Homeowner tells jury perchlorate disrupted family’s daily life
and damaged home value
San Jose – The discovery of perchlorate in South County groundwater ruined the home life of a family that used to raise crops and breed horses on their San Martin land, a woman told a federal jury Thursday.
“It created a complete disruption of our daily life and threw off the balance of our family,” Teresa Pereira testified. “It’s a complete catastrophe.”
One of four San Martin homeowners suing the Olin Corp. for damaging property values and wrecking their rural lifestyles, Pereira also testified that learning she had been giving her daughter polluted water has caused her considerable psychological distress.
“Even though I know it’s not my fault, I feel like a bad mother,” she said. “I know rationally in my head that it’s not my fault, but as a mother I put it in a glass and gave it to my daughter.”
Pereira lives on five acres with her husband, Antonio, and two daughters, one of whom was born a few months after the perchlorate was found to have drifted in a 9.5-mile plume to the east and south of Olin’s former road flare factory in southern Morgan Hill.
Pereira testified that she was not able to breast feed her daughter and that her family has suffered the loss of their land’s agriculture uses. They no longer eat the fruit that grows on the property or board horses. Pereira’s older daughter, now 13, can no longer earn money selling the eggs hatched by the family’s chickens.
In his cross examination, Olin attorney Tom Carney repeatedly questioned Pereira’s failure to investigate treatment systems shown to remove perchlorate and suggested that she had no good reason for not allowing Olin to install a proven well-head treatment system on her property.
Carney, with the St. Louis firm of Husch and Eppenberger, also presented a series of financial documents showing that the value of the Pereira home has more than doubled since they purchased it for $410,000 in 1998. Earlier this year, it was appraised for $990,000.
Pereira attributed the steep increase to improvements that cost the family $160,000, including an apartment, office space, a machine shop and a 14-stall horse stable. She gave little ground during the nearly two-hour cross examination, but was impeached several times with statements she gave during two videotaped depositions before the trial.
When Pereira told Carney she was unmoved when she heard about an inexpensive reverse osmosis treatment system that could be installed under her kitchen sink, Carney played for the jury a clip of Pereira calling such a system, which does exist, to be “too extremely unbelievably good to be true.”
Pereira was composed throughout her five hours of testimony but grew visibly weary, often removing her glasses to rub her eyes and temples. She often looked sheepish when Carney played a clip of her contradicting answers she gave from the witness stand, and by the end of his examination, she was crying.
“I tried to be calm, but he kept asking me questions about my personal finances that have nothing to do with what happened to my water,” Pereira said when court recessed for the day. “This entire thing is frustrating, that I have to be here when Olin ruined my water. It doesn’t seem fair. They killed my water.”
Pereira currently receives bottled water from Olin. The most recent test of her well showed perchlorate concentration of more than 11 parts per billion, or almost twice the state’s public health goal for the contaminant, which has been shown to inhibit thyroid function. Her three co-plaintiffs all have wells that test below the health goal. In the interview, she said she doesn’t trust the efficacy of the sink and well-head systems.
“What if I find one day it’s not working and it hasn’t been working for two months,” she said. “I think Olin has a lot of good ideas, but they’re all still in the testing phase.”
The reverse osmosis system has been certified by the California Department of Health Services, as have larger versions of the ion-exchange systems Olin has installed on other private wells in San Martin. The company will continue to provide bottled water to the users of those wells until the devices receive certification, a process that has hit bureaucratic snags.
Pereira’s attorney, Colin Pearce, of San Francisco’s Duane Morris, said certification won’t solve his clients’ problems.
“Whether or not it has been certified is not the same as whether it works and what the people in this case are trying to do, which is get compensation for what Olin did to the water,” Pearce said. “Certification is not the same as giving people state of mind.”
The trial, which is being heard in the San Jose courtroom of Federal Judge Ronald M. Whyte, will continue Monday, July 25, with more testimony from Pereira and two other San Martin homeowners, Bob Wess and Cindy Dalla.
Pearce and his co-counsel represent about 120 plaintiffs who are awaiting the outcome of this “bellwether” case. An additional 160 residents who have sued Olin through another law firm are on the verge of settling their claims.
Attorneys expect this case, Palmisano v. Olin, to last about a month.
