Activists celebrate 40 years of pesticide safety rules, with work still to do.

Antonio Velasco remembers one day during his medical residency at Natividad Medical Center especially clearly. It was July 10, 1980. As a second-year resident, he had just started supervising the ICU when someone drove up a pickup truck, and left four patients – two of them unconscious, two semi-conscious – outside of the hospital with no explanation.

Fellow resident Charlie Clements recognized some of the same symptoms (weakness, vomiting) he’d seen from nerve gas exposure in the Vietnam War, and the doctors suspected pesticide poisoning, but at the time there was no standard way to test for pesticide exposure or a treatment plan. They administered protopam, which worked to stabilize their patients, but Velasco and Clements were confronted with the reality that they would be released from the hospital and return to the fields and potentially face exposure again. And they learned that these four patients were members of a larger crew, 19 people, but others feared immigration authorities and declined medical care.

“I sensed this urgency to act, but I wasn’t sure what to do,” Velasco recalls of that pivotal day early in his career.

The sense of urgency led Velasco and Clements to develop protocols for blood tests to diagnose pesticide exposure, in what eventually became the standard. They launched a clinic to treat farmworkers, and patients came from as far away as Bakersfield. And they began to show that it was possible to gather medical data showing pesticide exposure – data that became a critical piece of evidence for a young attorney named Bill Monning to pursue litigation against growers and pesticide applicators, holding them accountable for pesticide poisonings.

All of this happened decades ago, but Monning, Clements, Velasco and their former Natividad supervisor, John Midtling, joined others on the evening of Dec. 2 to recount those early days for the Monterey County Pesticide Coalition. They were there to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a milestone in farmworker safety activism – the requirement to post pesticide warning signs in fields – but also to deliver a message to the next generation of activists.

“We’re not finished, that’s our message to you tonight,” Monning said.

Today, it’s easy to take pesticide postings for granted – the signs, warning “Danger/Peligro,” are commonplace. But Clements, Velasco and Midtling saw preventable exposure to pesticides again and again.

“In a lot of cases we found that poisonings were the result of a communication breakdown between applicators and growers,” Midtling said. “It was very clear that if we were going to have an impact to prevent these poisonings, what we needed to do was have a posting regulation.”

Monterey County enacted an emergency field posting ordinance in 1981, leading the way in what has become standard across the industry. But still, mass sickenings continued.

In September of 1982, members of a 32-person crew in a cauliflower field began to experience symptoms of exposure. Among them was Maria Flores, who was in her first trimester of pregnancy. Her daughter, Mariana Flores, was born months later with severe birth defects, and died at 10 days old.

As the medical team gathered data, Monning, then working for California Rural Legal Assistance, used it to build a legal case against the pesticide manufacturer. A settlement for $278,000 represented a massive win for farmworkers at the time.

The progress toward safety regulations built slowly as activists sued manufacturers and growers, and appealed to CalOSHA. Besides warning signs, field reentry guidelines were established. Over the years, some chemicals were banned.

Still, it was not proactively safe. “We were always chasing chemicals after they’d done damage and injury to workers,” Monning said.

Being proactive is activists’ next big goalpost, as they push the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to create a notification system before pesticides are applied. The coalition has evolved into a group called Safe Ag Safe Schools, led in recent years largely by teachers. DPR expects to hold public hearings on a potential notification system in early 2022, and activists from both generations will be watching closely.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/sarahayleyrubin