Rumple Report Released

By Paul Peters

After three years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, denials, public accusations and lawsuits, the Rumple Report, long sought after by amphibole asbestos activists in Libby, Montana, at least one reporter, and a public watchdog group, but withheld by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General, has finally been released.

The report confirms that there have been major mistakes made by the EPA in its cleanup of the nation’s most deadly Superfund site in Libby.

The OIG’s April 29 release of the report marks a major shift in the future of investigative reporting. President Barack Obama, who promised on Jan. 21, 2009 to reverse a Bush administration policy that directed government agencies to err on the side of withholding documents requested under FOIA, has so far made good on his word.

This means the Rumple Report may only be the beginning, a small leak indicating a major burst of information that will shed light on EPA policies. Already, Washington, D.C. based nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is already submitting requests for more documents pertaining to the Libby cleanup.

The Missoula Independent initially attempted to get the report through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in May of 2006. When this was rejected, the paper ran a cover story entitled “A Dangerous Lie,” in which four men closely involved with the Superfund cleanup talked about what they believed was in the report.

Gordon Sullivan, Gerry Henningsen, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard, had suspected the EPA was not using scientific standards to clean Libby, in part because it had never done a risk assessment of amphibole asbestos.

Amphibole asbestos is particular to Libby, Montana, and a few other places around the world. An official study on the health risks of amphibole asbestos had never been completed, and because of this, Sullivan, Henningsen, Troyer and Clinton believed the EPA had no way of knowing whether the clean up, on which $110 million had been spent, was successful, because there was no known safe exposure limit.

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