Warning label from the back of a Zonolite bag.

When it comes to asbestos, you’d think the Environmental Protection Agency would at the very least try not to kick up any more dust to add to the contaminated sites it is still trying to get its arms around.

But, according to The Republican, the agency has offered to clean an area contaminated with tremolite asbestos from Libby, Montana in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Once the EPA has done the cleanup, the city plans to put in a 1,000-foot section of bike path on the property. The bike trail is being supported by the federal Rails to Trails program. The city also plans to place a sewer line under the path. According to the article, $750,000 in federal money has been approved for the work.

In Libby, according to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, hundreds have died and thousands have been sickened from exposure to tremolite asbestos there. Libby asbestos has been shown time and again to be extremely dangerous to human health, even in low doses according to at least one study.

So at first glance, the EPA’s offer to “clean” Libby asbestos sounds like a good thing. But consider that in In 2006, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report declaring that EPA had no way of knowing whether or not 7 years and $110 million of cleaning by the EPA had managed to reduce risk posed by tremolite in Libby, because the agency has not done any risk analysis on its own for tremolite asbestos. The risk analysis is currently underway, and is expected to be completed in 2012.

From 1963 to 1984 (according to an ATSDR report attached further down in this story), the site for the proposed Easthampton bike trail was a Zonolite processing plant for W.R. Grace & Company. Zonolite was the name given to vermiculite ore mined in Libby after a heating process had expanded it and made it suitable for use as a home insulation product. Vermiculite, and products made from it, were contaminated with tremolite asbestos from Libby. Grace also processed Monokote fireproofing material in Easthampton, which was made using Libby asbestos and used to fireproof buildings. Both of these products have been banned.

Grace’s activities at this site seem to have heavily contaminated it, according to this December 2006 report made by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). Testing on the site found significant asbestos contamination. The report notes that asbestos was even detected in air samples taken off the property.

The report notes that in as early as 2000 the bike trail proposal for the site had already been made, and that, “Exposure concerns with regard to asbestos will need to be addressed before construction.”

The EPA’s webpage on the Easthampton site states that it is “unknown” by the agency if human exposure to asbestos there is currently under control.

It would seem that, in order to adequately address a cleanup of this sort, the EPA would first have to have the risk analysis its own office of the inspector general has said they need. Apparently, neither lack of information nor the deadly history of tremolite asbestos will stop the EPA from poking a stick into this hornet’s nest.

Jeff Camplin (center) walks the shore of Illinois State Beach Park with Paul Kakuris and NBC Chicago's Carol Marin. Photo provided.

by Paul Peters

Jeffery Camplin and Paul Kakuris believe that the beaches of Lake Michigan in Illinois, from Chicago up to the northeastern edge of the state, may pose one of the greatest environmental health risks in the country.
The beaches, they say, contain several forms of asbestos in high levels.
This includes amphibole asbestos from Libby, Montana, a remote town of about 2,600 in the northwest corner of a sparsely populated state. According to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease Libby amphibole has caused the death of at least 290 people and the sickening of almost 2,000 more, and has been shown to cause a deadly form of cancer, mesothelioma, even at low doses.
To this day, CARD says 10 new cases of asbestos disease are diagnosed each month in Libby, and it is widely considered to be the most deadly Superfund site in the nation.
Yet Camplin and Kakuris believe what they have discovered in Illinois may be worse, as 2 million people are annually visiting beaches contaminated with Libby amphibole, and studies have shown that the counties along the shore have some of the highest asbestos disease rates in the country.
They also believe that, should the International Olympic Committee discover this pollution, it could jeopardize the Chicago’s chance to hold the 2016 Olympics.
And they assert that government agencies, like the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, (U.S. EPA), and several offices in the state of Illinois know about this problem and are actively covering it up, with the ATSDR committing scientific fraud in an effort to hide the dangers of this contamination.

A statement like this naturally invites skepticism. And, at first glance, it would be easy to dismiss Camplin and Kakuris as conspiracy theorists.
The ATSDR completed its most recent report on Illinois State Beach Park (ISBP) on March 10, 2009.
The report draws its conclusions using data from a September 2007 U.S. EPA study. It concludes that “recreational use of the beach is not expected to harm people’s health.”
The EPA study, which made the same conclusions, was proceeded by another ATSDR report released in 2007, a report by the University of Illinois, Chicago released in 2006, a report done by ATSDR and the Illinois Department of Public Health in 2000, and finally a 1998 report by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR).
Each report states the same thing the 2009 report did, i.e., the park poses no threat.
On top of that, the site was been declared “a success story” by the EPA in 1991, when the agency finished its Superfund cleanup there.

When Jeff Camplin first heard about possible asbestos contamination at the Illinois Beach State Park (IBSP) in nearby Waukegan, he was a skeptic.
Camplin knows quite a bit about asbestos. Since 1988, he’s been an EPA-accredited asbestos abatement instructor. He is a certified professional environmental auditor, president of an environmental services company, and was named Environmental Safety Professional of the Year by the American Society of Safety Engineers in 2006.
In the late 1990s, while teaching asbestos abatement classes in Mundelein, Illinois, he heard about pieces of asbestos containing material (ACM) being found by workers at nearby Illinois Beach State Park (IBSP), and the cleanup effort underway.
At the time, he says, “I thought it was a waste of taxpayer’s money.”
He had heard from the local news, and from students who had worked cleaning the beaches that the asbestos was “non-friable” meaning it was safely contained in pieces of cement or other materials, and could not turn into breathable dust.

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Detail of W.R. Grace Zonolite insulation bag. Andrew Rich photo.

by Paul Peters

This week, Spokane, Washington made the news when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began testing yards near a former plant where W.R. Grace & Co. processed vermiculite contaminated with tremolite asbestos.
The vermiculite had come from Libby, Mont., where, according to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, nearly 300 have died from asbestos exposure. Once processed, Grace sold the vermiculite as Zonolite brand attic insulation, which eventually found its way into millions of homes across the U.S.
The EPA had studied the yards and the site of the former plant back in 2000 and 2001, and at the time had only found “trace amounts” of asbestos in the yard soils.
Exactly what the “trace amounts” were is unclear, but it has been well established that tremolite asbestos, a component of Libby asbestos, can cause mesothelioma at low exposures.
This would seem to be enough to justify not just another round of testing, but a cleanup of these yards.
According to several news accounts, the EPA was retesting the Spokane yards for three reasons. Because of the public health emergency declared by EPA in June, because there are new health standards, and because there are new testing methods.
But interviews with EPA employees involved with the site, as well as a review of the records, show that none of these reasons hold true.
Julie Wroble, the risk analyst for the site, says that the testing they plan to use, known as California Air Resources Board method 435, “isn’t anything new.”
In fact, documents indicate it was developed in 1991. Incidentally, these documents specify that method 435 be used for serpentine family asbestos. Asbestos from Libby is of the amphibole family.
Likewise the “new” standards are fairly old. The “old” standard, which had been used by the EPA to declare places like Libby, Illinois Beach State Park, and post-9/11 Manhattan safe, was never meant to be a health standard, which the EPA stated outright in this 2004 document.
Finally, Greg Weigel, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator for the site, says the impetus for reviewing the site dates back to a study done in October 2008, which recommended revisiting previous sites that processed Libby vermiculite, and is not related to the Public Health Emergency.
The plans for re-testing this site, he says, were in the works for months.
The Spokane site is just one of more than 200 places where Libby vermiculite was processed. In 2006, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General stated that the EPA had no way of knowing whether or not Libby was clean.
The EPA has yet to develop a standard for exposure to tremolite asbestos.

Montana Senator Max Baucus (center) with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (left) and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, right, at a press conference announcing Public Health Emergency for Libby.

by Paul Peters

When the EPA first tried to declare a public health emergency in Libby, Montana in 2002, they were particularly concerned about Zonolite, a type of attic insulation from vermiculite mined in Libby which contains Libby amphibole asbestos.
Zonolite is a product that was manufactured by W.R. Grace, the same company once accused of knowingly exposing the people Libby to deadly asbestos. Zonolite can be found in approximately 30 million homes and buildings in the U.S. It was also processed at several sites around the country.
Furthermore, tremolite asbestos, one of the main constituents of the asbestos type found in Zonolite, occurs in residential areas like El Dorado Hills, Calif., and has been found on Oak Street Beach in Chicago.
In 2002, Grace, with help from the White House Office of Budget Management (OMB), stymied efforts to declare an emergency. At the time, the EPA wanted to remove Zonolite attic insulation from Libby homes. To remove a commercial product like Zonolite from homes and businesses, the EPA was required by law to declare an emergency.
Although the EPA announced in 2002 that it would remove attic insulation from Libby homes, Grace and the OMB had stopped the emergency declaration and kept the Zonolite name out of the press. Click here to read more about the first attempt at an emergency declaration.
Although the EPA finally declared a public health emergency in Libby last week, the word Zonolite was never uttered, or written.
None of the official documentation accompanying the decision (which you can find here), including the press release, mention Zonolite.
EPA head Lisa Jackson did not use the product name in her press conference on the emergency declaration, although she did say that, “Today EPA is launching a national education program focused on vermiculite insulation to ensure the continued education and safety of all Americans.”
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W.R. Grace promotional products for asbestos-containing Zonolite Attic Insulation. Photo courtesy Anthony Rich.

by Paul Peters

Eight years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to do what it finally did on June 17, 2009. That is, declare a public health emergency in the town of Libby, Montana.
In Libby, about 290 people have died and another 2,000 have been sickened due to asbestos exposure from a former W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine just outside of town.
The declaration contains several flaws which you can read about here.
It does not, contrary to most reporting, provide any additional money to Libby. In answers to a host of questions from Asbestos Watch, the EPA stated that money for the cleanup is actually coming out of funds it had already received from W.R. Grace one year ago (EPA answered these questions on the condition that Asbestos Watch would not attribute them to any one official). There is no “new” money going to Libby as a result of this public health emergency declaration.
And it’s more than a little interesting that the declaration comes now, after W.R. Grace, the company responsible for releasing the contaminants that poisoned Libby, has safely cleared the deck of all lawsuits pertaining to its operations in Libby, and has reached a settlement with the federal government that protects the company from future health care and cleanup costs in Libby.
(story continues)

by Paul Peters

St. Louis resident Julie Gundlach’s life changed forever in August of 2006, when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer at just 35 years old.
Her diagnosis with this deadly disease is unusual, but may be part of a growing trend.
Mesothelioma normally strikes older men who were heavily exposed to asbestos in occupational settings-at plants where it was processed, in mines, or in professions that brought them into contact with insulation and other building materials in which asbestos was heavily used.
This may have been the case with Gundlach’s father, who died in 2005, at the age of 63, from lung cancer. Gregg Gundlach had worked for 30 years as a commercial electrician, coming into contact with insulation and fireproofing materials on a frequent basis. Asbestos was routinely used in these types of materials until the mid-1980s.
The lungs are one of the primary places mesothelioma attacks, and from there it spreads very quickly. People diagnosed with mesothelioma in their lungs, which is known as pleural mesothelioma, generally live for just weeks or months.
Gregg Gundlach died only six weeks after diagnosis.
At that time, Julie Gundlach says her family was not aware of asbestos or the diseases it can cause, and so they never had any tests done to determine whether it was the culprit in his death. Gregg Gundlach’s body was cremated, without a biopsy or an autopsy ever having been performed.
Then, two years later, Julie Gundlach became ill. She discovered the link between mesothelioma and asbestos then, and now thinks her father’s death and her sickness may have been connected.
When she was a child, Gundlach says her play area was also the laundry room, where her dad’s possibly asbestos-laden clothes were washed and dried. She believes that to be the source of her exposure, although it’s impossible to know for sure.

A Rare Diagnosis

Gundlach laughs telling the story about how she first discovered she had mesothelioma.
“I was constipated,” she says bluntly. “I tried a bunch of herbal stuff, ate prunes, drank prune juice, and nothing was making it any better, so within a week I went to the doctor.”
Her doctor ordered a CT scan for Gundlach, which revealed an unusual tissue mass inside her pelvis, and fluid in one of her lungs.

The companies that owned the Zonolite mine shipped vermiculite all over the country for years in a variety of products. It was used to insulate at least 35 million homes in the U.S., and more in Canada betweenn1960 and the mid-1980s.
It was also used in Monokote, a fireproofing spray developed by W.R. Grace & Co., the last owners of the vermiculite mine.

In the U.S., builders used Monokote to fireproof 60 to 80 percent of steel-frame buildings constructed during the 1970s and 1980s, including the bottom 40 floors of the main World Trade Center buildings (the twin towers) and all of World Trade Center 7, which also collapsed on 9/11.

Vermiculite from the mine was also shipped to at least 245 sites across the U.S., 28 of which were processing plants. The mine was closed in 1990, and in 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency began investigating health problems in Libby, Montana, and soon initiated a Superfund cleanup there.

Libby now has the highest asbestos-related mortality rate in the U.S., with more than 200 people dead from exposure, and thousands more sickened.

According to health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fatalities from asbestos-related diseases are rising in the U.S. The reported 18,068 fatalities between 1999 and 2005 occurred as a result of mesothelioma, a cancer directly associated with asbestos exposure. During this time, the frequency of mesothelioma deaths annually rose by 222 per year.

Studies have shown that people with low-level, non-occupational, exposures to amphibole asbestos are developing lung disease. In other words, you didn’t need to live in Libby, or have worked work at a mine or processing plant to receive deadly doses of amphibole asbestsos.

Asbestos related disease has a long latency period, meaning that adults exposed to the toxin today could see health effects in 20 to 40 years.

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.

As evidenced in the Rumple Report, many observers of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Libby cleanup believe the agency’s policies could still be exposing people to amphibole asbestos, which has killed hundreds and sickened thousands.

It is documented that public health statements made by Bush administration officials, which downplayed the risks posed by Libby amphibole asbestos released in Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks, were used by W.R. Grace to lower the standards of the Libby cleanup.

It is also documented that, despite spending more than $110 million on the Libby Superfund cleanup, EPA still has no idea exactly how dangerous amphibole asbestos is, and yet portrayed to the community that Libby asbestos was safe in small quantities.

Eventually, pressure from the public, media reports, and congressmen pushed the EPA to retract information it released to the community that minimized risks of asbestos, and caused the agency to begin the process of investigating the risk posed by amphibole asbestos.

Gordon Sullivan says one of the most important revelations of the report is that the EPA’s own scientists were intensely critical of how standards had changed in Libby post-9/11.

“The most extreme issue in that entire report comes from inside the EPA,” he says. “When your head toxicologist says it’s unconscionable, you’ve got a problem.”

Sullivan refers to Chris Weis, Senior Toxicologist of the EPA’s National Enforcement Investigations Center. According to the report, OIG Special Agent Cory Rumple asked Weis about a brochure entitled “Living with Vermiculite” which was mailed to all Libby addresses, and states that low-level, short-term exposure to asbestos is not dangerous, and that it is perfectly safe to vacuum up “small releases” with HEPA vacuums, or wipe them up with damp cloths, as New Yorkers were told to do.

Weis, according to the report, “stated the language within that document contained ‘double speak,’ adding in his opinion it was ‘unconscionable’ to write a document with such language.”

A quick read of the introduction to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of the Inspector General’s April 29, 2009 release of the Rumple Report would suggest OIG Special Agent Cory Rumple is satisfied with its results.

The report, he writes, resulted in the retraction of EPA documents in Libby that he, and the four men who made knowledge of the report public, believed were misleading Libby citizens on the known risk of amphibole asbestos. It also brought a criminal investigation,  and got the EPA to stop trying to issue a Record of Decision (ROD), a contract specifying exactly what the agency will do to finish the cleanup.

But those four men, who include Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard are not jumping for joy.

According to Gordon Sullivan, “Nothing’s changed.”

The EPA, he says, is almost exactly where it was three years ago, when the Rumple Report was written, “They’re pushing for a ROD without a Risk Assessment.” In 2006, Sullivan and others questioned how the agency could specify its final cleanup plans without knowing what risks were posed to the community by amphibole asbestos.

At that time, Henningsen noted that “Once they (the EPA) finalize the ROD, they’re done, and you’ll play hell to ever get them back in town again. Their legal obligation is over.”

The issue then, and now, is that the EPA has yet to create a Risk Assessment for Libby, which is a comprehensive study that determines both what the ongoing exposure to asbestos is in Libby, and how toxic the substance is. In December of 2006, the EPA admitted it did not know the risks associated with amphibole asbestos, and in June of 2008, the federal government announced that the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) would do an $8 million study over five years to determine the toxicity of amphibole asbestos.

This poses a few problems. For one, the ATSDR does not plan on finishing its assessment until 2013, but the EPA is already planning how it will finish the cleanup. On top of that, this study only establishes how toxic the substance is. In order to understand risk, it is necessary to know how much of it the public is being exposed to. Finally, the ATSDR has an issue with credibility. In March of 2009, a scathing congressional report was released that, in part, concluded:

[A]cross the nation local community groups believe that ATSDR has failed to protect them from toxic exposures and independent scientists are often aghast at the lack of scientific rigor in its health consultations and assessments. The studies lack the ability to properly attribute illness to toxic exposures and the methodologies used by the agency to identify suspected environmental exposures to hazardous chemicals are doomed from the start.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the report notes that in 2006 the ATSDR found amphibole asbestos at Illinois Beach State Park, and, despite having no complete scientific information about the risks associated with this substance, declared the beach to be safe.

This, of course, does not inspire much confidence in the ATSDR’s ability to deliver a study of amphibole toxicity that, at best, would give Libby and the EPA half the information it needs to do a risk assessment.

Henningsen notes that, even if the EPA were to change course on the toxicity study and the ROD, there is another huge problem.

He says that EPA’s Region 8 office (which is based out of Denver and covers a geographic area that includes Montana) pressured and misled the citizens of Libby to accept a settlement from W.R. Grace & Co. of $250 million dollars, telling them this was a good settlement.

On March 12, 2008, Grace agreed to pay $250 million to the EPA Superfund program. The agreement settled a claim brought by the federal government under Superfund law to recover costs related to asbestos removal from Libby properties.

“Basically, that would do nothing,” Henningsen says of the settlement. “The average Superfund site costs $1 billion to clean. Here they are going to spend a total of less than $250 million and let Grace off the hook for the worst site ever in the nation.”

Henningsen even provides a chart, showing settlements for Superfund sites across the nation. It is easy to see that Libby falls near the bottom for settlements.