By Paul Peters

For a short time, it seemed certain the federal government had crossed into a new period of openness and transparency.
Early in his term, President Barack Obama reversed a Bush-era policy that discouraged federal agencies from releasing documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
“The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption,” Obama said. “In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”
On April 23, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new administrator, Lisa Jackson, released a memo calling for greater openness in her agency. This memo included a section that seemed to call for greater access to EPA employees for the media.
Encouraging results from these actions were seen on April 28, when the EPA Office of the Inspector General released a memo that had become known as the “Rumple Report.”
This report revealed that science was being ignored in the EPA’s cleanup of the nation’s worst Superfund site, in Libby, Mont., where more than 250 people have died from exposure to amphibole asbestos, and thousands have been sickened.
The Rumple Report was written by OIG agent Cory Rumple in April of 2006, but the OIG refused to release the document for three years. When it finally did so, it cited Obama’s new policy on FOIA
At that moment, it seemed Obama’s calls for openness in government had been heeded. But it doesn’t appear there has been a sea-change within the EPA, or its Office of the Inspector General, just yet.
In the course of reporting on the report’s release, Asbestos Watch attempted to interview Rumple, perhaps the most obvious source for any story about this important document.
It is clearly in the public’s interest, dealing with pollution that has killed hundreds of people, to hear more from an investigator like Rumple.
In particular, Asbestos Watch would like to learn more about his reasons for writing the report in the first place, his treatment within the OIG after it was written, and whether the issues he has addressed have truly been answered.
But the response from the OIG’s head spokesman, John Manibusan, was that Rumple would not be made available for an interview.
“The report was released last week, and at this point that’s everything we have to say on the issue,” Manibusan said.
Asked why, especially in light of Jackson’s memo, Manibusan responded that, “I can’t give anymore than what I’ve said-that it was a decision internally not to make Cory available.”
Asbestos Watch then appealed directly to the EPA, hoping they would push for Jackson’s memo to be upheld. But on May 14, EPA spokesman Dale Kemery responded via email, writing that the OIG is independent of the EPA, and that his agency could not force the OIG to comply with the memo.
Asbestos Watch has since requested that Montana Sen. Max Baucus, who has prompted inquires into the state of the Libby cleanup in the past, look into the matter. As of now, there is no other apparent recourse for interviewing Rumple.
Part of the reason openness is not prevailing may be that the OIG is still headed by Bill A. Roderick, a holdover from the previous administration, who may still cling to closed government ides of the past. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure, as the Rumple Report is, for now, the agency’s last word on the subject.

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.

Cover photo: Masked workers at Ground Zero. (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution).
By Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 08/02/2007.
Some of the destruction terrorists inflicted on Sept. 11, 2001, was immediately obvious, even if you were watching it on television thousands of miles away in Montana. The twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) collapsed. Thousands of people died.

What was less obvious was the collapsing towers’ collateral function as a sort of dirty bomb, pulverizing or igniting all the hazardous substances of a small city, the poisons contained in computers, fluorescent light bulbs, windows and any number of construction materials, and blasting them through the city’s streets with the percussive force of two falling skyscrapers.

Post-9/11 photos show residents of Manhattan covered in layers of white ash so thick they look like ghosts. Residents in neighborhoods near Ground Zero reported finding inches of dust in their cars and homes. A plume of smoke rose from the burning debris for weeks. But on Sept. 13, two days after the towers fell, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman told New Yorkers their air was safe to breath.

Asbestos, some of which came from W.R. Grace & Company’s vermiculite mine in Libby, was one of the many substances released by the attacks.

As the towers fell, Libby had just begun to come to terms with its own tragedy. The EPA had begun considering the town for Superfund designation earlier in 2001, following revelations that thousands had been sickened, and hundreds had died, due to asbestos exposure.

But while the EPA seemed at last to recognize the dangers of asbestos exposure in Libby, it ignored those same dangers in New York, apparently at the direction of the White House.

The discrepancy has given ammunition to activists who want a more thorough cleanup in New York, and it also offered a lifeline to W. R. Grace, which was arguing for less stringent standards on asbestos exposure and cleanup, in Libby and in Manhattan. The discrepancy also reveals an EPA of two minds about asbestos cleanup, and the mind that prevails – for better or for worse – could set regulatory precedent for a whole host of toxic baddies.

]]> http://www.asbestoswatch.net/featured/libby-meets-manhattan/feed/ 0 http://www.asbestoswatch.net/featured/a-dangerous-lie/ http://www.asbestoswatch.net/featured/a-dangerous-lie/#comments Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:26:24 +0000 admin http://www.asbestoswatch.net/?p=4 by Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 07/27/06.

In November 1999, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported the news that 192 people had died and another 375 had been sickened by exposure to asbestos from W.R. Grace & Company’s Libby vermiculite mine, which closed in 1990. The ill effects were not limited to miners, but struck down many who had never even been to the mine. The newspaper posited that Grace executives, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other government agencies knew the dangers of the mine, but did nothing to stop exposure. The EPA began its cleanup of Libby almost immediately afterward.

Dr. Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard say the worst thing anyone could possibly say about the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup of Libby: That after six years of abatement, at a cost of $110 million, and with Montana’s one-time shot at an expedited Superfund cleanup spent, exposure to asbestos, which has now killed approximately 300 and sickened 2,000 in Libby, continues.

Furthermore, they say the EPA has intentionally misled Libby residents about the potential danger of that ongoing exposure and enacted unscientific cleanup policies that will lead to continued exposure and a huge financial burden for Libby and Montana. The men say their claims are supported by a report, created by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), that has been buried. They say the report was written by OIG investigator Cory Rumple in early May, after he had interviewed Henningsen, Sullivan, Troyer and Maynard about their complaints with the EPA cleanup, and then corroborated those complaints through his investigation.

The Independent submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the OIG on May 2, complete with a number identifying Rumple’s report (2006-8004), and on June 30 received a particularly evasive answer: “With respect to the information requested, this office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any documents responsive to your request. An official acknowledgement from this government entity could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy.” U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns’ office had also been told of the report’s existence by Gordon Sullivan and, after requesting a copy and receiving a similar answer, Burns has demanded the OIG come clean about the report and provide a timeline as to when it will be released to the people of Libby.

Whether the report ultimately sees the light of day or not, Henningsen, Sullivan, Troyer and Maynard say they know what it is likely to contain. The men say they learned of the report’s findings in an April 21 conference call with Rumple, who outlined his report’s contents. While he told them it would speak to their concerns over the cleanup, he also assured them it would not affect the current federal case against Grace’s former executives that seeks to hold them accountable for what happened in Libby. Finally, he told the four men that he expected the OIG to try and bury the report.

Rumple declined to speak to the Independent on the record. Frustrated that efforts by the Independent, Sen. Burns, and themselves to obtain a copy of Rumple’s report had been rebuffed, the four men revealed details of their complaints about the EPA, and Rumple’s description of his report’s contents, to the Independent in a July 12 meeting at Flathead Valley Community College’s Libby branch.