford it.

“Within a week or so of being back, she couldn’t breathe again. She was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital,” Hope said.

According to Dr. Dan Harper, another doctor Joye visited after the accident, her pre-existing conditions included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD from smoking cigarettes, colon cancer 10 years prior, a heart attack and reactive airways disease as a child.

Harper is certified by nationally recognized boards to practice holistic and family medicine, eligible for certification from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and has 35,000 hours of emergency room experience. He examined Joye five times, most recently less than six months before her death.

The Goodwins are chemically sensitive, said Harper, meaning they have a genetic predisposition that makes them especially sensitive to chemicals. People can be chemically sensitive just like they can have allergies, he said.

“Eighty percent of the world could handle it just fine. You expose them to this harsh a chemical and they’re doomed,” Harper said.”If you take a detailed history and how they were before and after, that’s how you start building a case for chemical sensitivity.

“This lady was square dancing a month before the accident,” he said. Afterward “she could not finish a complete sentence at times, she was afraid, very paranoid. She wasn’t crazy. The paranoia she was having was coming from the chemical exposure,” he said.

Over the duration he saw her, Harper said Joye had a stroke and several mini strokes, an abdominal aneurysm, a drop in her white blood cell count, declining liver function, blood clots in her legs which had never happened before, a lung infection and chronic bronchitis.

“When you get to be 84, 85 years old, there’s a lot of water under the bridge” he said. “But here was a lady that was functioning and taking care of her sick daughter when this happened.”

At the time of the accident, Hope was bedridden, after surgery for a hernia.

Following the spill, Hope had dermatitis as well as brain fog or short-term memory loss, Harper said.

“I’ve had parts of my body that haven’t stopped itching since the spill,” Goodwin said.

Her mother’s symptoms were consistent with exposure to neurotoxins but also to old age, Plummer said. With pre-existing conditions and without knowing what is in the mixture, it can’t be conclusively proven the oil had anything to do with her death.

“Hydraulic fluid doesn’t generally make the grade for toxic things but can be especially bad when you’re already a mess,” Plummer said.

What was in the fluid?

All hydraulic fluids are not created equal, Plummer said. Ingredients depend on where and when it was manufactured.

“If they had barrel numbers, Chevron could tell us,” Plummer said. But “EDCO refused to give us an example and now claim they don’t have a viable sample.”

“It’s a legal inference that when someone has control of evidence and loses or destroys it,” there’s something to hide, he added.

A 1989 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) document listed the fluid as made up of 11 different hydrocarbons, two deemed toxic: paraffinic, which may cause cancer, and napthenic, which may be poisonous to the nervous system or cause brain damage. Any part of those 11 ingredients make up 99 percent of the fluid, the document stated.

The presence of these two hydrocarbons prompted John Anderson, senior engineering geologist for the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board (WQCB), to request EDCO do an additional cleanup and test the soil and water for contamination levels in a May 2007 letter.

Anderson cited the 1989 document and unpublished studies of paraffinic by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and American Petroleum Institute, as having the ability to cause “dermal sensitization, chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity” or the ability to cause cancer, in the letter.

A profile of petroleum hydrocarbons by the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control said some compounds can affect the central nervous system, skin and eyes as well as the “blood, immune system, liver, spleen, kidneys, developing fetuses and lungs.”

The WQCB was exclusively concerned with potential water contamination, Anderson said in a fall 2008 deposition, and expressed concern for a well on the Goodwins’ property that reportedly goes 10-feet deep, and the neighbor’s well that goes 3-feet deep.

No samples of the soil were requested from EDCO and no visits were made by WQCB officials to the Goodwin residence.

Anderson declined to be interviewed for the story because of continuing legal action. According to the deposition, he took on the case as a courtesy to the Goodwins.

“It was never really an official case, to be quite honest about it,” Anderson said. Instead, it was “kind of a follow-up to a complaint rather than an ongoing case that needed to be solved.”

The cleanup was requested, not demanded, because that would be “an ultraconservative approach to dealing with the matter,” Anderson said. “I didn’t think it was necessary. But as a good neighbor policy for dealing with the issue at hand, it would be, perhaps, going the extra mile to remove these soils.”

Though the initial letter claimed parts of the soil to be potentially cancerous or damaging to the nervous system or the brain, the recommended cleanup was revoked a year later by WQCB executive officer John Robertus only two days before a trial was set to begin, stating the agency was no longer concerned with water contamination.

“The ‘no further action’ letter does not address the issue of whether the property represents a danger of toxic exposure to humans,” Robertus’ letter said. “The Regional Board’s investigation in this matter focused solely on the potential for significant impacts to water quality.”

Soil samples taken in September 2008 had similar findings to tests done a year prior by Bryant Geoenvironmental, according to Plummer, which initially motivated the WQCB to request more cleanup.

A third soil analysis was done in November 2008 by mortgage owner Deutsche Bank, also a party to the lawsuit, since the Goodwins, adamant to move, stopped paying their mortgage.

Anderson and the WQCB were made party to a lawsuit the Goodwins filed against EDCO, but were declared immune and dismissed from case in August 2009 by a North County court, since neither the government nor its employees can be considered liable for statements made in connection to pending investigations.

Blayne Hartman visited the Goodwin home, walked the property with Hope Goodwin and conducted a soil sample analysis at her request in September 2008. Hartman is a nationally-recognized expert in soil sampling who has provided training to county and state agencies in more than 30 states and was co-founder and principal geochemist for H&P Mobile Geochemistry before starting his own firm.

“The aerial extent of the claimed contamination was minimal,” he said, adding that he didn’t find a risk to human health and called trying to prove an impact to the Goodwins’ health “a long shot.” It can’t be definitively concluded that high hydrocarbon levels found in tests were from the amount of organic matter in the pesticide-free soil or from hydraulic fluid.

The key to both analyses, he said, is that no volatile organic compounds or VOC’s were detected.

“The VOCs are the compounds that are a risk to human health, not the TRPH” or total recoverable petroleum hydrocarbons, he said. “The only way TRPH might be a health risk is if you ate the soil.”

Dr. Harper has a different view.

“There is no way they are able to recover as long as they are on that land,” he said.

A summary judgment in the case is in the works, Plummer said, where EDCO would pay Deutsche Bank the necessary amount to finish cleanups and Goodwin would be able to move out after being paid for lost equity.

Khari Johnson is an SDNN contributing writer.

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