Dozens of residents in the landmark Serrano development of El Dorado Hills are lining up against a proposal to build 135 homes on a ridge that bears a particularly toxic form of asbestos.
The united front represents the first organized opposition to construction in Sierra foothills asbestos deposits, after 10 years of public health warnings.
Carving roads, utility trenches and building pads into Oak Ridge is bound to release breathable asbestos fibers into the air, potentially contaminating neighborhoods and schools downwind, according to geologists and environmental health experts who have studied the area.
Some of the digging would take place just over residents' back fences and near sports fields at Oak Ridge High School, which takes its name from the proposed housing site.
The main public health concern is mesothelioma, an inoperable and almost always fatal cancer of the membranes lining the chest and other body cavities. Breathing the type of asbestos commonly found around Oak Ridge can be enough to trigger the disease, though it typically takes 20 to 30 years for the cancer to take hold, according to several health studies.
Children are especially at risk because of their long life expectancy.
Nadine Lauren, a leader of the opposition group, counts 23 children among her dozen closest neighbors on Meadow Wood Drive.
"My concern is 100 percent about health risk, most importantly to my kids," said Lauren, who helped enlist many of the 70-plus Serrano residents in the group, Block Asbestos Ridge Development.
Controls have worked
Many Serrano residents find their gated, oak-shaded "villages" much safer and saner than congested cities they left downhill in the Bay Area and Sacramento County. And the creator of this suburban refuge – Parker Development Co. – insists it will stay that way.
El Dorado County's asbestos dust controls have already proved adequate on construction sites elsewhere in Serrano, and they will work just as well on Oak Ridge, said Kirk Bone, the company's director of governmental affairs.
"We are confident that the regulatory framework works to protect the public," Bone said.
Several California communities are laced with asbestos veins. The fibrous minerals, best known for their decades of use as a fire retardant, are commonly found near earthquake faults in foothills of the Coast Range, the Klamath Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.
While other areas may contain more asbestos, none has drawn more attention from health experts and regulators than El Dorado Hills, a bedroom community of 43,000.
"We are not aware of any other place in the state where you have this convergence of rapid development and large-scale disturbance of tremolite-bearing terrain," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Dan Meer told The Bee in 2005, following a study he supervised of the community's busiest recreational park.
EPA testing showed everyday activities – playing baseball or riding a bike – kick up a particularly toxic kind of asbestos fibers called amphibole, specifically its tremolite and actinolite varieties.
A more potent asbestos
Most lung disease experts consider amphibole asbestos at least 100 times more potent than the more prevalent commercially used chrysotile fibers in causing mesothelioma.
EPA testing was one of several government and university studies stemming from a 1998 Sacramento Bee investigation of asbestos in western El Dorado County.
The reports spurred California to ban the sale of serpentine road gravel, which often contains asbestos, and prompted the first nationwide mapping of asbestos outcrops as potential cancer hazards. The state subsequently imposed special dust controls on construction and mining in areas likely to contain the minerals.
Local planning departments also added asbestos to their screening of proposed developments, and real estate agents began disclosing the potential hazard.
Development in asbestos zones has continued with little opposition from local residents.
By Chris Bowman
cbowman@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
