ILL EFFECTS: the Hayes-Sammons site is clean, but its stain lingers in the many lives it changed

MISSION - In 1950, local hardware store owner Thomas B. Sammons and his son decided to embark on a new business, mixing pesticides for the local farmers who were the store's best customers.

Sammons - the scion of a pioneer family who had started his first company with the help of a wealthy friend, Florence Hayes - found a cheap old warehouse in south Mission and hired local guys during growing season to mix the wholesale, undiluted chemicals he bought. Other warehouses where he'd once kept his hardware inventory now housed leaking barrels along the railroad tracks to the east of the plant.

Hayes-Sammons' five-gallon cans of DDT, Dynatox and Endrin, and other bug-killing concoctions for cotton and melon farmers were proudly labeled with the name of their hometown: Mission Brand Chemicals.

The company was part of the community. Even as it grew, managers handed out coloring books to the children riding by on bikes, and the Hayes-Sammons softball team had the best uniforms in the city league.

It's unlikely Sammons would be proud of his legacy in Mission now, though - 58 years later.

The mostly Mexican men who worked there mixed now-banned toxins without the protection of masks or gloves, according to former workers. Every day, they inhaled the pure form of substances designed to kill at only a few parts per million. Liquids leached into the soil and powders were blown or washed into the surrounding streets.

Today, several generations of bodies and lives have been shaped by the decision of a hardware store owner to try a new business.
At the end of this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is set to complete a $6 million cleanup of the mixing plant site on Holland Avenue - the last of three sites in Mission believed to have been contaminated by Hayes-Sammons Chemical and by the companies that came after it.

Efforts to remove contaminated dirt and waste products from the sites have been spread over three decades.

BODIES

It is easy to trace the contamination's effects on south Mission residents' lives in terms of how they see themselves, their community and their government.

But it is much harder to describe, much less prove, the effects of the pesticide chemicals on their bodies and health.

Later this year, plaintiff attorneys plan to use nine experts and sophisticated computer models to try to prove to a jury that resident Guadalupe Garza developed Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma as a result of her exposure.

Her case will be the first of about 1,700.

The list of maladies that may be related to the 24 toxic chemical compounds once used at the plant is extensive. On it are cancer, kidney failure, birth defects, skin lesions and rashes, misshapen limbs and lumps, insulin resistance, tumors, heart disease, cysts, asthma, migraines, miscarriage and infant death.

Some of those profiled in a 2002 Monitor series, Mission's Toxic Legacy, are dead or ill.

Celia Muñoz-Badiozzamani, whose mother owned the clean-up site known as the Muñoz Borrow Pits, died in 2006 of cancer, though Muñoz-Badiozzamani did not attribute the disease to the contamination of her mother's south Mission property.

Alfredo Murillo, a former plant foreman for Hayes-Sammons, lives at the same Edinburg nursing home as his incapacitated daughter, Rosita Gutierrez.

Simon Sandoval Sr. once drove a truck for Helena, the company that took over the mixing plant for several years in the late 1970s. Now 81, he carries a list of the surgeries and hospitalizations in his medical history, starting with a 1965 appendix removal and ending with a defibrillator implant in his heart muscles last year.

Despite his heart disease, he may be healthier than his son, Simon Jr., who is losing the use of his kidneys and has had two abscesses on his head - the most recent on his right cheek - surgically drained. The first, beside his brain, left him with slower speech and a dazed look.

Both men know that illnesses are a risk of living and aging, but both are sure that the chemicals changed their bodies and their neighbors' bodies, killing relatives and friends with impunity.

"Too many of our friends have died," Sandoval Sr. says.

Nodding his head in the direction of the old mixing plant - which is now an empty, fenced lot - Sandoval Jr. says, "Somebody is liable for the these things, these illnesses and deaths going on."

Knowing now that nearly everything he touched as a child may have been contaminated with toxic chemicals, he said, "makes me feel better, in the sense that somebody is responsible for the damages done, instead of just, ‘We don't know what's happening but you're going to have to live with it.'"

Beside him, his cousin Roque Duran nods.

"We can die knowing what killed us," he said.

Minds

Thomas B. Sammons will never know how he shaped the lives, careers and mindsets of people like Duran and Iris Gonzalez.

Sammons' immediate descendants are no longer involved in the family business.

Duran and Gonzalez are just two who have become vocal activists for the Mission community, devoting most or all of their time to the minutiae of chemical contamination and exposing its human effects.

In his McAllen kitchen, Duran, 53 - who grew up in Austin but frequently visited family in Mission - shows his piles of binders. They are filled with reports, handouts, notes and phone numbers. He has stockpiled an archive of meeting minutes and EPA brochures that slide in alongside photo albums and diary entries in his personal papers.

His parents, who grew up in Mission, died of cancer.

He has read and highlighted the largest file, a series of nearly impenetrable expert reports on parts per million and the molecular breakdown of very complex bug sprays.

Most of the more heavily involved plaintiffs in the toxicity lawsuit can, like Duran, toss around names like Toxaphene and BHC like the names of old friends.

Duran has made his cause such a central part of his life it is now his career. He hands out cards for "The Neighborhood Environmental," of which he is the sole employee, acting as a freelance consultant, researcher and public speaker and organizing new movements and lawsuits in other contaminated towns.

Gonzalez also travels, giving presentations on Mission and environmental catastrophes inflicted on minority communities to audiences across the country.

Gonzalez is from San Antonio, but traveled to Mission as a student at the University of Texas-Austin five years ago to collect oral histories from residents after hearing about the area from fellow activist Ester Salinas.

"When you go to a place, and person after person after person after person has cancer, these rare diseases, and can tell you about their kids, their families, their neighbors dying - that was just really overwhelming."

"I went from oral historian to activist," she said. "This changed my life."

She runs a Web site, Mission-Texas.com, where she documents the afflicted residents' stories and posts articles and pictures.
Her thinking on the United States' relationship with Mexican immigrants has sharpened as she's researched the history of chemical contamination in neighborhoods and the treatment of newcomers in the early 20th century.

Today, "I'm a Chicana activist. That is my world," she said.

And like residents of south Mission, she says the problem is far from solved.

"EPA is taking this stance that, ‘Oh, we knocked down the building, it's all done now' - it's not."

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Sara Perkins covers Mission, western Hidalgo County, Starr County and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach her at (956) 683-4472.

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This story contains a revision to clarify that Celia Muñoz-Badiozzamani, an advocate for Mission residents who lived near sites of chemical contamination, did not attribute her fatal cancer to the contamination of her mother's south Mission property.