In a California town, birth defects, deaths, and questions

State and federal officials are scrambling to determine what caused the deaths of three children in this Central California farming town, which shares a ZIP code with the largest hazardous waste treatment site west of the Mississippi. Over a 15-month period in 2007 and 2008, six children of mothers from Kettleman City were born with serious birth defects, including cleft palates, deformities and brain damage. Half of those infants subsequently died. And while health authorities have not placed any blame, the apparent cluster of defects has given new ammunition to environmentalists and local residents who have long been wary of the town's proximity to the Kettleman Hills waste facility, a 1,600-acre landfill that lies in an unincorporated area less than four miles west of here. "We've always been saying, 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling,'–said Maricela Mares-Alatorre, a Kettleman City resident and longtime critic of the facility. "Well, for those mothers, the sky fell."