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 04/12/2007.
It must have seemed like déjà vu for some Libby residents on April 5. That’s when Montana Sen. Max Baucus held a field hearing for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at a conference room in Libby’s city hall with Susan Parker Bodine, who heads Superfund cleanup for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Baucus’ public show of indignation in front of 100 curious Libby residents was almost exactly the same as a hearing held in 2000, although the specific targets of anger had changed.

The last field hearing was held after it was revealed asbestos-containing ore had poisoned Libby residents while federal and state agencies, along with W.R. Grace, the company that mined the ore, allegedly ignored the problem. At that time, the hearing allowed Baucus and representatives of the EPA to express mutual resentment over what had occurred, and make bold promises to ensure the town would be cleaned. But in retrospect, the EPA cleanup since 2000 makes the first hearing look like a dog and pony show, and leads one to wonder if the latest hearing is more of the same.

The recent meeting comes on the heels of a series of gaffes by the EPA. Earlier this year, after being investigated by the EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the agency admitted it cannot, after seven years and $110 million dollars, say whether or not Libby is clean because it hasn’t done toxicological studies of the town’s asbestos. Before being investigated, the EPA planned to finish the cleanup this year, without doing the study.

Baucus, who was positioned at the head of the conference room opposite Bodine, as if in a debate, focused on the two main questions concerning Libby residents: why did the EPA not do a toxicological study of Libby asbestos years ago, and when will Libby finally be cleaned?

The audience watched in silence as Bodine, who appeared flustered and unprepared for the questions, struggled to deliver any definite answers. She admitted a toxicological study is standard operating procedure during cleanup of a Superfund site, but could not offer an explanation on why it hadn’t been done in Libby.

Baucus then offered his own theory-the EPA avoided the study, despite Libby being the deadliest Superfund site in the world with more than 200 asbestos-related deaths, because of money.

“EPA’s own scientists requested a toxicological study, but the funds were denied [by the EPA],” Baucus said. “Why in the world would the EPA turn that down?”

“I don’t know why that didn’t happen,” Bodine responded.

“I’m a little surprised that you wouldn’t know that,” Baucus replied. “The buck stops with you.”

Later in the hearing, Baucus addressed the question of when the cleanup would be finished.

Bodine said it would take three years and $6.2 million to complete the toxicological study alone. When Baucus pressed for a final cleanup date, she objected to giving a specific timeline, saying it would be impossible to plan until the initial study is complete.

Baucus resigned to asking Bodine to look into ways of speeding up the toxicological study, and submit a monthly progress report on her findings directly to him.

After Baucus finished questioning Bodine, a preselected panel of Libby residents spoke about the cleanup, and then audience members were given a chance to speak and ask questions. Despite skepticism, some took advantage of the forum as a legitimate chance to raise concerns to Baucus and the EPA.

Tom Wood, chief of Libby’s volunteer fire department, pointed out the EPA’s decision to leave asbestos containing vermiculite in attics, crawl spaces and behind walls in Libby’s homes is causing firemen to be exposed when those residences burn down. Wood noted five firemen have died in recent years due to asbestos-related disease. He asked Baucus for more funding to supply the department with proper equipment for avoiding exposure; Baucus said he’s working on the issue.

Other Libby residents wondered aloud whether, once again, Libby was just getting a political show. This group included Gordon Sullivan, who formerly worked as a liaison between the EPA and the town on technical issues surrounding the cleanup. Sullivan quit in 2005 over frustrations the EPA had not done toxicological studies.

Sullivan brought up a report made by former OIG investigator Cory Rumple, which was the catalyst for exposing problems with the Libby cleanup, but has still not been released to the public.

“The fact is, Senator, we’ve never gotten Cory Rumple’s report, have we?” Sullivan asked.

“No,” Baucus answered.

“And we won’t, will we?”

Baucus ensured Sullivan that he would get it, telling the Independent later, “I want to see it.”

Sullivan also brought up what he says was a commitment given by the EPA to do a toxicological study during a 2004 meeting in Denver.

“[In 2004] they promised us that they would have a risk assessment in six months,” he said, confirming with other members of the audience that this promise had been made.

“How many promises does it take?” he asked. “We would like to think there’s a new day coming in Libby, Montana. I’d especially like to see that happen.”

But, he continued, echoing a sentiment felt from Baucus and the rest of the crowd, “I don’t trust you, Ms. Bodine. Sorry to say that, but I don’t trust you.”

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.

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.

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.”