U.S. Government played down smelter risks
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Date:
Mon, 8 Jul 2002
From: Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State
of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Government played down smelter risks
By Chris Carroll Of The Post-Dispatch c2002, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
For 25 years, health officials from local, state and federal agencies -- sometimes working directly with the Doe Run Co. -- played down the health risks Herculaneum residents faced from the company's lead smelter operations.
Documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch through open records laws show that from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, officials learned of:
* High rates of child lead poisoning.
* Dangerously contaminated residential soil.
* Toxic dust inside homes.
* Continuous violation of federal air emissions limits by the Herculaneum smelter.
But instead of sounding the alarm, which might have spurred government action to clean things up, the health agencies emphasized those parts of the data that indicated things were getting better.
Several officials admit -- in hindsight -- that their agencies were remiss in not warning long ago of the scope of the lead problem in Herculaneum, a city of 2,800 people 30 miles south of St. Louis.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, they concede, the agencies failed to adequately protect public health in Herculaneum because they focused too tightly on the fact that blood-lead levels in children were dropping and the lead content in smelter emissions was dropping, too.
But, in what present-day officials attribute to a blind spot, the agencies overlooked a key variable. Over the same years, federal health regulators were continually tightening the blood-lead standard for lead poisoning. New medical research indicated that lead was dangerous at far lower blood levels than previously thought.
The result: Increasing numbers of Herculaneum children were found to be in danger of suffering lead's harmful effects. Those include decreased intelligence, stunted growth, behavioral problems, aches and pains and hearing impairment, among other things.
Herculaneum residents never heard that side of the story.
The situation changed dramatically last year, when state and federal agencies acted on the mountain of evidence and began removal of lead from yards, houses and elsewhere in the city. Then, this year, Missouri officials persuaded Doe Run to buy the homes of 160 families living in a heavily polluted area near the smelter.
One of the triggers for change was a lead poisoning study conducted last year by the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies. It found that 28 percent of Herculaneum children under 6 were in danger. Within a half-mile of the lead factory, more than half of children under 6 had elevated lead levels, according to results released this year.
The results called for strong government intervention, state health and environmental officials said.
"I've never seen anything in the state this high or that even approaches this," Scott Clardy, deputy director of environmental health for the state Health Department, told the Post-Dispatch in February.
But 10 years earlier -- in 1992 -- other Missouri officials had helped conduct a study that revealed rates of lead poisoning in Herculaneum that were twice as high. Seemingly, no one was alarmed.
That year, 40 of 71 children, or 56 percent, had dangerous lead levels, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of data received from the Jefferson County Health Department.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1991 set 10 micrograms of lead per one-tenth of a liter of blood as the level at which lead is known to have hurt children under 6 years old. The CDC recommends communitywide intervention activities if many children in a community have blood-lead levels of 10 micrograms or higher. But following the 1992 tests, local and state health authorities failed to keep track of children's lead levels in Herculaneum.
In the ensuing years, only a fraction of Herculaneum children received blood tests, and the state kept tabs on only 41 in its blood-lead database. In 1999, officials from the state health department, the Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were passing around an e-mail copy of the database that showed three-fourths of those 41 children had lead poisoning at least once.
Hindsight reveals "damning" data
"When you look back at it, some of that data is damning," said Steve Mahfood, director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources since 1998. "I think the feeling was, 'It's improving, and there's no sense in panicking.' There was a feeling that what was being done to reduce (smelter) emissions would work and the blood leads would drop quickly, and they were wrong."
Throughout the years of failed enforcement, officials had data at their command that should have spurred them to strong action, said an environmental law expert at Washington University.
"A health official who was paying attention should have been able to connect the dots between the lead in children's bedrooms and the contamination throughout Herculaneum," said Maxine Lipeles, director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at Washington University. "We've seen no information that the agencies that had the data attempted to look at it in the big picture."
Lead levels in the air were far from the only problem.
Lead levels inside 22 Herculaneum houses in 1986 averaged 1,877 lead parts per million, with the highest at 8,300 ppm. The average lead content in soil and play areas around houses measured that year was 1,200 parts per million, with a high of 9,250 ppm.
Such levels were known to be harmful. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in the late 1980s determined that soil and dust concentrations between 500 and 1,000 ppm can raise children's blood-lead levels.
Further testing in 1992 revealed high lead levels in houses and yards, including measurements in children's bedrooms ranging as high as 6,000 parts per million.
Playing down the risk
In official reports and communications to the city's residents, continuing health risks may have been obscured by the focus on the downward trend in average blood-lead levels in the city.
"What you need to do is try to give people a fair estimate of risk, and it appears to me that people in Herculaneum over the years probably didn't appreciate the risk," said Dennis Diehl, director of the Jefferson County Health Department. "Maybe that was due to the way the health department responded to the data we had."
Between 1975 and 2000, four blood-lead surveys indicated children's lead levels dropped from an average of 24.3 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 6.5, a 73 percent drop.
But child lead levels were dropping precipitously around the nation, by more than 80 percent during the same period, because of new regulations banning lead from paint and gas. Today, the average child's blood contains 1.9 micrograms of lead per deciliter, the CDC says. The average in Herculaneum revealed by the 2001 survey was 7.7.
The greater lead-level reductions elsewhere around the country should have highlighted Herculaneum's lead smelter problem more with each passing year. But it took a long time for that fact to register with health officials, Diehl said.
A pattern of complacency
Federal government researchers in 1975 were the first to deny that a lead-related public health problem existed in Herculaneum. That year, spurred by 1974 findings of extremely high lead levels in children at a smelter complex near Kellogg, Idaho, the CDC undertook a nationwide study of children living near lead, copper and zinc smelters.
Compared to Kellogg, the average child's blood-lead level in Herculaneum was less than half. Researchers concluded the Herculaneum smelter, as well as two other primary lead smelters in Missouri, did not pose a public health concern.
Yet the study also said that 11 percent of Herculaneum children had elevated blood-lead levels, and 29 percent had elevated levels of another toxic heavy metal, cadmium.
Starting with the 1975 study, the city's environmental problems may have been understated from the beginning, a state health official says.
"That's a good question -- did the initial study come to a wrong conclusion about Herculaneum?" said Pamela Walker, director of environmental public health for the Missouri Department of Health. "Looking back, with what we know now, yes, they were wrong."
In the years that followed 1975, Herculaneum residents would hear repeatedly there was not much risk.
"The (1975) study found individual cases of lead absorption . . . but no public health problem was detected," according to a Missouri Division of Health memo telling city residents of plans for a second blood-lead survey in 1984.
The 1984 study found that 18 percent of children were lead-poisoned by the then-current standard of 25 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.
An analysis of the study, published several years later by Missouri Division of Health epidemiologist Patrick Phillips and Doe Run executives Daniel Vornberg and James Lanzafame, dismissed the potential of health problems near the company's Herculaneum lead smelter.
The study said there was no need to clean houses of lead-contaminated dust and called into question government efforts to reduce the amount of lead being blown from the smelter into the air of Herculaneum.
"The most impact can be gained by reducing household dust levels," the authors wrote. "However, the authors did not find health problems from lead in Herculaneum warranting such actions."
More soothing words came from Jefferson County Health before the next blood-lead study in 1992.
"Based on recent voluntary testing done in the Herculaneum area, (neither) the Jefferson County Health Department nor The Doe Run Co. anticipate any high lead levels," a letter to Herculaneum residents from department director Mary Brassfield said.
The only public report that followed the 1992 survey was written by the Doe Run Co. It again reported the declining blood-lead trend, but residents were not told that by 1991 federal standards, most of the town's children were now classified as lead-poisoned.
Such misleading communication was all the city's residents had for years, says Leslie Warden, a Herculaneum resident who has been a vocal critic of both Doe Run and the government.
"The method in Herculaneum has always been to sugarcoat things and try to give people a false sense of security," she said. "No one was really going out trying to gather good data, and what the health department had, they weren't telling people about. People have had to rely on Doe Run forever to get information."
Following a blood-lead survey in 2000 that Doe Run helped organize, the company sent a monthly newsletter to Herculaneum residents that praised the company's efforts to stop lead poisoning -- again with help from the state health department.
"We didn't expect to find a lot of children with elevated blood-lead levels," a department employee assigned to Herculaneum was quoted as saying in the October 2000 newsletter. "The results of this test show a lot of effort on Doe Run's part to correct an old problem. They should definitely be applauded for all the efforts they are making to take care of an old problem."
A dramatic shift
The scene shifted dramatically just months later, as officials came to realize Herculaneum's pollution problem was very current.
Tests by the state's Department of Natural Resources last August revealed dust in the streets of Herculaneum containing up to 30 percent lead content.
Had state environmental officials reviewed previous studies of lead-ore hauling, including one by a scientist at the University of Missouri at Columbia that had sat in the files of the Department of Natural Resources since the mid-1970s, they would have known that hauling ore by truck through Herculaneum was likely to cause extensive contamination.
But officials reacted with surprise, and soon thereafter, the head of the state health department, Dr. Maureen E. Dempsey, called the situation in Herculaneum a "clear and present" danger to children's health. Signs were posted telling residents to stay off streets used to haul ore. The Department of Natural Resources and federal EPA issued strict new orders to Doe Run to accelerate cleanup activities and to stop the sources of pollution.
In February, the state health department released the results of blood tests of Herculaneum youngsters showing 28 percent had lead poisoning.
The blood-lead data was exhibit No. 1 at a meeting in March between state officials and Doe Run executives. By the end of the six-hour session, the company had agreed to buy the houses of 160 families in the most-polluted area of town, and to take immediate steps to purchase the houses of 26 families with small children.
It was the only logical protective step, given the health data, state health and environmental officials said afterward.
Some Herculaneum residents with young children say they are glad of the tough new stance the state is taking. Because of fear generated by news of lead poisoning, they say the buyout is the only way they can hope to sell their houses and move their children to a safer locale.
Members of a family that moved to town in 1999 said they also are angry that the problem essentially remained hidden for all those years.
"We're right in the middle of it now because the lead problem was kept quiet," said Grayson Rasnic, 31, who lives with his wife and 2-year-old son two blocks from Doe Run's 110-year-old smelter. "Before we bought here, the real estate agency assured us there was no problem and gave me Doe Run's and the Department of Natural Resources' Web sites to look at. We had no way of knowing everything wasn't normal."
MANAGING LEAD AT HERCULANEUM | 25 YEARS OF COMPLACENCY\
Reporter Chris Carroll:\
E-mail: chris carroll@post-dispatch.com\
Phone: 636-931-1016
http://home.post-dispatch.com/channel/pdweb.nsf/TodaySunday/86256A0E0068FE5086256BEF0046ED64?OpenDocument&PubWrapper=A-section
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