JUAN TAMAYO

 VIEQUES, Puerto Rico -- From his home on a tiny hillside neighborhood dubbed
 ``Cancer Heights'' because the disease has struck so many of its homes,
 Fernando Robinson recalled the neighbors killed by cancer.

 ``The two old sisters down there, the man next to them, my stepfather up there,''
 the 43-year-old fisherman said as he swept a sun-bronzed arm around the 40 or
 so homes in the neighborhood officially named Lujan.

 Robinson then pointed a block away, to the gates of a U.S. Navy firing range
 closed since two stray bombs from an F-18 jet fighter killed a civilian guard in
 April. ``And that's where it comes from,'' he said with a grim nod.

 Even as the Navy pushes to resume limited bombing, mounting allegations that
 toxic residues from the explosives are causing cancer among residents of the tiny
 island of Vieques may eventually force the range's total closure.

 About 65 Vieques cancer patients and property owners filed a $109 million suit
 against the Navy just last week, charging they had been ``exposed to toxic and
 hazardous substances by the naval and aerial bombardment.

 The cancer rate on Vieques has been reported to be 26 percent higher than that
 of Puerto Rico as a whole. Doctors say islanders also suffer from high rates of
 birth defects, skin diseases, asthma and other respiratory diseases.

 ``In such a small island, with one single factory, the only explanation for these
 horrible things is the range,'' said Dr. Rafael Rivera Castaño, a Tulane-educated
 Vieques epidemiologist who wants the Navy to leave the island.

 The Navy flatly rejects the charge. ``We can't prove a negative, but there's no
 evidence at all linking our activities to any of this,'' Navy spokeswoman Cmdr.
 Karen Jeffries said.

 YEARS OF POUNDING

 A Navy offer to use `dummy' bombs and pay $40 million is turned down

 For 58 years, the Navy has pounded the live-fire range on the eastern third of
 Vieques, the 33,000-acre ``baby island'' eight miles east of Puerto Rico, with
 airplane bombs, ships' cannon and Marine artillery.

 The Navy also owns the western third of Vieques, storing munitions in bunkers
 dug into its hills. About 9,300 civilians live in the middle third of the island.
 Vieques is 21 miles long and four miles at its widest point.

 Navy officials, seeking a compromise to reopen a bombing range the Navy has
 called critical to its war readiness, offered on Dec. 4 to drop only inert ``dummy
 bombs and pay $40 million if they could use the range for five more years.

 But Puerto Rican officials and Vieques residents rejected the deal, complaining
 that the Navy bombings have blocked economic development on the island, which
 has miles of stunning white-sand beaches yet only one luxury hotel and a poverty
 rate one-third higher than Puerto Rico's.

 FACTS ARE ELUSIVE

 Hard data on the bombings' impact on the health of residents is more difficult to
 come by, since neither Puerto Rico's Health Department nor the Navy has
 regularly monitored air, water or soil quality on Vieques.

 It is a failure that critics say shows Puerto Rican government negligence and the
 Navy's autocratic behavior in a U.S. Commonwealth captured by U.S. troops
 during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

 ``The Navy . . . inspected restaurants and brothels to protect their own, but never
 inspected the air or the water to protect others,'' said Gordon Rumore, 57, an
 environmental health specialist with the Pennsylvania Department of Health who
 retired to Vieques last year.

 Rumore triggered the first serious investigation of the controversy when he filed a
 complaint this year with the Atlanta-based U.S. Agency for Toxic Substance and
 Disease Registry.

 ``I was swimming one day in February when the Navy was bombing, and I noticed
 the clouds of earth [sent up by the explosions] were drifting right into civilian
 areas,'' Rumore said.

 ``I looked up the explosives on the federal registry of toxic substances, and they
 were all there,'' he added. ``Just imagine, 50 years of accumulated heavy metals,
 stirred up every time another bomb explodes.''

 POLLUTION ALLEGED

 Islanders contend that over the decades, the bombs and shells from ships'
 cannon have literally flattened entire hills on the range and polluted the air, water
 and soil with toxic residues from the explosives and metal casings.

 Chromium, a metal used in munitions, and RDX, one of the most common military
 explosives, have each been branded a ``possible human carcinogen by the U.S.
 Environmental Protection Agency's toxics department.

 ``It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that this stuff ain't good for you, said
 Ron Jones, a Florida International University professor who studies heavy-metal
 pollution.

 Prevailing winds on Vieques blow from east to west -- from the range to residential
 areas. And the area most directly on the path of the clouds sent up by the Navy
 bombs is Lujan, the hillside neighborhood known as Cancer Heights.

 ``I know my cancer came from the range, said Edwin Menendez, a Lujan resident
 now 20 years old and healthy after undergoing eight rounds of surgery, radiation
 and chemotherapy for testicular and lung cancer.

 Edwin's sisters Alejandra, 5, and Esperanza, 2, suffer from asthma, and his
 mother, Yolanda, found a lump on her right breast two weeks ago. She's waiting
 for an appointment for a checkup on the Puerto Rican mainland.

 TOXIC FORCES PROBED

 A U.S. agency agrees to look for toxic residues from the Navy's bombings

 Investigators of the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry were in
 Vieques last month and officially accepted Rumore's complaint, in effect agreeing
 to study whether the prevailing winds are driving toxic residues from the bombings
 into residential areas.

 The agency is now gathering any available data on air, soil and water quality on
 Vieques and will later ask the EPA and the Puerto Rican government's
 Environmental Protection Board to fill in whatever gaps it finds.

 Rear Adm. Andrew A. Granuzzo, the Navy's top environmental officer, told
 Congress in July that the military would cooperate with the U.S. toxic substance
 agency ``even though there is no reason to believe that Navy actions are involved''
 in the allegedly high incidence of cancer on Vieques.

 But the Navy has not been very cooperative in the past.

 When Puerto Rico's Environmental Protection Board tried to send 12 inspectors
 to take water samples at the range in August, Navy officials rejected one team
 member, a private consultant on munitions, saying he was gathering evidence for
 a possible lawsuit. The visit was canceled.

 NAVY CONFIRMATION

 The Navy only recently confirmed that it had used napalm bombs and accidentally
 fired 267 cannon rounds tipped with depleted uranium on the range. The latter is
 banned from any use on U.S. soil by federal regulations.

 Navy officials said ground-water samples they tested in August were found to be
 free of residues from explosives, but they declined to make the full study public,
 citing the possibility of a lawsuit.

 Wednesday's class-action lawsuit was filed on the same day that two University
 of Georgia marine biologists reported finding large numbers of live or leaky bombs
 on the ocean floor off the Navy range, as well as two wrecked ships carrying
 1,000 to 1,300 drums containing unidentified chemicals.

 Officials of the Environmental Protection Board said the Navy last applied for a
 water quality certificate, required to carry out bombings on Vieques, in 1989. The
 agency made a clerical error and never processed the application, officials added,
 but the Navy never filed another request after that.

 Adding to the health concerns, the Pentagon is building a powerful new radar on
 Vieques, 1,500 feet from a civilian neighborhood. It is designed to monitor
 drug-smuggling airplanes as far away as Peru.

 RADAR DIVERTED

 The radar was originally to be built on the ``big island'' of Puerto Rico, but area
 residents who complained that its powerful electromagnetic waves could endanger
 their health forced the shift to Vieques.

 ``The military is environmentally bad in every place, but on Vieques the
 regulations are simply not enforced. It writes its own ticket,'' said Sarah Peisch,
 director of the independent Environmental Action Center.

 At the heart of the controversy over the incidence of diseases in Vieques is a
 1992 cancer survey by the Puerto Rican Department of Health, based on data
 collected since 1960.

 The study showed that the rate of cancer in Vieques was lower than the overall
 rate for Puerto Rico throughout the 1960s, but began rising in the 1970s and
 surpassed the U.S. Commonwealth's rate in the early 1980s.

 Rivera Castaño, the Vieques epidemiologist, noted that the Navy stepped up its
 bombardments on Vieques in 1971, after protesters forced the Navy to stop using
 another range on the nearby islet of Culebra. The Navy abandoned Culebra in
 1975.

 VIEWS OF CANCER RATE

 Navy Vice Adm. Robert J. Natter, in a column published by the newspaper San
 Juan Star last month, pointed out that the study also showed that Vieques'
 cancer rate had dropped below that of Puerto Rico as a whole between 1989 and
 1992.

 Rivera Castaño replied that was because the Department of Health was forced to
 close its Cancer Registry, which used to backtrack through old medical records
 for misreported cases, for budgetary reasons in 1992.

 Vieques cancer victims must go to ``big island'' hospitals for treatment, and their
 cases are sometimes misreported as originating in the municipalities where they
 are treated, the epidemiologist said.

 Whatever the truth of the allegations about high levels of cancer on Vieques,
 island residents have grown so apprehensive that they now blame the bombing
 range for almost any of their ailments.

 Fisherman Fernando Robinson blames ``something evil over there'' for a yearlong
 throat inflammation he suffered three years ago, when he was setting his fish and
 crab traps in the waters off the bombing range.

 Robinson acknowledged that he could not recall any strange odor in the air or
 noticeable pollution in the waters. ``But it was there. I knew there was something
 bad there,'' he insisted.

 ``Two other fishermen working in that area became thin as rails, so finally I just
 abandoned all my traps,'' he said. ``I never even went back to get them. And I
 haven't had anything wrong since then.''
 

                     Copyright 1999 Miami Herald