COLUMN ONE : A Life in Limbo for DDT Nomads : Families that fled their South Bay homes are stuck in a federal relocation program, waiting for a cleanup or buyout to end a year of anxiety.

They come home only rarely now, to fetch the mail or check the locks or rummage through a musty closet in search of summer clothes.

One woman returns to water her rosebushes, which are laden with bulging, sweet-smelling blooms despite the tainted soil. A neighbor visits daily to feed her back-yard chickens, but she throws away the eggs out of fear that someone will eat them.

No one lingers for long. The street has an eerie feel, as if someone has died.

“For me, it’s like going back to a graveyard,” said longtime resident Marla Frame.

More than a year has passed since Frame and her neighbors fled their homes on 204th Street near Torrance, driven away by the discovery of DDT-contaminated soil and reports of more chemicals lurking in two nearby toxic chemical sites.

Today, these 32 families have become environmental nomads, scattered across the South Bay by a federally financed relocation program. They live out of suitcases in hotel rooms or leased houses, uncertain when--or if--they will move back to their neighborhood. They wait: for a cleanup schedule, for test results probing the level of DDT in their blood, for a promise that government or industry will buy their homes and free them for good from the uncertainty of living alongside chemicals.

As the months drag on, frustration festers.

“There’s no stability,” said Frame, 36. “We don’t know where we’re going. It feels like my roots have been torn up.”

Some say that long-running problems with rashes, irritated eyes, headaches and nausea subsided after they left 204th Street. But others worry--despite the lack of any proven correlation--that their bodies may have been invaded by some cancer-causing agent or even rendered infertile. Several residents have sought help for stress and depression.

They have not forgotten how tests last year found DDT in eggs laid by neighborhood chickens, or how more DDT was detected in household dust in their living rooms.

About 150 people have undergone initial testing at an innovative federally funded clinic near Torrance, one of four such centers nationwide established to study possible links between toxic sites and illness. But no easy answers are expected.

In fact, the saga of this neighborhood-in-exile is threaded with the same vexing questions that emerge so often when people live near toxic sites: Is the government overreacting or under-reacting? Are health problems pure coincidence or a telling clue? And how safe is safe?

The relocation is voluntary, but nearly all the eligible families left. Plans call for most or all of them to return to 204th Street in September, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducts a $7-million cleanup of DDT-contaminated fill believed to be present around eight homes. All houses are to be steam-cleaned and tested before families return.

Many residents remain skeptical. They tussle with EPA officials at every community meeting, insisting that they should be relocated permanently. Each time, they get the same answer: Nearly $2 million of tests of soil, indoor air and tap water has failed to find toxic materials at levels high enough to merit a government buyout.

“We would not allow them to return home if we had any questions” about neighborhood safety, EPA spokeswoman Paula Bruin said.

*

When registered nurse Dunia Ponce moved into her neat, gray stucco bungalow in 1991, she thought she had found her house of dreams.

For years, she lived with her mother and worked grueling overtime shifts, finally saving the down payment for the $155,000 house. She spent thousands of dollars installing drywall in the two bedrooms, remodeling the bathroom, constructing a fence, adding furniture piece by piece.

“I did it alone. I did it by myself,” Ponce wistfully recalled. Today, her home is a deceptively well-kept shell, the ruffled curtains hiding bare walls and empty rooms. Ponce left in April, 1994, first for a hotel and then for an apartment in Torrance where the rent is financed by the federal government. But she still must pay the $900 mortgage, utilities, insurance and taxes on the house where she hopes to never live again.

At first glance, this tree-lined street of modest homes looks almost normal. But here and there is a hint of strangeness: weeds growing high in a few yards, a front fence adorned with an EPA Superfund warning sign, a security guard making his rounds on empty sidewalks. An ice cream truck sounds its horn, but there are no children left to run after it.

Until 14 months ago, residents of this unincorporated swath between Torrance and Carson paid little attention to the dingy backdrop of warehouses and power lines, the growl of trucks or strange smells in the night.

Most of them were unaware that their little street lay close to two toxic waste sites--a former DDT manufacturer and a long-gone synthetic rubber factory--that are under close scrutiny by federal officials.

Then routine testing uncovered high levels of DDT in two back yards, where more digging unearthed DDT chunks the size of bowling balls. The once-popular pesticide, banned in 1972 primarily because of its effect on birds’ reproduction, can affect the human nervous system in high doses and is suspected of causing cancer.

Shaken families were relocated to hotels, assured that they could return home in two weeks. But as more DDT surfaced and residents lobbied for protection, the voluntary relocation was extended--first to January, then June, now September.

Most residents have moved to rented homes, but some, such as Cyndi Castro, 27, remain in suites at the Marriott Residence Inn in Torrance. She shuttles her 7-year-old daughter across town to her old school and returns home to pick up supplies for her 6-month-old baby.

“It grows old,” Castro said. “Every day, we’re bringing something new, and taking something back. Clothes. Cribs. Bassinets.”

A neighboring couple preferred to buy all-new clothes after learning that DDT had been detected in dust inside their home. Guillermo Aguirre, 47, said: “We don’t use anything from the house. Anything.”

Hotel life offers amenities uncommon on 204th Street: a swimming pool, an exercise room and regular maid service. Yet there is a blandness to the cookie-cutter suites, and some miss tinkering with household projects. “We haven’t been to Home Depot in years,” one man said. “There’s no home to work on.”

The federal government spent $1.5 million on relocation by the end of February. It also issues families monthly expense checks of $150, but amid procedural problems, most people did not receive checks for five months last winter and spring.

Some residents who live on 204th Street but outside the relocation zone complain that the EPA never offered them the chance to relocate.

“I’ve never been asked, not at all, and that’s really a low blow,” said Rod Draculan, 50, an insurance underwriter who lives in the house he bought five years ago and has since tried--and failed--to sell. An EPA official responds that the agency worked with community leaders to identify homes they believed were at risk. But some activists continue to press for the relocation of more families.

As some attempt to leave, Ronald Hinzo, 65, is the first nomad known to come home.

The gray-haired substitute teacher had been relocated to a sterile Torrance apartment where nothing belonged to him except his clothes and a few books. Feeling alone and adrift, Hinzo returned to his white cottage beside a flowering ginkgo tree.

This is where Hinzo and his wife of 28 years once toiled in the living room, stripping paint from the rich wood wainscoting. It was into this room that Hinzo moved his wife’s hospital bed when she was dying of cancer, angling it so she could see the birds flocking to the feeders outside the window.

Her scrapbooks are here, and her ashes, and the woodwork is still satin smooth when Hinzo runs his hand along it.

“When I got back here, it seemed more settled, more calm,” he said.

*

Until last spring, some people along 204th Street had never met their neighbors. This was a nondescript area, overshadowed by freeways and industrial parks and lacking even a name. Its residents are an amalgam of races and cultures, some working-class, some poor.

The DDT discovery imbued them with a shared identity, a common fear. Today they socialize, not over their back fences, but at the often-rowdy EPA meetings or in the federal clinic’s waiting room. Housewives and gardeners have emerged as leaders, thrust into high-stakes negotiations with EPA officials and congressional aides.

Disagreements flare between homeowners and renters. Irritable residents fight with one another at meetings, much like frustrated siblings. Some, expressing lack of faith in the government, have joined lawsuits against alleged polluters, who in turn question any link between the toxic sites and health problems.

The spirits of some homeowners were bolstered by news in April that Shell Oil Co. and Dow Chemical Co. have agreed to discuss the possibility of buying up some homes as part of treating the so-called Del Amo Pits, the waste pits for the old synthetic rubber factory.

The EPA cautions that any such buyout would be highly unusual. Although short-term relocation is fairly common, permanent relocation has occurred at only 12 federal Superfund sites nationwide, including such notorious dumps as Love Canal, N.Y., and Times Beach, Mo.; it has never been attempted at any federal site in California, according to the agency.

Some renters worry that such a buyout would split the community by benefiting only those who own homes.

But homeowners see a glimmer of hope.

“We don’t want to get rich out of this thing,” Ponce said. “We just want out, to go on with our lives.”

*

For many residents, the specter of chemicals has undermined their faith that life will one day return to normal.

This spring, Ponce, who plans to get married in August, was found to have uterine fibroid tumors, a relatively common problem but still worrisome to a 34-year-old woman who wants to bear children. “You always wonder, is this because I live next to this chemical, or did it make it worse?” she said, “Or would I have had this anyway?”

Uncertainty also haunts Lorena Torres and Veronica Soto, who as children rode their bikes through a bumpy area they nicknamed “Jack Rabbit” because of the rabbits they saw scurrying through the tall grass. Today, the area has a different name--the Del Amo Pits--and is surrounded by wire mesh fences and EPA warning signs.

The women, now 20-year-old optometrist assistants, finally goaded each other into visiting the new federal clinic. Torres suffers from headaches, while Soto has rashes, allergies and breathing problems.

They were examined and quizzed at length by doctors about medical problems, family histories--and even about whether they played in the dirt as children or ate home-grown vegetables. The two will return this week for breathing tests.

This weekly clinic opened in January, part of a federal project that will also include clinics in Augusta, Ga., Columbia, Miss., and Tucson.

UC Irvine is spearheading the local clinic, which focuses on the relocated families as well as current and past residents of a larger area bounded by Del Amo Boulevard, Vermont Avenue, Torrance Boulevard and Western Avenue. But doctors warn that it is far too early to say if residents are suffering from environmentally caused illness, a controversial topic in medical circles.

“We have no idea if we’re going to find it or not. We’re there to look,” said Dr. Constantine J. Gean, UC Irvine assistant clinical professor. “It’s a way to push back the darkness a little.”

Residents’ blood samples are shipped on dry ice to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to be tested for DDT and its related form, DDE.

Doctors have not yet made the findings public, but residents working with the clinic report that only a few tests have shown high DDT or DDE levels.

Studies in the mid-1980s showed that the vast majority of Americans had low but detectable amounts of the pesticide in their blood, Gean said, adding that the health significance of its presence remains unclear.

Among the clinic’s champions is community leader Cynthia Babich, 36, who raised vegetables in a yard where high DDT levels were found. Babich travels daily to 204th Street to feed her chickens and water her plum tree. During a visit last week, her head began pounding so fiercely that she crawled into bed afterward and pulled a pillow over her head.

“It just hurts so bad. You don’t know if it’s the stress, or if you inhaled something,” she said later, her voice thin.

“We have to know what we’ve been exposed to. We have to know what to watch for. We can’t wonder anymore.”

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DDT Exodus

More than a year ago, 33 families left their homes along 204th Street near Torrance after high levels of DDT were found in backyard soil. Today, those families are still in hotels and rented homes while the federal government readies a cleanup plan. Many residents are calling instead for permanent relocation, fearing that chemicals from the nearby Montrose and Del Amo chemical waste sites have contaminated their neighborhood.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Brief History

THE BACKGROUND

* DISCOVERY: The DDT along 204th Street was found almost by accident in early 1994. Federal investigators were actually trying to determine whether heavy metals had spread from the proposed Del Amo Superfund site.

* CLEANUP: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a cleanup plan after high DDT levels were detected in two yards. In 1994, 33 families were relocated; all but one have yet to return. Complete cleanup was delayed by discovery of DDT-laced fill around eight homes. A $7-million excavation is planned this summer.

* SOURCE: The EPA contends that the pesticide came from the Montrose Chemical Corp., which manufactured DDT, and the agency has attempted to make it pay for the cleanup. Attorneys for the chemical company counter that the government lacks proof.

* RESIDENTS: The affected families want permanent relocation, charging that their health is threatened. The EPA, after testing indoor air, dust, tap water and more soil, says that no major chemical threat is present. Its tests did find DDT in household dust inside 25 homes, but its significance is still being measured.

* OTHER: Residents recently appealed to Shell Oil Co. and Dow Chemical Co., which once operated a plant nearby, to buy their homes. As part of the Superfund cleanup, the two companies want to cover the 3.7-acre Del Amo waste pits with a protective layer, which would cost less than excavation.

THE SITES

* MONTROSE: The Montrose Chemical Corp. factory, which operated from 1947 to 1982, was a leading producer of the pesticide DDT. Its 13-acre site has been capped with asphalt. Testing has found DDT in soil on the site and in sewer lines, as well as monochlorobenzene in ground water not used for drinking. Montrose has been blamed for releasing DDT through sewer lines off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, prompting a major federal lawsuit that was dismissed amid controversy in March. Montrose was added in 1989 to the federal Superfund list of 1,200 hazardous waste sites.

* DEL AMO: This site was home to a World War II-era synthetic rubber factory built by the U.S. government. It was operated by Shell Oil Co. and Dow Chemical Co., among others, and later sold to Shell. Most of the site is now an industrial park. Benzene, a carcinogen, has contaminated ground water that is not used for drinking. The entire 280-acre area was nominated as a Superfund site in 1991, and Shell and Dow are investigating cleanup plans.