Big Trouble in Libby, Montana
Click
Here to Add Comment Subject:
Big Trouble in Libby, Montana
Date:
Mon, 20 Jan 2003 15:59:30 -0500
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
Big trouble in Libby, Montana - Sitting In / By Rick Holmes - Friday, January 17, 2003
After years of study, public comment and fierce lobbying, the Environmental Protection Administration was ready to act.
Hundreds of people had died from exposure to asbestos from the Zonolite Mountain mine in Libby, Montana, and though the mine had been closed years before, millions of homes, offices and schools contained vermiculite insulation that came from it.
The EPA had concluded it must declare a public health emergency, a rare step that would obligate the government to remove disease-causing insulation from homes in Libby and provide medical care for victims. It would also trigger notification of homeowners elsewhere who might have been exposed.
The announcement was to come last April. Press releases had been drafted, plans made for notifying state and federal officials. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, who had visited Libby in 2001, was considering a return to the small town near the Canadian border to make the declaration public.
Then the White House called. The press conference was canceled. The EPA quietly announced a new program to replace Zonolite insulation in Libby homes, but there would be no emergency declaration, no notification of the hazardous material hiding inside the walls of millions of homeowners - and no news story, at least not until eight months later.
Washington sources say the Office of Management and Budget had stepped in to the stop the EPA's declaration. But the EPA is a Cabinet-level agency that answers to the president, not the OMB. It doesn't take too much cynicism to see the hand of the political wing in the decision, acting at the behest of the owners of the Zonolite Mountain mine, chemical giant W.R. Grace, which gave nearly $200,000 to Republicans in the 2000 campaign.
This CEO administration can be expected to sympathize with Grace, whose tolerance of toxic waste here in Massachusetts was spotlighted in "A Civil Action." Vice-president Dick Cheney can relate: His former company, Halliburton, has seen its fortunes fall over asbestos-liability claims it acquired under a deal Cheney negotiated as CEO.
This story of Whitman's retreat didn't get much play. It was broken by Andrew Schneider, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who had covered the Libby story for years. Schneider's story came out over the holidays, when the Washington media were obsessed with the birthday party antics of Trent Lott. The big east coast papers played it inside, if at all.
Sweeping a Montana environmental disaster under the rug was just another in a series of retreats by Whitman since taking over the EPA. Her first move was to rule that high levels of arsenic in drinking water aren't so bad after all. Then she went along as Bush broke a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. A few months after scotching the Libby declaration, the EPA announced it was loosening Clean Air Act requirements on aging, dirty, Midwestern power plants that Whitman had sued to enforce when she was New Jersey governor.
Last week brought another environmental retreat. Whitman announced a new set of rules that will remove federal protection from millions of acres of wetlands covered by the Clean Water Act.
With the economy reeling and war on the horizon, maybe all this isn't such a big deal, unless you or one of your loved ones is slowly suffocating from asbestosis, or unless you live in a state downwind from power plants that have exceeded federal air pollution limits for decades, or unless there's a pond or stream you care about that was, until George W. Bush moved into the White House, protected from the bulldozer by federal law.
What's truly scary is that these retreats have garnered so little notice - and that the regulatory moves we hear about are just the tip of the iceberg. Last March, the chief of the EPA's civil enforcement office, a career civil servant, resigned. In a letter to Whitman, Eric Schaeffer said the White House "seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce."
This administration is brutally effective at using the regulatory powers of the executive branch to pursue the agendas of its political supporters, and it is especially good at doing its work quietly. The price of its effectiveness will be felt by the environment, and by generations of Americans to come.
Rick Holmes is opinion page editor for the MetroWest Daily News. He can be reached by e-mail at rholmes@cnc.com.
Well Mr. Helliker, James P. Keough, M.D. recently noted: "If you poison your boss a little each day it's called murder; if your boss poisons you a little each day its called Threshold Limit Value."
Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten
If you would like to be included in our mailing list for continuing information on pesticides, please email us at list@safe2use.com.