Efforts to hold chemical giants accountable have been hampered by state regulators’ failure to map the full extent of contamination, leaving the true scope of cleanup needs unknown.
By Gregory Weaver, Fresnoland
The San Joaquin Valley has reached a dead end in its fight to clean up a toxic contaminant from its drinking water, with residents now facing the prospect of footing the bill for a mess created by Shell and Dow products.
Fresnoland reviewed internal Shell and Dow memos, court records, and state documents and interviewed key officials to uncover a decades-long environmental crisis enabled by both corporate greed and bureaucratic neglect.
The documents show how the companies’ products contaminated nearly 20% of San Joaquin Valley drinking water with a substance the EPA rates as toxic as Agent Orange’s deadliest dioxin. The companies sold pesticides laced with 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP), a manufacturing waste from gunpowder and plastics production. Shell marketed the farming products as pure – a scheme that saved them millions in disposal costs. Over 25 years since discovering the contamination, state water officials have failed to even map how far and deep the cancer-causing chemical had spread into the Valley’s aquifers.
This summer, the City of Fresno trumpeted what seemed like a victory over this toxic past: a record-breaking $233 million settlement with Shell and Dow over TCP-contaminated drinking water – the largest of its kind in U.S. history. Shell and Dow admitted no wrongdoing in the Fresno settlement.
But scratch the surface, and a darker truth emerges — the money will vanish in less than a decade, covering filtration costs for roughly eight years, according to interviews with city of Fresno officials Georgeanne White and Brock Buche. Once the settlement funds run dry, Fresno residents will be left to shoulder any remaining pollution cleanup, at a cost of millions each year.
The city’s hollow victory points to a fundamental failure of state oversight. A quarter century after discovering widespread TCP contamination in California’s agricultural heartland, state water officials still can’t answer a basic question: Just how far and deep has this cancer-causing chemical spread into the aquifers?
Neither the Department of Water Resources nor the state water board has mapped the full extent of TCP contamination that threatens drinking water for more than 8 million people across California.
“Data gaps do exist where TCP characterization remains unknown,” said Blair Robertson, a state spokesperson, about the chemical’s underground contamination plumes.
This regulatory blind spot has forced local water agencies to wage a desperate legal battle against two of the world’s most powerful corporations, often with little more than educated guesses about the true scope of the contamination they’re fighting.
“It’s unknown how long that will take,” Buche, the city’s public utilities director, said of a true cleanup effort. “I’d be optimistic that we can remove most of it out of the aquifer by [the time the settlement money runs out], but only time will tell.”
Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer declined to comment on the settlement.
The settlement and the cleanup
Of Fresno’s seemingly impressive $233 million settlement, $46 million will be spent on legal fees, and another $144 million on startup costs, city officials estimated. Only $42 million remains to start filtering Fresno’s polluted aquifer.
Often, the TCP lawsuits filed over the last two decades have resulted in inconsistent lump sum settlements which don’t result in completely cleaning up the water, according to the state water board spokesperson Blair Robertson.
Bakersfield, for instance, has roughly the same number of contaminated wells as Fresno but reached a settlement with Dow for just one-third of the amount, $81 million, according to city of Bakersfield spokesperson Joe Conroy.
“We are aware of the settlements with individual water systems and that those settlements are not sufficient to provide a long-term solution in most, if not all, instances,” said Blair Robertson, a SWB spokesperson, in a statement.
More needs to be done to ensure that Shell and Dow – and not residents – pay for the costs of clean up, Robertson added, but was unclear about where they planned to go next.
“We are investigating/researching if there is a way to hold manufacturers such as Shell and Dow responsible for impacts in California.”
While residents face an uncertain future, one group has profited handsomely from the Valley’s water crisis: private attorneys. Law firms have collected up to 40% of each settlement, according to city officials across the Valley involved in lawsuits with Shell and Dow, amassing potentially hundreds of millions in fees from the billion-dollar battle.
With inadequate settlements and no coordinated state strategy to force Shell and Dow to fund a permanent solution, San Joaquin Valley residents have been left to grapple with the toxic legacy of industrial farming, according to a recent CalMatters report — and the bill that comes with it.
TCP had no agricultural use, according to internal company memos revealed in court records, but both companies withheld information about the presence of TCP from farmers who were using their products.
Adam Romero, a University of Washington historian who has written a 2022 book from University of California about the Shell fumigant, said that the waste originated from a revolutionary manufacturing line Shell scientists invented in the 1930s. By the mid-1950s, the company possessed the ability to eliminate the carcinogenic impurity from their products, Romero added.
However, Shell kept TCP in their products for decades. A 1983 Shell memo from court records reveals that 30% of the value of the farmer’s product stemmed from circumventing disposal costs of the toxic chemicals from other products.
By the 1970s, Shell forecasted it would ship 40,000 tons of their TCP-containing fumigant worldwide. The San Joaquin Valley, California’s stronghold of industrial agriculture, relied heavily on Shell and Dow’s products and has emerged as the state’s epicenter of TCP contamination.
“It’s horrible. It’s not something that has been exposed as it should have been,” said Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board and ex-EPA Western Chief. “It’s so cold.”
Dow did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Shell did not answer a list of questions about information contained in company memos. A company spokesperson said one of Shell’s top motivations is being a good steward of the land.
“Shell remains committed to delivering energy responsibly and safely, with the priority of protecting people and respecting the environment,” said Shell spokesperson Natalie Gunnell in an emailed statement.
A permanent clean-up of TCP in local aquifers would take years of more intense efforts, EPA documents from Southern California show. The federal government, armed with powerful Superfund law, has yet to intervene in the San Joaquin Valley on the TCP issue.
When Lockheed Martin poisoned Los Angeles groundwater with TCP in the 1980s, the EPA wielded its powerful Superfund authority, forcing the aerospace giant to purify the entire aquifer. Today, that water runs clean, according to data shared by the EPA.
But 200 miles north, the EPA remains absent in the San Joaquin Valley. No one has ever asked the federal agency to investigate the Valley’s TCP crisis as a Superfund issue, according to EPA spokesperson Michael Brogan.
That Shell and Dow had disposed of industrial waste by selling it to unsuspecting farmers left Keith Takata, a former EPA Superfund chief, stunned.
“If somebody is saying that they had chemicals that they needed to dispose of, and the way they did it was put it in products? If true, it would be quite horrible,” Takata said.
How oil companies and industrial farmers united
But before Shell’s product created a water crisis, the oil company had a revolution on their hands. In the 1940s, the San Joaquin Valley was a testing ground for new chemicals being made by Shell.
During World War II, the US needed explosives and gunpowder. Shell had found a way to make it out of Kern County crude oil. In a state-of-the-art facility near San Francisco, Shell scientists discovered they could manufacture these products using a groundbreaking new chemical reaction dubbed the substitution reaction.
It allowed highly reactive elements called halogens to bond with the carbon molecules in the crude oil, enabling Shell to create an unprecedented amount of new compounds from each drop of oil gushing from the derricks out of Kern.
According to Adam Romero, the historian, the discovery would prove as momentous for the oil industry as the Trinity nuclear test was for the military. The discovery of the reaction split two of the world’s top oil companies into separate markets – Shell leveraged their reaction to turn its leftover oil and gas into plastic products, while Standard Oil went into household heating supplies, according to Romero.
“It allows these short carbon chains to attach together and form new circular molecules. It’s such a foundational thing in organic chemistry,” Romero said of the impact of Shell’s discovery. “It opens up the petrochemical age.”
It was a classic California story: from textbook to lab to global impact. Kern County crude, shipped via pipelines to cutting-edge facilities in Martinez, was cracked, processed, and refined using revolutionary techniques pioneered by Shell’s Emeryville R&D unit. In perfect synchrony, three California geographies transformed the state’s energy and infrastructure into a dizzying array of products – pesticides and pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and plastics, imitation leather and all-weather gear.
But this petrochemical alchemy came with a spillover cost. Each turn of Shell’s profit-making engine, Romero documents in his recent book, was digging the company into an ever-deeper hole of junk – novel waste compounds with unknown dangers.
Desperate for a quick fix, Shell stumbled upon an opportunity in 1939. Walter Carter was a scientist in Hawaii hell-bent on eradicating nematode parasites which were plaguing cash crops of all sorts of colonial companies. Bankrolled by agricultural giants Dole and Del Monte, Carter was experimenting with any poison he could procure – and asked Shell for some of theirs.
Stationed in the fertile highland valley of Oahu, Carter’s unit had failed to find a solution to the nematodes throughout the 1930s, trying everything from coal tar to cyanide. When a shipment of 55-gallon drums arrived from Shell’s Emeryville lab, Carter found his miracle cure. Shell’s inky sludge, a witch’s brew of dichloropropenes (DD), annihilated the microscopic worms with unprecedented efficacy, he found.
“Fumes shot out in a circle, killing every worm they reached,” Carter marveled in his notes about his first DD experiments. Follow-up experiments over the next two years were miraculous – plots of land treated with DD yielded almost triple the pineapples.
For Shell, DD was a masterstroke of corporate synergy — transmuting the unwanted byproducts of one arm of its empire into a blockbuster commodity for another. Carter’s discovery not only rescued Hawaii’s pineapple industry, but created a powerful new weapon in the arsenal of industrial agriculture, Romero said, enabling struggling monocrop plantations to flourish once again across the globe.
“It created the blank slate that industrial farmers were after,” Romero said. “It’s the first time you could kill everything underground and reset your fields every year.”
California, with its WWII trifecta of war industries, oil extraction, and intensive farming, was poised to capitalize on this breakthrough. The sandy soils of the San Joaquin Valley, weakened by relentless cultivation and teeming with nematodes, proved the perfect testing ground for Shell’s new wonder drug, swiftly branded as DD.
Before Carter’s experimental results even went public, according to Romero, Shell set up its first DD labs with UC Davis in a Modesto bean field. In the spring of 1943, scientists with Shell and UC Davis hand-injected DD for the first time in the mainland US.
Farmers unknowingly spread Shell’s waste
Initial photos taken by the scientists proved that, indeed, Shell’s new chemical was performing miracles. Before and after photos of infected bean rootstocks showed that Shell’s product had scrubbed off everything but the plant’s nutrient-absorbing dermal tissues.
In especially diseased soils near Ventura, one sweet potato farmer who used DD reported that his crop yield increased by more than 1000%, according to Romero. Soon, DD spread across California.
The first sign of trouble emerged a few years later.
In 1952, a grower out of Rhodesia, South Africa wrote that his tobacco crop was stinky after injecting DD. He found that a chemical known as TCP was also in the product, an “impurity,” he described.
At first, Shell likely lacked the technology to remove TCP from its pesticides, Romero said. But by the early 1950s, the company had the ability to strip out the carcinogenic chemical.
“In the early days, they couldn’t separate them all very well,” he said. “But by the mid-1950s, Shell could remove TCP on a pretty good basis.”
In a 1949 internal communication, Shell said it preferred “not to list all the ingredients” in order to “retain the definite sales advantage of a 100 percent active ingredient claim,” according to the the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington DC-based non-profit. Even with the relatively weak federal pesticide regulations at the time, there were federal laws against false claims on pesticide labels.
By 1974, a Dow scientist predicted EPA would require removing TCP, calling it “garbage” with no agricultural use.
Keeping TCP in its fumigants was a financial boon for Shell. In a 1983 memo, the company acknowledged the practice allowed it to sidestep the expense of properly disposing of the toxic waste from other products.
Despite the risks, the chemical companies kept TCP in their fumigant products for decades. Shell proposed in the 1970s to start a research program to study the health effects of TCP, according to a memo. They never followed up, said Todd Robins, an attorney who has litigated Shell and Dow several times, in a KVPR interview this August.
DD and Telone, Dow Chemical’s competitor product, ended up becoming the second-most used pesticide in California.
Valley’s toxic water remains unmapped
It took California regulators decades to catch on that something was amiss.
In 1980, nearly 40 years after contaminated DD was being applied across California, the EPA started investigating a former Lockheed Martin factory. In the shadow of deindustrialized Los Angeles, a 13-square-mile plume of groundwater beneath the company’s abandoned aerospace plant was found to be laced with industrial chemicals, including TCP.
An investigation revealed that during the wartime boom, Lockheed had, like Shell, engineered itself into a waste disposal problem. The aerospace company had stored their industrial wastes in underground storage tanks which leaked chemicals, including TCP. Other toxic chemicals the company injected directly into the aquifer, a court-appointed water expert later found.
Fifteen percent of Los Angeles’ and Burbank’s water supply was impacted. Six years later, the EPA established the area as a Superfund site in 1986, requiring Lockheed to build a mammoth clean-up facility and meet specific water quality goals. The program was so successful, water from the aquifer near North Hollywood is clean to drink today, according to EPA data.
In the wake of the Lockheed case, state officials grew alarmed about TCP. Their testing in the 1990s and 2000s revealed a far more extensive problem, concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley.
But no cavalry arrived for the San Joaquin Valley like in Hollywood. Since discovering the problem over 25 years ago, state and federal regulators never mapped the full extent of the San Joaquin Valley’s TCP plumes, according to Blair Robertson at state water board, critical to determining the true cleanup costs.
This dearth of data undercut efforts by over 100 Valley communities to hold Shell and Dow accountable in court. Without a complete picture of the contamination, the communities couldn’t quantify the funds needed to fully decontaminate their aquifers.
To initiate a full plume study across the state, said state spokesperson Robertson, the state water board would need to direct DWR to investigate the issue.
More risks loom. Ambitious groundwater recharge projects, which will flood vast swaths of land with surface water, could inadvertently spread the TCP contamination, since the shape and extent of these underground toxic plumes remain unmapped.
The current evaluation of these recharge projects only considers “known groundwater contamination plumes,” DWR said.
But one agency has been starkly absent – the most powerful actor in all of this: the EPA.
Rural water crisis lacks federal champion
While companies like Lockheed Martin have faced accountability for improperly disposing of industrial chemicals in Los Angeles, Shell and Dow have faced fewer consequences for products that contaminated a rural region.
It’s a familiar pattern, data shows. California’s Superfund sites are concentrated in populous coastal regions. Nearly a third are in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties alone.
Felicia Marcus, the former EPA Western Chief under the Clinton administration, believes the Valley’s TCP crisis could qualify for Superfund intervention.
“Why would it be protected?” Marcus said about the chemical.
According to Brogan, the EPA spokesperson, the federal agency only shields pesticide makers from Superfund liability for “lawful application of registered pesticides in ways that are consistent with the pesticide’s purpose.”
In the case of TCP, the chemical was not a registered pesticide and had no agricultural use.
Marcus believes that if the San Joaquin Valley can secure Superfund designation, it would gain access to powerful tools not available at the state level, such as the ability to collect triple the amount of damages from polluters. “The government doesn’t have to prove as much. They have to prove that you touched it, but they don’t have to be tied up in a massive evidentiary thing,” she said.
“In this case, it’s pretty clear where the TCP contamination came from.”