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.”

If any individual deserves credit for getting Libby’s asbestos Superfund cleanup out of neutral and into gear, (although possibly still spinning its wheels) it’s Cory Rumple.

As an agent with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (IG), Rumple investigated minor complaints of criminal conduct at the Libby Superfund site when, in March of 2006, a few Libby activists-Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Clinton Maynard and Abe Troyer-started tugging on his sleeve, steering him toward problems with the cleanup as a whole.

Rumple listened, investigated, and authored a report bolstering the complaints he’d heard, claiming that the EPA, despite seven years and $110 million dollars spent on cleanup, had no way of knowing if its work was effective, because it had not adopted a toxicity study on the specific form of asbestos particular to Libby.

After Rumple completed his report, the IG refused to acknowledge its existence, despite a Freedom of Information Act request by the Independent.

Stories in the Independent revealed the report’s existence to the wider public, and, with pressure from the offices of Sen. Max Baucus and former Sen. Conrad Burns, the IG admitted in October of 2006 that the report in fact existed. Under persistent pressure, the IG finally released a report in December echoing the findings presumably included in Rumple’s initial draft.

Imagine the surprise in Libby, then, when the IG team that doctored the December version of the report for public consumption received the Presidential Council on Integrity and Efficiency award this month, a prestigious honor given to employees at federal Inspector General offices.

Two asbestos activists, including Henningsen and Terry Trent have written letters to Sen. Baucus decrying the undeserved recognition.

The award winners, Henningsen writes, “had minor or essentially no meaningful roles to merit such a prestigious award.”

“Meanwhile,” he continues, “The main author and contributor to the excellent work cited in this award nomination was omitted as a co-awardee.”

Henningsen asks Baucus to pressure the IG committee that awards the PCIE to retract it and give it to Rumple instead.

For now, Baucus has sidestepped the controversy. His spokesman, Barrett Kaiser, in an email to the Independent, wrote, “Right now, the focus should be on the work that the IG has yet to do… Max wants to get to the bottom of why the EPA quashed the toxicity studies in the first place.”

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) may have just admitted that the EPA’s expenditure of seven years and $110 million dollars cleaning asbestos from Libby, with no way of knowing if the town is clean, was criminal.

But it’s hard to tell for sure.

Since June 2006, the Independent and others have tried to acquire a report filed by former OIG agent Cory Rumple that first called into question EPA’s cleanup of Libby, without success.

On Aug. 8, 2007 the OIG offered its reasons for not complying with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the report by Washington, D.C. non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

According to the response letter OIG sent to PEER, documents pertaining to ongoing criminal investigations are exempt from FOIA, and, “The Rumple document was compiled in the course of, and relates to, an open criminal investigation…”

When the Independent first began asking OIG about Rumple’s investigation in April 2006, an OIG spokesman said the agency did two types of investigations, one for efficiency and one for criminal activity, and that the OIG policy was to neither confirm nor deny the existence of criminal investigations.

The spokesman then refused to confirm or deny the existence of the Rumple investigation. Rumple himself admitted to working as a criminal investigator.

Over time, the OIG has changed its rationale for not releasing information on the investigation or the report it produced. In August 2006 OIG told the Independent that the report did not exist. In October 2006, OIG acknowledged the report’s existence, in response to a FOIA request by the Independent, but said it was an exempt communication between a subordinate and a superior (a reason OIG also used when denying PEER’s request).

On August 6, 2007, in an interview with the Independent, EPA chief Stephen Johnson characterized the OIG’s role in the Libby cleanup as “program evaluation,” which would seem to suggest the agency’s work was an “efficiency” investigation.

Two days later, the target moved again.

PEER director Jeff Ruch says his group will decide this week whether to pursue the Rumple report in court.

By Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 08/09/2007.
On Aug. 6, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen L. Johnson paid his second visit to Libby in two years to attend a U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works field hearing hosted by Montana Sen. Max Baucus.

Stephen L. Johnson, head of EPA during final years of the Bush Administration.

His visit comes in the wake of a year in which an EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation determined that, despite expenditures of $110 million and seven years spent cleaning up asbestos contamination left in the town by W.R. Grace & Co.’s vermiculite mine, the EPA “cannot be sure that the Libby cleanup sufficiently reduces the risk that humans may become ill.” That’s because the EPA has never adequately studied the type of asbestos particular to Libby.

In a brief interview with Johnson before his visit to Libby, the Independent had hoped to clarify important questions surrounding the Libby cleanup and asbestos contamination. Instead we got a series of non-answers and obfuscations reminiscent of recent Senate hearings on attorney firings at the U.S. Justice Department.

For instance, the OIG’s findings bring up an obvious question: If the EPA cannot be sure that Libby is safe, how can it know if any place contaminated with Libby asbestos is safe?

Libby vermiculite was used to insulate as many as 35 million homes in the United States, was used to fireproof the World Trade Center buildings, was processed at hundreds of sites across the country, and has been found on some of the most popular beaches near Chicago.

“Wherever asbestos might be, whether it might potentially be in attic insulation or on old pipes or other kinds of structures, certainly our advice is to avoid disturbing [it] and avoid that exposure…” Johnson said. “With regard to other places, other sources, that continues to be our important message: Asbestos is something that you should not be dealing with, because it is harmful.”

But in Manhattan, a large amount of Libby asbestos was unforeseeably disturbed after two planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings. What we wanted to know is how the EPA could declare Manhattan safe – as the agency has declared – when it doesn’t even know if Libby is safe.

When the Independent asked Johnson how the EPA got to the point that the OIG had to tell the agency that, despite the time and money spent, it had no idea whether or not Libby was clean, Johnson answered:

“The OIG plays an important role of program evaluation across the agency, and program evaluation is something that, as administrator, I’m very supportive of, because all programs can always be evaluated, and my experience is there’s always opportunities to improve the program…”

In other words, the OIG report was just routine program maintenance. But Johnson’s answer doesn’t jibe with the cleanup’s recent history. For years, people like Gordon Sullivan, who served as a liaison between Libby and the EPA, have been asking the agency to do a proper study of Libby asbestos, so that they would have a baseline for determining the cleanup’s efficacy. It took an OIG investigation, a story in the Independent (see “A Dangerous Lie,” July 27, 2006) and requests by Sen. Max Baucus to get the EPA to acknowledge its own lack of science.

In fact, on Dec. 5, after the OIG report on the Libby cleanup was released, Sen. Baucus said in a press release: “It’s an outrage. Heads should roll at EPA. The people in Libby and the American taxpayers deserve better, much better.”

The Independent asked Johnson for a reaction to that quote, and got what seemed an attempt to make peace with Baucus, as well as a defense of the EPA’s work in Libby.

“Sen. Baucus has been a great leader and advocate for the citizens of Libby, and with regard to the work of the EPA, the EPA is the one who has gone in, and over the years focused attention on removing contamination and improving the situation,” Johnson said.

He went on to note that the EPA has overseen the removal of asbestos from 857 Libby properties. This number is, of course, rendered effectively meaningless by the OIG’s finding that the EPA had no way of knowing whether its work had made even one Libby property safe.

Furthermore, it appears Baucus never got the memo about the EPA chief’s appeasement.

The Missoulian quotes Baucus at the Aug. 6 field hearing saying, “Nothing got done at EPA until lots of pressure was put on…Until then, frankly, nothing was being done.”

Baucus also demanded the EPA release documents pursuant to its 2002 decision not to issue a public warning on the dangers of Zonolite Attic Insulation, which is made of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite from Libby, and not to declare Libby a public health emergency, which would have hastened the arrival of cleanup crews and medical care. A 2002 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article by Andrew Schneider states that the White House Office of Budget Management was directly involved in that decision.

Also, the Independent reported in a recent story (see “Libby Meets Manhattan,” Aug. 2, 2007) that W.R. Grace tried to use the EPA’s declaration that Manhattan was safe after the World Trade Center collapse to argue against the Zonolite warning.

Baucus, according to reports in the Missoulian and the Associated Press, said he would force the agency to hand over documents on the Zonolite and public health emergency decisions if the EPA would not do so voluntarily.

Baucus has already promised Libby, during an April field hearing, that he would get his hands on documents created by former OIG investigator Corey Rumple, who initially investigated problems with the Libby cleanup in early 2006. So far, those documents have not been made unavailable.

Those documents could go a long way toward explaining how the Libby cleanup got off track. And the paper trail may be Libby’s best chance at getting answers. Because Johnson doesn’t seem inclined to provide them.

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 10/19/2006.

Vindication has come in small increments for the men who made their concerns over the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup of Libby public in the July 27 issue of the Independent.

Dr. Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard all maintain that EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigator Cory Rumple completed a report supporting their belief that asbestos exposure in Libby continues, and that the EPA cleanup has not been based on sound science.

When the Independent filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Rumple’s report, the OIG responded that it could neither confirm nor deny its existence.

The Independent appealed the OIG decision, and this month received a response. While the OIG continues to withhold the report, now on the new grounds that it was a FOIA-exempt communication between Rumple and his supervisor, it finally acknowledged the report’s existence.

Also on Oct. 10, the EPA decided it would no longer circulate a brochure titled “Living with Vermiculite.” Maynard, Henningsen, Sullivan and Troyer had cited that brochure as proof of the EPA minimizing the risk of asbestos exposure in Libby. The brochure advised Libby residents on how to handle vermiculite, the asbestos-contaminated mineral W.R. Grace & Co. mined just outside the town.

Since “Living with Vermiculite” was first issued in October 2003, Maynard has been one of its most outspoken critics, demanding that the agency pull the brochure.

“I don’t even know how to act,” Maynard told the Independent, describing his elation that the brochure had been pulled.

“It’s been a long battle,” he says. “Somebody finally listened.”

The listener, Maynard says, was Paul Peronard, the man who led the initial EPA cleanup of Libby, and who returned to his post as remedial project manager this August. Peronard says he understands the impetus for the brochure’s creation.

“We have folks coming into contact with vermiculite in Libby with some frequency,” he says.

“The rub,” he continues, is that “a lot of folks thought it downplayed the risks,” making vermiculite seem too easy to handle.

“If I had my druthers” Peronard says, “it would just be, ‘Stay the hell away from the stuff.’”

In July 2006, the Independent published the story of Dr. Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard. The four men, who have been deeply involved with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) cleanup of asbestos contamination in Libby, said a report by EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigator Cory Rumple confirms their belief that the EPA is hiding the possibility that Libby is still contaminated, and still dangerous, in part because the agency has never bothered to study the type of asbestos specific to that town.

The OIG told us it could not “confirm or deny the existence” of that report, despite there being an official number attached to the document and four men who say they talked directly with the investigator about it.

In our story, we noted that Sen. Conrad Burns had sent a letter to OIG Acting Inspector General Bill Roderick asking him to clarify whether or not the report exists and when its contents might be made available to the public.

On Aug. 7, Burns received a response from Roderick, which read, “Contrary to what you have been told by your constituents, I can assure you that we have not issued any public reports on remediation efforts in Libby.”

The OIG appears to be playing language games here. No one has ever asked for a public report. The problem with the report is that it is not public. And if the report never existed, why was the Independent not simply told that, point blank, when we first requested it?

Asked if the letter marked the end of the senator’s quest for Rumple’s report, Burns spokesperson James Pendleton replied, “There is no report.”

On Aug. 23, Sen. Max Baucus sent his own letter to Bill Roderick. That letter asked the OIG to investigate claims made by Henningsen, Sullivan, Troyer and Maynard, without attributing those claims to the four men or asking for Rumple’s report.

Although he’s apparently reading our paper (hi, Max!) Baucus’ office, as usual, did not return calls seeking comment.

If the report does exist – and whatever the EPA is calling it, it clearly does – then it would appear that an agency that’s already stonewalled reporters and senators alike on the results of its investigation is being offered a chance to re-conduct an investigation it’s already carried out, then buried. Will the results be any different the second time around?

At press time, the Independent can neither confirm nor deny it. What we can report is that Rumple, non-author of the agency’s non-report, recently announced to us his intention to resign at the end of August. Perhaps not surprisingly, he declined to discuss his reasons.

By Paul Peters
Editor

A version of this story originally appeared in the Missoula Independent on 04/27/2006.

Gordon Sullivan finally felt some hope of vindication for his criticisms of the Environmental Protection Agency’s work cleaning up the asbestos-contaminated town of Libby when a federal investigator interviewed him about two weeks ago.

Sullivan quit his job as Libby’s technical advisor last year over his concerns about the EPA’s cleanup of cancer-causing tremolite asbestos, rained upon the town by the W.R. Grace Corporation’s nearby vermiculite mine.

As technical advisor, Sullivan was paid to study EPA reports and present his findings to Libby’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which is funded with federal Superfund money to make the EPA aware of the community’s technical issues.

“I saw the process being overwhelmed by the EPA,” Sullivan says of his decision to quit. He thought that by working from the outside, he’d find other ways of helping with the cleanup. As it turns out, other ways found him.

Should the investigation justify his concern that the EPA has flubbed its Libby cleanup, Sullivan says, eventually “Libby will be a cleaner, healthier place.”

The EPA, on the other hand, could find its efforts tainted.

The investigation, according to Sullivan and other community members, is being carried out by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a branch of the agency that conducts internal audits and investigations.

John Manibusan, a spokesman for the OIG, says the office performs two types of investigations, aimed respectively at efficiency and criminal concerns. Manibusan says that the OIG is not engaged in an efficiency investigation in Libby, and that the OIG’s policy on criminal investigations is to neither confirm nor deny their existence.

Sullivan says he was interviewed by an investigator named Cory Rumple who, when contacted by the Independent, declined to comment on whether or not he is taking part in an investigation. Rumple did confirm his role as a criminal investigator for the OIG. Peggy Churchill, project manager of the Libby cleanup, confirmed the existence of an investigation, and Dr. Gerry Henningsen, technical advisor to TAG since Sullivan quit, acknowledged meeting with an investigator in March, and said “many others” have been interviewed as well.

Henningsen says he and the investigator discussed “concerns about various parts of the cleanup,” although he declined to specify those concerns.

Sullivan says he was also asked to explain his concerns about the cleanup, of which he has many, ranging from the technical to the personal.

Sullivan’s personal issue is that he and his wife Kathy’s home, like approximately 2,500 other homes in Libby, was insulated with asbestos from W.R. Grace’s mine. The EPA has remediated the Sullivans’ home, and contained hard-to-reach asbestos behind its walls.

But on a sunny Friday afternoon, Gordon stands at one corner of the log home, looking for glints of sunlight in spider webs. From the webs he pulls shiny bits of what he says is vermiculite, the asbestos-containing mineral from W.R. Grace’s mine, that he says have fallen through the walls of his home. Above the fallen vermiculite he points to a spot where cardboard was apparently used to hold it inside the walls.

The EPA has scrubbed about 550 homes in Libby since cleanup began in 2002. Sullivan says his isn’t the only home leaking vermiculite. His concerns about the way local homes were remediated goes to the heart of his problems with the cleanup.

In 2002, when Sullivan was first hired as TAG’s technical advisor, he says the plan was to completely remove asbestos from the town. That initial plan, Sullivan says, was steadily eroded by the EPA, from removal to containment to minimization of asbestos release. Now, he says, “It’s gone from minimizing release to ‘You clean it up.’” That comment refers to the EPA’s provision of HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaners to Libby residents so they can suck up any asbestos dust that escapes containment.

Sullivan’s other major problem with the cleanup is more technical. Before the cleanup even began, he says, the EPA should have done a risk assessment, a baseline study to determine how dangerous a toxin is, and how people might be exposed to it. Without such a baseline study, Sullivan says, it is impossible for the EPA to really know how safe anything in Libby actually is. It could turn out that it’s safe to leave some asbestos in people’s homes, and have them clean up spillage with vacuum cleaners. Alternately, that could turn out to be a deadly mistake. The problem, he says, is that nobody knows.

Sullivan says that while he served as technical advisor, he tried repeatedly to get these concerns dealt with by the EPA, with no success, which eventually led to his resignation as technical advisor.

Project manager Peggy Churchill says she’s unable to comment on Sullivan’s concerns, as they are part of an ongoing investigation.

At this time, it remains unclear what criminal charges might eventually arise from the investigation. What seems evident to Dr. Henningsen, Sullivan’s successor as technical advisor, is that the investigation itself will ultimately be good for Libby, no matter what investigators find.

“Everyone will benefit from a solid, clean, accusation-free process,” he says. “This should be seen as a chance to alleviate concerns.”