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.

At the same time, the men accused the EPA of minimizing the risk of amphibole asbestos in documents distributed to Libby residents, and claimed the EPA was preparing to pull out of the town without having done a full cleanup, or ever having really studied the risks posed by amphibole asbestos.

Eventually, PEER filed a FOIA request for the documents, as the Independent continued writing stories about the issue, and Henningsen, Troyer, Maynard, Sullivan and others continued to nag the EPA

Over the years, the OIG’s rationale for not releasing the report changed. It initially refused to confirm or deny the existence of the memo, then in August of 2006 it told Montana Sen. Conrad Burns that the memo did not exist.

In August of 2007, the agency told PEER “The Rumple document was compiled in the course of, and relates to, an open criminal investigation…” and could therefore not be released.

In the summer of 2008, PEER learned that the criminal case was closed, and again requested the report, but the agency then insisted it could not be released because it was “pre-decisional,” i.e. it was part of a decision making process between a federal employee and his superior, and therefore off-limits. At the time, PEER chose not to contest that determination in court.

When President Obama announced that his administration would reverse Bush-era FOIA policies, PEER filed a third time. OIG initially rebuffed the request, claiming it would be unable to even make an “initial determination” on whether it could release the memo for several months. But when PEER filed a lawsuit on April 21, citing the administration’s new stance, the OIG released the report within days.

“As to why OIG released it,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, ” I assume that it was a combination of a) not wanting to embarrass the administration or get crosswise with it; and b) the legal weakness of their [pre-decisional claim], perhaps coupled with an early indication that [the Department of Justice] might not be willing to defend it in court.”

After hearing of the report’s release, Sullivan told Asbestos Watch, “Regardless of what it says, it’s an indication that you can fight back, although it may take you a lot of years to fight back. Understand that the first conversation I had with anybody in the inspector general’s office… I was told that Cory Rumple did not exist.”

Despite the release, he says, “I think the EPA is a hugely broken organization.”

“Why do you have to fight for what, seven years to have a risk analysis in your town, to tell you if you’re in danger or not?” he asks, adding “and you have to go through this type of stuff… this cloak and dagger crap.”

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