St. Louis Post-Dispatch White House budget office thwarts EPA warning on asbestos-laced insulation

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http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Commentary/News/2002/2002-1227-StLPD-asbestos.htm

 

 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

27 December 2002

 

White House budget office thwarts EPA warning on asbestos-laced insulation

Andrew Schneider

 

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency was on the verge of warning

millions of Americans that their attics and walls might contain

asbestos-contaminated insulation. But, at the last minute, the White House

intervened, and the warning has never been issued.

 

The agency's refusal to share its knowledge of what is believed to be a

widespread health risk has been criticized by a former EPA administrator under

two Republican presidents, a Democratic U.S. senator and physicians and

scientists who have treated victims of the contamination.

 

The announcement to warn the public was expected in April. It was to accompany a

declaration by the EPA of a public health emergency in Libby, Mont. In that town

near the Canadian border, ore from a vermiculite mine was contaminated with an

extremely lethal asbestos fiber called tremolite that has killed or sickened

thousands of miners and their families.

 

Ore from the Libby mine was shipped across the nation and around the world,

ending up in insulation called Zonolite that was used in millions of homes,

businesses and schools across America.

 

A public health emergency declaration had never been issued by any agency. It

would have authorized the removal of the disease-causing insulation from homes

in Libby and also provided long-term medical care for those made sick.

Additionally, it would have triggered notification of property owners elsewhere

who might be exposed to the contaminated insulation.

 

Zonolite insulation was sold throughout North America from the 1940s through the

1990s. Almost all of the vermiculite used in the insulation came from the Libby

mine, last owned by W.R. Grace & Co.

 

In a meeting in mid-March, EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman and Marianne

Horinko, head of the Superfund program, met with Paul Peronard, the EPA

coordinator of the Libby cleanup and his team of health specialists. Whitman and

Horinko asked tough questions, and apparently got the answers they needed. They

agreed they had to move ahead on a declaration, said a participant in the

meeting.

 

By early April, the declaration was ready to go. News releases had been written

and rewritten. Lists of governors to call and politicians to notify had been

compiled. Internal e-mail shows that discussions had even been held on whether

Whitman would go to Libby for the announcement.

 

But the declaration was never made.

 

Derailed by White House

 

Interviews and documents show that just days before the EPA was set to make the

declaration, the plan was thwarted by the White House Office of Management and

Budget, which had been told of the proposal months earlier.

 

Both the budget office and the EPA acknowledge that the White House agency was

actively involved, but neither agency would discuss how or why.

 

The EPA's chief spokesman Joe Martyak said, " Contact OMB for the details. "

 

Budget office spokesperson Amy Call said, " These questions will have to be

addressed to the EPA. "

 

Call said the budget office provided wording for the EPA to use, but she

declined to say why the White House opposed the declaration and the public

notification.

 

" These are part of our internal discussions with EPA, and we don't discuss

predecisional deliberations, " Call said.

 

Both agencies refused Freedom of Information Act requests for documents to and

from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

 

The budget office was created in 1970 to evaluate all budget, policy,

legislative, regulatory, procurement and management issues on behalf of the

president.

 

Office interfered before

 

Former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, who worked for Presidents Richard

Nixon and Ronald Reagan, called the decision not to notify homeowners of the

dangers posed by Zonolite insulation " the wrong thing to do. "

 

" When the government comes across this kind of information and doesn't tell

people about it, I just think it's wrong, unconscionable, not to do that, " he

said. " Your first obligation is to tell the people living in these homes of the

possible danger.

 

They need the information so they can decide what actions are best for their

family. What right does the government have to conceal these dangers? It just

doesn't make sense. "

 

But, he added, pressure on the EPA from the budget office or the White House is

not unprecedented.

 

Ruckelshaus, who became the EPA's first administrator when the agency was

created by Nixon in 1970, said he never was called by the president directly to

discuss agency decisions. He said the same held true when he was called back to

lead the EPA by Reagan after Anne Gorsuch Burford's scandal-plagued tenure.

 

Calls from a White House staff member or the Office of Management and Budget

were another matter.

 

" The pressure could come from industry pressuring OMB or if someone could find a

friendly ear in the White House to get them to intervene, " Ruckelshaus said.

" These issues like asbestos are so technical, often so convoluted, that

industry's best chance to stop us or modify what we wanted to do would come from

OMB. "

 

The question about what to do about Zonolite insulation was not the only

asbestos-related issue in which the White House intervened.

 

In January, in an internal EPA report on problems with the agency's

much-criticized response to the terrorist attacks in New York City, a section on

" lessons learned " said there was a need to release public health and emergency

information without having it reviewed and delayed by the White House.

 

" We cannot delay releasing important public health information, " said the

report. " The political consequences of delaying information are greater than the

benefit of centralized information management. "

 

It was the White House budget office's Office of Information and Regulatory

Affairs that derailed the Libby declaration. The regulatory affairs office is

headed by John Graham, who formerly ran the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

 

His appointment last year was denounced by environmental, health and public

advocacy groups, who claimed his ties to industry were too strong. Graham passes

judgment over all major national health, safety and environmental standards.

 

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., urged colleagues to vote against Graham's appointment,

saying Graham would have to recuse himself from reviewing many rules because

affected industries donated to the Harvard University Center.

 

Thirty physicians, 10 of them from Harvard, according to The Washington Post,

wrote the committee asking that Graham not be confirmed because of " a persistent

pattern of conflict of interest, of obscuring and minimizing dangers to human

health with questionable cost-benefit analyses, and of hostility to governmental

regulation in general. "

 

Repeated requests for interviews with Graham or anyone else involved in the

White House budget office decision were denied.

 

" It was like a gut shot "

 

Whitman, Horinko and some members of their top staff were said to have been

outraged at the White House intervention.

 

" It was like a gut shot, " said one of those senior staffers involved in the

decision. " It wasn't that they ordered us not to make the declaration, they just

really, really strongly suggested against it. Really strongly. There was no

choice left. "

 

She and other staff members said Whitman was personally interested in Libby and

the national problems spawned by its asbestos-tainted ore. The EPA's inspector

general had reported that the agency hadn't taken action more than two decades

earlier when it had proof that the people of Libby and those using

asbestos-tainted Zonolite products were in danger.

 

Whitman went to Libby in early September 2001 and promised the people it would

never happen again.

 

" We want everyone who comes in contact with vermiculite — from homeowners to

handymen — to have the information to protect themselves and their families, "

Whitman promised.

 

Suits, bankruptcies grow

 

Political pragmatists in the agency knew the administration was angered that a

flood of lawsuits had caused more than a dozen major corporations — including

W.R. Grace — to file for bankruptcy protection. The suits sought billions of

dollars on behalf of people injured or killed from exposure to asbestos in their

products or workplaces.

 

Republicans on Capitol Hill crafted legislation — expected to be introduced next

month — to stem the flow of these suits.

 

Nevertheless, Whitman told her people to move forward with the emergency

declaration. Those in the EPA who respect their boss fear that Whitman may quit.

 

She has taken heat for other White House decisions such as a controversial

decision on levels of arsenic in drinking water, easing regulations to allow

50-year-old power plants to operate without implementing modern pollution

controls and a dozen other actions which environmentalists say favor industry

over health.

 

Newspapers in her home state of New Jersey ran front page stories this month

saying Whitman had told Bush she wanted to leave the agency.

 

Spokesman Martyak said his boss is staying on the job.

 

EPA was poised to act

 

In October, the EPA complied with a Freedom of Information Act request and gave

the Post-Dispatch access to thousands of documents — in nine large file boxes.

There were hundreds of e-mails, scores of " action memos " describing the

declaration and piles of " communication strategies " for how the announcement

would be made.

 

The documents illustrated the internal and external battle over getting the

declaration and announcement released.

 

One of the most contentious concerns was the anticipated national backlash from

the Libby declaration. EPA officials knew that if the agency announced that the

insulation in Montana was so dangerous that an emergency had to be declared,

people elsewhere whose homes contained the same contaminated Zonolite would want

answers or perhaps demand to have their homes cleaned.

 

The language of the declaration was molded to stress how unique Libby was and to

play down the national problem.

 

But many in the agency's headquarters and regional offices didn't buy it.

 

In a Feb. 22 memo, the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics said " the

national ramifications are enormous " and estimated that if only 1 million homes

have Zonolite " (are) we not put in a position to remove their (insulation) at a

national cost of over $10 billion? "

 

The memo also questioned the agency's claim that the age of Libby's homes and

severe winter conditions in Montana required a higher level of maintenance,

which in turn meant increased disturbance of the insulation in the homes there.

 

It's " a shallow argument, " the memo said. " There are older homes which exist in

harsh or harsher conditions across the country. Residents in Maine and Michigan

might find this argument flawed. "

 

No one knows precisely how many dwellings are insulated with Zonolite. Memos

from the EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry repeatedly

cite an estimate of between 15 million and 35 million homes.

 

A government analysis of shipping records from W.R. Grace show that at least

15.6 billion pounds of vermiculite ore was shipped from Libby to 750 plants and

factories throughout North America.

 

Between a third and half of that ore was popped into insulation and usually sold

in 3-foot-high kraft paper bags.

 

Government extrapolations and interviews with former W.R. Grace Zonolite

salesmen indicate that Illinois may have as many as 800,000 homes with Zonolite,

Michigan as many as 700,000. Missouri is likely to have Zonolite in 380,000

homes.

 

With four processing plants in St. Louis, it is estimated that more than 60,000

homes, offices and schools were insulated with Zonolite in the St. Louis area

alone.

 

Eventually, the internal documents show, acceptance grew that the agency should

declare a public health emergency.

 

In a confidential memo dated March 28, an EPA official said the declaration was

tentatively set for April 5.

But the declaration never came.

 

Instead, Superfund boss Horinko on May 9 quietly ordered that asbestos be

removed from contaminated homes in Libby. There was no national warning of

potential dangers from Zonolite. And there was no promise of long-term medical

care for Libby's ill and dying. The presence of the White House budget office is

noted throughout the documents. The press announcement of the watered-down

decision was rewritten five times the day before it was released to accommodate

budget office wording changes that played down the dangers.

 

Dangers of Zonolite

 

The asbestos in Zonolite, like all asbestos products, is believed to be either a

minimal risk or no risk if it is not disturbed. The asbestos fibers must be

airborne to be inhaled. The fibers then become trapped in the lungs, where they

may cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, a fast-moving cancer of the

lung's lining.

 

The EPA's files are filled with studies documenting the toxicity of tremolite,

how even minor disruptions of the material by moving boxes, sweeping the floor

or doing repairs in attics can generate asbestos fibers.

 

This also has been confirmed by simulations W.R. Grace ran in Weedsport, N.Y.,

in July 1977; by 1997 studies by the Canadian Department of National Defense;

and by the U.S. Public Health Service, which reported in 2000, that " even

minimal handling by workers or residents poses a substantial health risk. "

 

Last December, a study by Christopher Weis, the EPA's senior toxicologist

supporting the Libby project, reported that " the concentrations of asbestos

fibers that occur in air following disturbance of (insulation) may reach levels

of potential human health concerns. "

 

Most of those who have studied the needle-sharp tremolite fibers in the Libby

ore consider them far more dangerous than other asbestos fibers.

 

In October, the EPA team leading the cleanup of lower Manhattan after the

attacks of Sept. 11 went to Libby to meet with Peronard and his crew. The EPA

had reversed an early decision and announced that it would be cleaning asbestos

from city apartments.

 

Libby has been a laboratory for doing just that.

 

Peronard told the visitors from New York just how dangerous tremolite is. He

talked about the hands-on research in Libby of Dr. Alan Whitehouse, a

pulmonologist who had worked for NASA and the Air Force on earlier projects

before moving to Spokane, Wash.

 

" Whitehouse's research on the people here gave us our first solid lead of how

bad this tremolite is, " Peronard said.

 

Whitehouse has not only treated 500 people from Libby who are sick and dying

from exposure to tremolite. The chest specialist also has almost 300 patients

from Washington shipyards and the Hanford, Wash., nuclear facility who are

suffering health effects from exposure to the more prevalent chrysotile

asbestos.

 

Comparing the two groups, Whitehouse has demonstrated that the tremolite from

Libby is 10 times as carcinogenic as chrysotile and probably 100 times more

likely to produce mesothelioma than chrysotile.

 

W.R. Grace has maintained that its insulation is safe. On April 3 of this year,

the company wrote a letter to Whitman again insisting its product was safe and

that no public health declaration or nationwide warning was warranted.

 

Dr. Brad Black, who runs the asbestos clinic in Libby and acts as health officer

for Montana's Lincoln County, says " people have a right to be warned of the

potential danger they may face if they disturb that stuff. "

 

Martyak, chief EPA spokesman, argues that the agency has informed the public of

the potential dangers. " It's on our Web site, " he said.

 

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is sponsoring legislation to ban asbestos in the

United States. She said the Web site warning is a joke.

 

" EPA's answer that people have been warned because it's on their Web site is

ridiculous, " she said. " If you have a computer, and you just happened to think

about what's in your attic, and you happen to be on EPA's Web page, then you get

to know. This is not the way the safety of the public is handled.

 

" We, the government, the EPA, the administration have a responsibility to at

least let people know the information so they can protect themselves if they go

into those attics, " she said.

 

What you should know about asbestos dangers

 

Zonolite insulation has been produced and sold for home and business use for

more than half a century. The featherweight, silverish-brown pieces of

popcornlike vermiculite are usually the size of a nickel or dime, but some firms

have sold pea-size vermiculite.

 

Here's what government experts say you should do:

 

If you're a homeowner: Stay away from Zonolite insulation, and leave it alone.

 

Asbestos is dangerous only when the material is disturbed and the fibers become

airborne and can be drawn into the lungs.

 

If you must work in the attic: " If you're a do-it-yourselfer or someone who's in

attics every day — like electricians, telephone people, cable installers, the

heating and cooling people — get and wear the proper respirator and change your

clothes before you go home, " says Paul Peronard of the Environmental Protection

Agency.

 

If you don't know whether you have Zonolite but think you might: Do not let

children play in the area. Do not sweep the Zonolite or use a normal vacuum

cleaner. This will just recirculate the dangerous fibers, which could linger in

the air for days. There are vacuum cleaners on the market that come with highly

sensitive HEPA filters that will capture the fibers.

 

If you want to find out about the material in your attic: There are asbestos

testing laboratories in or near most communities.

If you want Zonolite removed: For do-it-yourselfers, the EPA and many state and

local health departments can tell you the safest way to get rid of the

insulation.

 

Professional cleanup help is available, but hiring a professional asbestos

remover can be costly. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, have the

insulation tested by one firm and removed by another. State and local agencies

have the names and numbers of people trained, equipped and licensed to do this

work.

 

Carefully check out the credentials of those you hire. An untrained or sloppy

crew can spread asbestos throughout your house or office.

 

For more information:

 

U.S. EPA — National Asbestos Hot Line: 1-800-368-5888

U.S. EPA Region 7 (Missouri): 1-800-223-0425

U.S. EPA Region 5 (Illinois): 1-800-621-8431

EPA Web site: www.epa.gov (search for vermiculite)

Missouri — Office of Environmental Health and Air Pollution Control:

1-800-392-7245

St. Louis County Health Department, Air Pollution Control: 314-615-8923 or 8924

St. Louis, Division of Air Pollution Control: 314-613-7300

Illinois: The health departments in Madison, St. Clair, Monroe and Clinton

counties say they refer all calls involving asbestos to the Illinois Department

of Public Health: 1-217-782-5830

 

 

 

 

 

 

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