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.”
(continued)

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)

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.

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.”

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/w/grace-catches-a-break/ http://www.asbestoswatch.net/w/grace-catches-a-break/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:46:19 +0000 admin http://www.asbestoswatch.net/?p=64 By Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 01/04/2007.

Christmas came early for W.R. Grace & Co. this year when U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Judith Fitzgerald issued a Dec. 14 opinion stating that the company’s Zonolite-brand attic insulation, used in as many as 35 million U.S. homes and businesses, poses “No unreasonable risk of harm” to homeowners.

The insulation contains asbestos from Grace’s former Libby vermiculite mine, exposure to which is blamed for more than 200 deaths in Libby.

Both Grace and lawyers for Zonolite claimants agree that Zonolite contains Libby asbestos fibers, and that those fibers can be released when disturbed.

But Grace, according to the opinion, argued that “the fiber release from [Zonolite] must be at levels which pose unreasonable risk of harm to human health.”

In her opinion, Fitzgerald agreed, writing that lawyers for the homeowners asserted “the mere presence of [Zonolite] in attics poses an unreasonable risk of harm” but provided “no evidence to support that contention.”

That could be because the evidence isn’t in yet.

As the Independent and other Montana media have reported in the last year, the actual danger posed by the specific type of asbestos found in Libby, and in Zonolite, has never been determined. Recently, U.S. Sen. Max Baucus and the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General were finally able to pressure the EPA into doing a comprehensive study on the risk posed by Libby asbestos. That study has yet to be completed.

Lawyers involved with the Zonolite case did not return phone calls from the Independent, but Dr. Gerry Henningsen, who worked as an EPA toxicologist for 12 years and currently works as a technical adviser to Libby residents on the EPA cleanup, points out the impact such a study might have had on the case.

“There’s no direct evidence to show how dangerous or harmful [Libby asbestos] is,” he says. “If you don’t have any data, how do you prevail in court? You can’t.”

But information on Libby asbestos is expected to become available within the year, and in the meantime lawyers for the Zonolite claimants have already filed an appeal.