Ladera Ranch

Why? Because I knew how to delay the inevitable.

This piece of land here in Lake Forest was not even on the map when Saddleback Church started because there was no such thing as the city of Santa Margarita and there was no such thing as the city of Ladera Ranch and nobody even mapped or petitioned this piece off.

There was no Portola Parkway.

El Toro Road was a two-lane road.

At Monks and Merrill.

We were talking... earlier this week if you'll recall about the the cancer cluster of this ewing sarcoma in ladera ranch and what is it six kids i think have been diagnosed with ewing sarcoma between 2013 and 2024 and it's a it's a very rare cancer two of those kids i think passed away predominantly affects uh children young people it can't happen to adults but this seems like a this is a This seems like an anomaly, statistically, to have six kids in this area in a case that, excuse me, in a disease that only affects 200 people worldwide every year.

And now you've got this cluster of kids that are getting it there.

Joining us right now is Dr. Karen Lincoln.

She's the director of the Center for Environmental Health Disparities Research at UC Irvine, and she's joining us right now.

Dr. Lincoln, based on what you've seen, What do you think, I mean, this is the big question everybody in the area has.

What is the real risk to a family living in Ladera Ranch today? Would you move there if you got a screaming deal on a place?

Well, good afternoon.

I think the police were scaring them.

There was two helicopters that came and in 747 that dropped a fire retardant at this neighborhood in Ladera ranch, seven and a half acres burned.

And then the next day, Jen Padrante went to Cabo with Ryan and their friends.

So, um, I have heard from three neighbors now, all three don't even know each other.

I think that we have pretty well exhausted this one.

Still to come this hour, we'll tell you about more diseases that are hitting people, including what's going on there with the kids that are the cluster of cancer cases in Ladera Ranch.

We have an expert that might be able to help us explain how that happened.

I did want to come back to this.

And so we've got the mosquitoes spreading the West Nile, so we need the bats, but then the bats have rabies.

Man, I'm telling you, you just can't leave the house anymore.

Hey, you want a straight answer from officials, like, is my neighborhood safe for children? Families in Ladera Ranch are still wondering when they're going to get that answer.

Researchers trying to narrow down just why so many kids from that hood are catching a rare cancer, and we might have some insight.

You're listening to Monks and Merrill On Demand from KFI AM 640.

Let's go to Ladera Ranch now where folks have been begging for someone to acknowledge that these kids here aren't just coincidentally coming down with a rare cancer.

We talked about this, I don't know, a couple of months ago, this horrible, horrible situation in this Orange County community where multiple children have come down with a rare cancer.

And then the California Post came out with this Very interesting article just yesterday that showed there may have been a warning years ago about this situation.

Officials warned 20 years ago not to build on land that has now been struck by extremely rare childhood cancers, this Ewing sarcoma.

They did it without further considerations, and that's according to records that the Post was able to uncover.

The ominous handwritten notes appearing on documents for the abandoning of a historical oil well below what is now Orange County's Ladera Ranch.

A handwritten note? A handwritten note that says, this is bad.

All right, now let's get back to that first story, an idyllic enclave in California and the mysterious cancer problem there.

Now heading to Ladera Ranch, California and going back to 2019, Cara Bell there began firing off a series of emails to her homeowner's association, hoping to find out what kind of herbicides gardeners were using on the many sports fields, pocket parks, and schools that pepper the hillside community of Ladera Ranch, a private enclave in the southeastern corner of unincorporated Orange County.

Like many residents, Bell was drawn to the safety and family amenities in this master-planned community.

She told us, Walking her son to school one day, she saw a man fully covered in protective equipment spraying the sidewalks.

She said just giving us all the excuses.

Now the illusion is material.

Ladera Ranch's primary landscape maintenance contractor was founded by a former landscape manager for Disneyland Resort in nearby Anaheim.

Like the theme park, the suburb is arranged in interconnected villages, whose vaguely anachoristic facades evoke a nebulous cartoon mashup of small-town Americana.

Powers, Fox News.

Newport Beach in California banning synthetic herbicides on all seventeen of its athletic fields as concerns grow over a rare childhood cancer cluster in nearby Ladera Ranch.

At least six children and teens have been diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma in the community since twenty thirteen, though officials have not established a link between the cancers and pesticides.

But even without the definitive link, Newport Beach says they will now instead use organic treatments, mechanical weed removal, and new sod every three to five years.

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Ladera Ranch.

Yeah.

[laughs]

I mean, and, and picturesque, right?

Yeah, it was beautiful.

I mean, Ladera Ranch-

Yeah