Julie Gundlach (right), her husband Dan Young, and their daughter, Madeline Young. Photo provided.

It’s not often that I get to report good news about asbestos issues. In fact, when I stop and think about it for a second, I don’t believe I’ve ever reported good news. Nope. Even with news that was supposed to be good, like the release of the Rumple Report, or the Libby Public Health Emergency declaration, I managed to find dark linings in otherwise silver clouds.

So today, after speaking with Julie Gundlach, I’m happy to report some good news. For anyone not familiar, Julie is a mesothelioma awareness activist, who has been diagnosed with this rare form of cancer that has been linked with asbestos exposure. You can read more about Julie here.

First piece of good news is that Julie’s doing really well.

“I feel great,” she said in an interview from her St. Louis home.

In fact, she’s feeling so well that she might just run in the Miles for Meso 5k she’s organized in downtown St. Louis on October 11. Click here to learn more about this run, as well as another Miles for Meso 5k in Alton, Illinois planned for September 26. Both of these will be events for learning more about the disease, and will raise money for mesothelioma research and awareness.

Julie also reports that she’s “been really, really busy” lately.

And her work is paying off. In the last few weeks, she was able to get the State of Missouri and the City of St. Louis to name September 26 Mesothelioma Awareness Day. And she’s hopeful that on September 24, a bill being put forward by U.S. Congresswoman Betty McCollum will create a national Mesothelioma Awareness Day (Click here if you’re interested in learning more about that).

“Last year I tried to get in touch with my lawmakers, and never heard anything,” she says.

Julie hopes efforts like these will have an effect.

“If nothing else, we’re going to reach hundreds of people that don’t know,” she says. “I think if people knew the reality of this disease, they’d get mad. And I think when enough people get mad, we’ll reach a tipping point.”

Paul Peters

These days, fish in California comes with side of mercury.

Sometimes I worry about my work on asbestos issues. It seems impossible, crazy, almost paranoid to say that public beaches in Illinois are polluted with a particularly dangerous form of asbestos, and the government’s standing by and doing nothing.

There’s the crazy run around people in Libby have been getting for years and years. There’s El Dorado. Manhattan. Mercedes. Reading and writing stories like these makes me worry I’ve become like a “9/11-Truther” (how the heck did they get to be called “truthers” anyway?). Just another conspiracy theorist.

And then there’s a week in the news like this. Perhaps the interesting thing has been this excellent series on water pollution by New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. The stories, especially this one, which focuses on water pollution from coal mining in West Virginia, are an example of how the the agencies that are supposed to be keeping our water safe, like the EPA, are completely broken and corrupt.

As much as I’ve taken the EPA and other governmental environment and health agencies to task on this site and in other work, I do believe there are good people who work for these agencies, who joined with the idea of helping protect health and the environment. My suspicion for a long time is that this attitude is actually detrimental to a career in these agencies, and that is certainly held up by this story.

Matthew Crum, according to the Times story, was an idealist who decided leave a career as an attorney and join West Virginia’s state EPA in 2001. He quickly found out that there was widespread fear of retaliation among his co-workers. Still, he began shutting down West Virginia mines that were contaminating that state’s drinking water. Within a few years, corrupt politicians, pushed by the mining industry, had him kicked out of the agency. There are towns in West Virginia now where residents cannot use their tap water for anything.

The story also shows that all over the United States there are places where the federal EPA and other agencies know for a fact that polluters are in violation of the Clean Water Act, and are doing nothing about it. Not fining, not shutting polluters down, nothing. The Times even produced this handy tool, which allows you to check out the Clean Water Act violations by city, zip code and state, and see for yourself how nothing is being done.

Along the lines of nothing being done about pollution issues, there’s this AP story that also came out this week. It’s all about mercury in Central California that’s been allowed to seep from mines for years and years, contaminating fisheries and drinking water.

From the AP story:

“There’s probably a water body near everybody in the state that has significant mercury contamination,” said Dr. Rick Kreutzer, chief of the state Department of Public Health’s Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control.

Mercury is considered one of the most harmful types of hazardous waste there is, causing brain and nervous system damage, especially in children and fetuses. The EPA and other agencies are well aware of the problem, but, as the EPA’s assistant superfund manager for the region told the AP:

“It took a hundred years to occur… And it may take a hundred years or more to solve.”

That’s assuming that we’re not too brain damaged, or dead, to solve the problems. What these stories make clear is that serious environmental health problems are not the stuff of conspiracy theories. They exist all over our country and the agencies that are supposed to protect us from them are doing nothing. The question now is, do we care? If so, what are we going to do, besides wait 100 more years?

Paul Peters

The issue was essentially this: the Environmental Protection Agency, under direction from White House staffers, downplayed the potential health effects of high levels of asbestos and other chemicals released when the Twin Towers were destroyed. One can only speculate as to why this happened. It may have been as simple as not wanting to send the general population of New York City into a panic. But the result was companies such as W.R. Grace & Co. using the EPA’s lowered standards in Manhattan to justify lowered standards elsewhere, including in Libby, Montana.

In early 2002, for example, Grace used the Manhattan precedents to fight an emergency health declaration in Libby, which would have theoretically helped the EPA remove Grace’s Zonolite Attic Insulation, which was contaminated by Libby tremolite asbestos, from attics in that town. It would have also sent out a warning about the product nationwide, where it was used in millions of homes.

William M. Corcoran, vice president of Grace, sent a letter to then EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, from which the following quotes are excerpted:

The purpose of this letter is to continue Grace’s dialogue with EPA regarding [Zonolite]… Contrasted to Region 8’s [the EPA region governing Libby] disregard of established norms, EPA’s pronouncements and activities regarding the World Trade Center collapse reaffirm those norms. Thus, EPA’s website reiterates that:

- EPA is using the 1% definition of an asbestos-containing material in evaluating dust and bulk samples.

- Air samples are the accurate measure of actual exposure potential, whereas the presence of asbestos in dust is not necessarily a significant health hazard.

- Asbestos exposure becomes a health concern when high concentrations of asbestos fibers are inhaled over a long period of time.

We believe that sound science dictates that the same peer reviewed methodologies for assessing risks at the WTC should be applied across the board, including in Libby, Montana.

The emergency health declaration was ultimately shut down in 2002, and finally approved in June of this year, although it did not actually provide any new money to Libby, nor did it ever mention Zonolite or W.R. Grace. (Read more here). In 2004, the EPA officially declared that the 1 percent rule Corcoran referenced in his letter was not protective of health.

Of course, many of the people who were at Ground Zero were hurt by the EPA’s failure to warn them of the chemicals. Columinist Marie Cocco writes a column this week that captures a lot of the ongoing health problems 9/11 responders face. The fact, I believe, that still needs to be faced is that the attacks on 9/11/2001 are still having a rippling effect on people who were in the vicinity that day. The planes and the towers in essence became a dirty bomb, spreading dangers pollutants across a major city, whose population was never properly warned. The effects rippled all the way across the country, to Libby, and are still being felt.

by Paul Peters

The EPA may be under new leadership, but the ideals remain the same.

It’s perhaps easy to blame the problems at the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies charged with protecting the environment and public health, on the ideals of past presidential administrations.

Take the problems we mentioned last week, for instance. The EPA’s study of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a practice used by drilling companies to bring natural gas to the surface, which involved no field testing or water testing. The EPA, in fact, didn’t even know what chemicals industry used in fracking, so if it had tested, it wouldn’t even know what to look for. This despite 15 years of complaints by Wyoming residents about water problems.

With the Bush administration’s well-established ties to the energy industry, it’s only natural to look at what happened in Wyoming, and the problems in the EPA, as a product of a bygone era in U.S. politics. But, as if to underscore how wrong that view is, on August 27 the U.S. EPA released an audit of New Jersey’s state EPA. Among the audit’s findings:

None of the Site Remediation Program’s bureaus interviewed do any project
assessment and/or process improvement beyond data validation, (i.e. no field audits, no
split samples, no internal assessments, etc). The EPA assessment team was told that
Responsible Party contractors and/or NJDEP contractors are “certified professionals and
taken at their word.”

So, New Jersey EPA’s Site Remediation Program, the body in charge of contaminated sites, was skipping field audits and other obvious methods for determining whether sites were cleaned. This is pretty much exactly what happened in Wyoming. At the same time, they were taking the people responsible for contamination (the “Responsible Parties”) at their word as to whether or not sites were clean. Worse, according to the report, the U.S. EPA had first warned New Jersey about these problems in 2006, yet nothing was done. All of this occurred under Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey EPA, and President Obama’s pick to head the entire U.S. EPA.

So what does this mean to people in Wyoming, where their water may have been poisoned by fracking, or places like Libby, Montana; Waukegan, Illinois; or El Dorado, California that have been air poisoned by tremolite asbestos? If nothing else, it means that a change in administration isn’t the beginning or end of problems in the EPA. If we really want this to be an agency that fights for public health, the public is going to have to be the watch dog.

Paul Peters