Marilyn Gray Wintersteen admitted she didn’t think much about what growers were spraying on the lily fields in her neighborhood until last year when it hit her in the face.
Wintersteen was planting flowers in her backyard on Ocean View Drive when she got a face full of spray from the adjacent lily field.
“My skin burned, my eyes burned, my tongue swelled up, I had blisters on it [and] I ended up in the ER,” she said. “I got from the back of my house where they were spraying around to the front of my house and bent over to catch my breath. I could not breathe.”
Wintersteen, a 35 year resident, told her story to the North Coast Water Quality Control Board at a town hall meeting at the Smith River United Methodist Church on Monday and to the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
Both meetings, and a third at the United Methodist Church in Crescent City, focused on the Water Quality Control Board’s efforts to develop water quality regulations for Easter lily bulb production in the Smith River plain. Those regulations will be in an order monitoring and mitigating the impacts of copper diuron and other pesticides and fertilizers on the watershed aquatic ecosystem.
But Wintersteen and other residents focused on the impact those substances have had on themselves and their loved ones. They complained of skin rashes, nausea, respiratory issues and friends and neighbors battling cancer.
One man said a friend had brought his bee hives from Gasquet to their property in Smith River and one January morning he awoke to find the ground riddled with dead bees.
Two people name-dropped Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist who built a case against Pacific Gas and Electric over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California.
On Tuesday, after about an hour of testimony, District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey asked County Agricultural Commissioner Justin Riggs to bring information back to her and her colleagues about the alleged contamination. Though she thanked Water Board scientists for their presentation, Starkey said she wanted to make sure residents are safe.
“It’s deeply disturbing to hear that we tell people they can’t plant food within 30 feet of this area. That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Starkey said, repeating a statement one of the residents made. “I appreciate the Water Board’s presentation and that has to take its course, but it sounds like this opened up more issues that I was not aware of that I’d like to be able to address sooner rather than later.”
On Monday, Wintersteen and her neighbors demanded Water Board staff do something about the pesticides both in their water and in the air — concerns those scientists were largely unable to address. Instead, they pointed residents to Riggs, the county agricultural commissioner who’s tasked with ensuring that pesticides are used correctly. Water Board Engineering Geologist Brenna Sullivan said her agency will also work collaboratively with the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, which regulates the sale and use of pesticides.
“One of the things we have heard loud and clear is frustration about why do I have to go to three different places to get a problem solved,” Sullivan told residents, adding that they want to work with the Department of Pesticide Regulation to help develop water quality regulations. “We’re all part of the California [Environmental Protection Agency] and we should work together to address those concerns and not have people call multiple agencies.”
Current efforts to develop water quality regulations in the Smith River area date back to the mid 2010s, Sullivan said. The agency formed a stakeholder group and conducted a monitoring study between 2013 and 2017. The results, released in 2018, showed copper diuron at levels toxic to aquatic life downstream of lily bulb operations, Sullivan said.
Sullivan was careful to state that the copper diuron was not at levels toxic to human health.
As a result of that monitoring study, the Water Board developed a water quality management plan, which included a stewardship team. This voluntary team included representatives of the lily bulb industry, the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation, Smith River Alliance and state and federal agencies, Sullivan said.
That water quality management plan was a precursor to the order now in development, which is being called the Smith River Lily Bulb Order. Once it’s implemented, the order will include management practices, requirements to monitor the water quality and thresholds that will require growers to address if they’re exceeded, Sullivan said.
“In early 2024, we started contacting folks who may be interested in joining a technical advisory group for the order,” she told residents in Smith River on Monday. “We convened that group in August and we decided to have this community meeting up here early on in the process to inform you what the plan was and what it was looking at.”
Over the next year, Water Board staff will work with the technical advisory group on the Lily Bulb Order. It will complete a draft environmental impact report and release it to the public in early 2026. The Lily Bulb Order will then go through revisions before going back to the Water Quality Control Board in fall 2026, Sullivan said.
The public will have multiple chances to provide input, starting with Tuesday evening’s scoping meeting, which focused on the potential environmental and economic impacts the Lily Bulb Order will have in the region.
“The purpose of the meeting is to scope the environmental impact water quality regulations will have — it’s the environmental impact of the order itself,” Sullivan said. “It’s the environmental impact of what we’re going to require in our order.”
She urged people to email any comments they might have on the potential impact of the regulations to NorthCoast@waterboards.ca.gov by Nov. 24.
At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Sullivan said growers have already begun taking steps to mitigate the impact pesticide and fertilizer use has on the watershed by creating some vegetative buffers between their fields and waterways.. One question she said Water Board scientists have is whether those buffers are wide enough.
As they continue working on the Lily Bulb Order, scientists will continue to monitor the creeks and streams in the Smith River plain as well as the groundwater, Sullivan said. She said they will also test residential wells for nitrates and pesticides.
When District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard asked if the lily bulb growers’ voluntary mitigation efforts have made a difference, Sullivan said she couldn’t say yet.
“A couple of years ago we initiated a water quality monitoring program to develop inputs into a copper toxicity model,” she said. “That monitoring effort concluded this fall and we’re very much in the process of analyzing those data and compiling it into a report. It’s our intention to have that available before a draft [of the order] is released so we can begin answering those questions.”
Greg King, executive director for the Siskiyou Land Conservancy, invited supervisors to view a 40-year retrospective report on “pesticide inundation and poisoning” in Smith River. He pointed out that he appeared before the Board of Supervisors in 2015 after findings showed pesticides at levels toxic to the invertebrate salmonids feed on.
King also mentioned a 2016 health assessment that garnered a 17 percent response from Smith River residents.
Though the assessment’s executive summary states that its findings “cannot directly link specific health conditions of Smith River residents to pesticide exposures,” King on Tuesday said the respondents complained of chronic coughs, infections, skin rashes, headaches, digestive problems and urinary problems that occurred after they moved to Smith River.
“I would like to be able to present to the Board,” King told supervisors, directing them to his organization’s YouTube Channel to view a presentation he gave on Easter lilies in 2015. “We’ve been doing this work for 20 years, 23 years myself.”
Fisheries biologist Carl Page, who operates Smith River Kayaks, accused the Water Quality Control Board of kicking the can down the road for 20 years. He argued that scientists should be testing the water quality after the season’s first rains when concentrations of copper, sodium and a “litany of other cocktails” are at their greatest. He also called for an independent consultant to monitor the water quality to give people results they can trust.
The first significant rain event of the season can result in higher concentrations of pesticides being washed into a watershed, Page said.
“I would have been out there at midnight last night on all these tributaries sampling every hour,” he said Monday. “Because the first flush is lethal.”
Though they were present, none of the lily bulb growers spoke at the Smith River meeting Monday. But the following day, Becky Crockett told supervisors she was presenting the three lily bulb growers that are left and wanted to offer a bit of history.
According to Crockett, 600 growers produced Easter lily bulbs in Del Norte and Curry counties in the 1940s. Back then, lily bulb production occurred primarily in Curry County and didn’t spread into Del Norte until the late 1970s and early 1980s, she said.
“When the water quality information came forward that instigated the Water Quality Control Board to say, ‘OK, we want to look at this more seriously and develop guidelines and, ultimately, an order,’ there were seven growers at the time and about 2,000 acres of production in Del Norte County,” Crockett said. “However, I want to make it clear that historically lily growers were in Curry County, so this question of long-term contamination of the soil doesn’t apply as much in Del Norte County as it probably should be addressed, if it’s an issue, in Curry County.”
Today there are three lily bulb producers who farm fewer than 200 acres, Crockett said.
“Does that warrant this big effort?” She asked. “And in 2026, the question that’s going to be out there [will be] are any growers [left]?”
For one Smith River resident, the irony of holding a community meeting focusing on pesticides in the Easter lily bulb industry in a church wasn’t lost on her. On Tuesday, she told supervisors about seeing her cousin’s 1-year-old baby who has a skin condition on her face right after Monday’s meeting.
This cousin has the same skin condition as does her mother and two other cousins living on the same street in tribal housing on land that was once a lily bulb field, the speaker told supervisors.
The health issues her neighbors are experiencing and the maladies people described at Monday’s town hall meeting makes her think that no further research is necessary.
“It’s not even just the native people they’re still trying to genocide out with these pesticides. They’re actually hitting people in different classes now — the whole community,” she said. “The way I see it is we have all this evidence that things are going on and people are hurting and non-human kin and the land is hurting, the waters are hurting, the air is hurting.”
