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Ronnie Greene stories from The Center for Public Integrity 2014-12-17T19:52:16-05:00 http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/3596/rss Residents of polluted U.S. communities fear planned cuts in EPA enforcement http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14550 The EPA's "Next Generation Compliance" plan would lead to fewer inspections of, and enforcement actions against, polluters. Cutting into enforcement Environment;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Clean Air Act;Earth;Clean Water Act;New Source Review;Environmental justice;Air pollution in the United States;Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance;Regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act;Environmental protection 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2014-04-09T06:00:00-04:00
In New Mexico, Navajo communities worry that uranium mining could contaminate the aquifer that feeds their drinking water. In southeastern states from Alabama to Virginia, residents fear a cluster of coal-powered plants will impact their health for generations. And in the Harlem section of Manhattan, advocates say the high rates of asthma among residents are a "direct result from breathing dirty air."

For these communities and others abutting big industry, worry over failing health and pollution has intensified as the Environmental Protection Agency intends to significantly curtail the number of inspections and enforcement cases it brings nationwide over the next five years.

Those cutbacks — continuing a trend, the Center for Public Integrity found, that began in 2006 and accelerated last year — mean the EPA will conduct thousands fewer inspections and evaluations each year, and initiate and conclude thousands fewer judicial and administrative enforcement cases.

Near the end of its draft Strategic Plan for 2014-18, the EPA details the hard numbers:

By 2018, the agency would conduct an average of 14,000 federal inspections and evaluations per year across the country. That's a 33-percent dip from the annual EPA caseloads from 2005-09, and a 30-percent drop from 2012.

By 2018, the EPA would initiate an average of 2,320 civil judicial and administrative enforcement cases a year in the five-year span. The drop: 41 percent from 2005-09 figures, and 23 percent from 2012.

And, by 2018, the agency envisions concluding 2,000 civil judicial and administrative enforcement cases per year, a 47-percent dip from the caseloads in 2005-09, and a 33-percent cut from 2012.

The EPA said it intends to put its enforcement might behind major pollution cases across the country. Under its five-year plan, the agency would focus, for instance, on criminal cases "having the most significant health, environmental, and deterrence impacts."

"The strategic decision to focus on high impact cases means that the overall number of cases will tend to be lower than in past years," the EPA told the Center in a written statement. "We anticipate this strategy will result in a higher level of public health protection because of the significant impacts associated with the large cases, and the precedent they set for performance of large facilities across the country."

Environmental advocates are not swayed. The planned reduction in federal enforcement comes as residents near industry fence lines say states are doing little to protect them.

Advocates: Cuts to impact minority, impoverished communities

"It's this perfect storm," said John Suttles, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit handling environmental cases in six states. "I think it's a really dangerous situation."

Suttles, based in North Carolina, points to recent environmental incidents in the state including the Duke Energy coal ash spill into the Dan River. In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory worked for Duke Energy for 29 years before taking office — a connection that has put the governor on the defensive over the state's dealings with the utility giant.

Even before the spill, according to emails obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center, state regulators consulted Duke Energy before seeking to exclude citizens from settlement talks over groundwater pollution triggered by the utility's coal ash ponds.

Beginning in 2009, the Center for Public Integrity exposed the environmental perils of coal ash ponds. Earlier this year, the EPA announced it would begin regulating the disposal of coal ash as part of a settlement to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups.

In the southeastern U.S., the environmental hazards extend beyond that one issue, said the law center, among those that have submitted comments to the EPA about its strategic plan.

Suttles told the EPA that each of the six states his group represents — Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee — ranks high in terms of adverse health effects from coal-fired plants. "Atlanta, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia, experience some of the worst health effects from power plants of any metro area in the country," he wrote.

"It's come as no surprise that you typically don't see big power plants and large coal ash impoundments near communities with million-dollar homes," Suttles said in an interview. "These big industrial sites, statistically, tend to be located disproportionately near poor and minority communities. … So if EPA pulls back, I think these communities are even going to face greater risks."

EPA enforcement, he and other advocates say, can make a difference. "When EPA is on the beat and EPA is conducting inspections and launching investigations and bringing enforcement actions, it achieves kind of a magnified level of compliance."

'Next Generation Compliance'

The EPA's plan to downshift the number of its inspections, and to focus its enforcement efforts more and more on "high impact" cases, is part of a larger strategy the agency calls "Next Generation Compliance."

Much of the strategy focuses on using electronic reporting and advanced monitoring devices to keep tabs on pollution more accurately, allowing the agency to target enforcement cases.

"The most effective way to achieve compliance with the law is to make it easier to comply than to violate. EPA is using new technologies and lessons learned about what drives compliance to reduce pollution and improve results," said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, in an article published in The Environmental Forum.

In the early 2000s, the number of EPA enforcement cases initiated and concluded increased steadily, peaking in 2006, a Center analysis of agency numbers shows. Since then, there has been a gradual decline.

In the most recent fiscal year, however, there was a significant drop, as the EPA noted that it had started pursuing larger, more complex cases that it expected would have a bigger payoff. The new strategic plan envisions a further reduction in the number of cases.

By 2018, the plan states, the number of cases concluded each year would be just over half of the average for the period 2000-2013. The number of inspections and evaluations would drop from an average of about 20,000 per year to roughly 14,000.

This approach is driven in part by budget constraints. During tight financial times, the agency said, it must be innovative. That includes using modern technology to monitor and target pollution.

"The burden of monitoring and compliance reporting will be reduced for the EPA and others by investing in state-of-the-art monitoring technology and supporting electronic interaction with the regulated community," the agency said in its budget plan. "This will allow the EPA and others to more effectively deploy its inspection resources."

Yet some environmental experts, including a former top EPA official, are, essentially, asking the EPA to back up its words with concrete action.

"In the final analysis, our government is measured by what it does and not what it says," Eric Schaeffer, former director of the EPA's Office of Civil Enforcement, and now director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, wrote to the EPA.

"We hope that EPA is not signaling that it will reduce the quantity or quality of the enforcement actions it brings against the big polluters," Schaeffer wrote. "There is no substitute for federal action in these situations, and EPA is already only able to address a handful of the serious violations that need attention."

He added, "NextGen goals include making regulations 'easier' to comply with, but EPA will need to explain what that means. Presumably, it does not mean relaxing emission limits or adopting monitoring requirements that make it impossible to ever establish that a violation has occurred."

The EPA told the Center it has been "aggressively going after significant sources of hazardous pollutants." It cited high-profile cases including a Clean Water Act prosecution of Wal-Mart in California, and a Clean Air Act criminal and civil case against a New York plant that failed to use required pollution controls.

"To be clear, Next Gen will not replace traditional enforcement," the agency said. "Next Gen is designed to support and strengthen our commitment to deter violations and increase compliance with environmental laws."

Environmental worries in New Mexico, New York

The EPA's Giles, in her write-up in the environmental publication, said advanced monitoring technologies "can help make these problems obsolete. Monitoring devices are becoming more accurate, more mobile, and cheaper, all of which are contributing to a revolution in how we find and fix pollution problems."

That approach, she said, will be coupled with an EPA commitment to move away from paper reporting. For years, facilities have submitted reports to the agency on paper, and then an EPA staffer would manually enter the information on computer. "Or, in a time of declining budgets, the paper sits in a corner unopened, until someone has time to examine the data and see if any violations appear likely," she wrote.

Important pollution information could fall through the cracks. E-reporting will move the reports more seamlessly — and make government more transparent, the agency said. "If you want to view paper records, you need to travel to a government office and sit there with your pad and pencil taking notes," Giles noted. "How much easier would it be if the same data could be reviewed online, creating government that is more open and gives people information about facilities and pollution that affects them?"

Yet, in some corners of the U.S., environmental advocates say some of the neediest communities could be left out. One example: In New Mexico, where Native-American communities confront pollution concerns.

"Electronic means of communication don't reach people in those communities, because people in those communities generally speaking don't have access to the Internet," said Douglas Meiklejohn, executive director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center. "There are large areas of Native American reservations where there isn't any electricity, much less access to the Internet."

For such communities, he said, in-person contact — with inspectors literally sitting down with residents and seeing what they see — is more meaningful.

"And it gives them the ability to take the EPA officials to their homes, and say, now look there's this uranium mine … 100 yards across the street from us. Look at it, and feel the way the wind is blowing," said Meiklejohn, who is among those to file memos challenging the EPA's shifting enforcement focus.

"And that's something that you can't really get if you're sitting in an office in Dallas or Washington or Denver or some other EPA office, and somebody writes that down on a piece of paper for you. It just doesn't have the same impact."

In New Mexico, the law center represents two Navajo communities working to prevent leach mining of uranium from contaminating groundwater. In another community in Albuquerque, residents are dealing with health issues and air pollution from a demolition debris landfill.

In New York, a group called WE ACT for Environmental Justice said the EPA cutbacks would be detrimental for Harlem, where, the organization said, residents suffer escalated rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease and development effects in babies are elevated as well.

"We cannot understand how the Agency will advance human health and cut some of the most critical activities of the Agency to reducing pollution across the board," the community-based organization wrote to the EPA.

The EPA's presence can make a tangible difference with polluters and those battling pollution, Jalonne L. White-Newsome, WE ACT's federal policy analyst, said in an interview.

"Keeping that constant eye on our industrial partners can have drastic impact," she said. "To me when you're kind of taking those resources away, especially from the areas and the people that really need them, I don't think it's going to play out too well."

Some communities, White-Newsome said, are "fighting to breathe clean air every day."

"You're saying public health is important, but this is a different message that communities are receiving," White-Newsome said. "It's great to write these great laws, but what it really boils down to is enforcement. And what is the message you are sending to the communities?"
 Johnny Collins, of Kernersville, N.C., holds a large photo of a Duke Energy coal plant during a February 2014 protest near Duke Energy's headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., over Duke Energy's coal plants. Duke Energy estimates that up to 82,000 tons of ash has been released from a break in a 48-inch storm water pipe at the Dan River Power Plant earlier in February. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Chris Hamby http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-hamby States target toxic chemicals as Washington fails to act http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14505 In state capitols from Maine to Oregon, environmental advocates are filing bills to identify and ban noxious chemicals. States target toxics Environment;United States;Vermont;Toxic Substances Control Act;American Chemistry Council;94th United States Congress;California Green Chemistry Initiative 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2014-04-02T06:00:00-04:00
In Vermont, the Senate has just passed a bill potentially empowering the Green Mountain State to ban chemicals it deems harmful to consumers. Some 3,000 miles away, in Washington State, environmental reformers weren't as successful: A bill to ban six toxic flame retardants died in the Senate, beaten back by industry opposition and politicians' cries of state overreaching.

In state capitols from Maine to Oregon, environmental advocates are filing bills to identify and ban noxious chemicals and industry groups are fighting back with pointed rebukes and high-pitched lobbying. Toxic reform legislation is either breathing with new life or being extinguished altogether.

The toxics tug-of-war in state houses is direct fallout from the muddled environmental politicking of Washington, D.C.

In 1976, Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, a federal framework intended to safeguard the public from dangerous chemicals. Yet in the nearly four decades since, TSCA, as it is known, has done little more than gather dust. Among tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency has "only been able to require testing on a little more than 200 existing chemicals," and banned five, the EPA told The Center for Public Integrity.

Everyone wants to revamp TSCA — from the industry's $100 million lobbying arm, the American Chemistry Council, to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, to the EPA itself.

Yet three years to the month since the late New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg proposed sweeping change through the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011, the TSCA overhaul remains in the works, with proposals, counter-proposals and criticisms about the working draft's fine print.

Fed up with logjams in D.C., state legislators are filing hundreds of measures in their own states to do what the federal government hasn't — take action against destructive chemicals, by singling out the most dangerous toxins and seeking to remove them from shelves.

While the political smoke continues in Washington, the chemical reform fire is playing out in statehouses from Montpelier to Olympia.

At least 442 bills involving toxics and chemicals have been filed in 2014, or refiled from previous sessions, covering 39 states, according to an environmental health legislation database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures. A year earlier, 399 such bills were filed and the year before that, the database shows, more than 500.

"There's only so much you will say, 'We can wait and see. It will be great if the feds do something.' I think people are losing patience," said Justin Johnson, deputy secretary of the Vermont Agency for Natural Resources.

As the Center for Public Integrity reported last year, the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups fight nearly every state measure, contending that a patchwork of state laws would do more harm than good, and that true change should come through TSCA. The industry's statehouse pushback, fueled by a chemical advocacy group that spends tens of millions of lobbying dollars along with making political campaign donations, has helped beat back hundreds of state bills in recent years.

Vermont's Johnson is among the state officials who understand the argument that having multitudes of differing state laws "is not the way to go." Yet in his state, as in others, the argument of waiting for Congress to act has grown stale.

"I've been personally to the statehouse here in Vermont for five years in a row. 'Let's wait and see what the feds do,'" said Johnson, who serves on the Environmental Council of the States, a nonpartisan association of state leaders. "It's getting pretty old."

Bills filed, and fought, from Vermont to Washington State

Last week in Vermont, the Senate approved Senate Bill 239, which would allow the state Department of Health to "identify and publish a list of chemicals of high concern," following the lead of states such as Washington and Maine. The bill would require manufacturers of products using such chemicals to notify the state, "and to replace the chemical with a safer alternative."

"Given where we are with the toxics reform at the federal level; given that we haven't seen movement there; and given that we have over 60,000 chemicals that haven't been adequately tested for their effect on public health, this is the way to begin," the bill sponsor, Sen. Virginia "Ginny" Lyons, told a Vermont news website.

The bill must clear the House before becoming law.

As in other states, the toxics legislation faces opposition from industry, with lobbyists describing it as another piece in a patchwork of state laws across the U.S.

The Toy Industry Association, a trade group composed of 700 members, has gone on record opposing the bill, citing what it views as a "flawed scientific approach" as the basis for the measure, and the "immense cost to businesses" and the state.

"TIA commends the bill sponsors for their keen interest in the safety of children. We share that interest, and our industry is founded on the mission of bringing fun and joy to children's lives," the association wrote Vermont legislators.

"However, we have serious concerns regarding Senate Bill 239 as it does not consider the existing robust safety system for toys sold in this country — including federal regulation and international standards — and will create unnecessary burden on companies doing business in Vermont with arguably no measurable increase in safety."

In Washington State, industry opposition helped quash the Toxic-Free Kids & Families Act. The measure would have banned six flame retardants on the state's list of "Chemicals of High Concern for Children" — and put the onus on manufacturers to replace them with safer chemicals.

Sen. Sharon Nelson, a Democrat who has pushed toxics legislation for several years in Washington State, is among the legislators weary of waiting for the federal government to act. "We haven't seen the changes at the federal level," she said. "Ultimately the science will prevail, but it's hard."

As they had in previous sessions, the Association of Washington Business and the American Chemistry Council pushed back against the flame retardants bill, officially filing opposition to the proposal.

The bill died in the state Senate.

"I've seen every time we go into this across the nation, the chemistry council comes in behind the scenes and does a good job about casting questions: Should we be doing this at the state level? They've done a good job of just constantly either trying to water down the bills or kill them," Senator Nelson said. "They've been effective. They are well-heeled lobbyists."

Republican State Sen. Doug Ericksen, chair of the Washington legislature's Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee, said the bill as proposed was problematic, putting too much power in the hands of a state agency to potentially ban chemicals.

Ericksen said he proposed a compromise measure but Democrats didn't go along. Sen. Nelson said that measure was watered down to ban chemicals already being phased out.

In a broader sense, Sen. Ericksen echoes the industry's biggest complaint with state bills. "The issue you get into is creating an island in Washington State," Ericksen said. "I would say it doesn't help for Washington State to have a go it alone mentality."

Brandon Housekeeper, an Association of Washington Business government affairs official, used the same phrasing as Ericksen in describing his group's opposition, asking "Whether Washington should act alone as an island and ban chemicals used in commerce."

Housekeeper said the AWB, which describes itself as the state's "premiere advocate for the business community" representing 8,000 members, helped Ericksen create the alternate bill. "Just an out and out ban in these things in their use didn't seem appropriate, so we proposed a different path to get to that result," Housekeeper said.

How effective was the industry effort? "I think the opponents of the legislation obviously had some voice and hand in how legislators reacted to the legislation. Because I think we asked valid questions," Housekeeper said.

The AWB's slogan: "We mean business." Ericksen said he listens to industry and "all different points of view."

"The industry groups are not necessarily opposed to eliminating these harmful chemicals from these product lines," he said. "They just find it difficult when they are mandated to be included in one state and mandated to be prohibited in another state."

More state battles: Oregon, Connecticut, Maine

Legislators in other states have also filed bills this session to identify and remove unsafe chemicals. In state after state, the legislation encounters strong industry pushback, with critics working capitol hallways to douse reform proposals.

"Even if these bills don't pass, it's raising awareness," said Oregon Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, who for several years has proposed a bill that would, like Washington State's, create a state list of high priority chemicals for children's health.

Again this year, the bill was shot down. "The industry fought it very hard," the Oregon legislator said.

Creating lists of dangerous chemicals can make a difference, Keny-Guyer believes. "If companies see they are showing up in these things, there's much more incentive for them to find safer chemicals," she said.

In many states, getting from proposal to approved bill is a steep climb.

In Connecticut, advocates are again trying to win approval for a bill allowing the state to compile and maintain a list of harmful chemicals. Supporters crafted the bill so it would not cost the state government a penny.

That same measure was pitched in 2013 but failed when the proposal was talked to death by a committee and never came to a vote.

"We really feel like we're doing everything we can to kind of build momentum, but we're not resting on anything at this point. I know that the industry is continuing to fight the bill on a daily basis," said Anne Hulick, coordinator for the nonprofit Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut. "I'm worried the opposition is building and we don't see it."

The lack of an updated TSCA is a "really big factor," she said, in why states like Connecticut need their own laws to target hazardous chemicals.

In Maine, advocates are pushing legislation in a state where the Republican governor last year vetoed a bill intended to protect pregnant women and children from harmful chemicals, and where the head of the Department of Environmental Protection is a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council. A spokeswoman for the Maine DEP's director, Patricia Aho, said any potential conflicts had been "thoroughly vetted" before she took office in 2011. The governor's office said he vetoed bills that were "not good policy."

This year's toxic reform push is a direct offshoot of the languishing pace of TSCA overhaul in D.C.

"It's huge," said Beth Ahearn, political director for the Maine Conservation Voters. "It creates all the reason we've decided to go ahead on our own, because we cannot wait for TSCA reform."
 A chemical plant in West Virginia Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Long-awaited EPA pesticide protections a 'mixed bag' for farmworkers http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14287 After more than two decades, the EPA revised rules to protect farmworkers from pesticides, but advocates say they don't go far enough. Lost opportunities Health;Environment;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Agriculture;Pesticide;Environmental health;Pesticides;Farmworker;Shelley Davis;Worker Protection Standard;Pesticide regulation in the United States 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2014-02-21T14:30:00-05:00
Ushering in what it called "milestone" changes to better protect the nation's farmworkers from pesticides, the Environmental Protection Agency this week proposed a slate of updates to its agricultural Worker Protection Standard.

The enhanced protections come 22 years after the EPA last revised the rules intended to safeguard the nation's 2 million farmworkers from pesticides' perils. Among other steps, the new rules would increase the frequency of mandatory pesticide training from every five years to every year, and include no-entry buffer zones to shield workers from spray and fumes.

"EPA's proposal aims to pull farm workers up toward the same level of protection from environmental and health hazards that other professions have had for decades," Gina McCarthy, the agency's administrator, wrote in a blog post titled: A Step Forward: Protecting America's Farmworkers.

Farmworker advocates agree the proposal represents a step forward.

But the long-overdue update falls short of the more sweeping changes advocates envisioned. It fails, for instance, to require medical monitoring of applicators handling toxic chemicals; sets 16, not 18, as a minimum age for those handling pesticides; and eliminates a requirement that growers display in a central location information on pesticides being applied.

"As expected, there are some genuine improvements, but also at least one big step backward … and some real lost opportunities, especially when it comes to protections for pesticide handlers, and most especially teen pesticide handlers," Eve C. Gartner, a staff attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law organization, wrote The Center for Public Integrity.

In 2012, the Center explored the EPA's thin layer of protection for farmworkers, describing how pesticides can endanger laborers, but no one knows the full scope of the environmental perils in the fields.

Now, advocates say, the proposed upgrades fail to fully close the safety gap.

For instance, Gartner and others note, the proposed rule would ban children under 16 from handling pesticides, with an exemption for family farms.

The EPA lauds that first-ever minimum age requirement as a step forward. But farmworkers and their advocates had pushed for the minimum age to be set to 18.

The new age limit "is better than nothing but I don't see justification for wanting to expose 16- and 17-year-olds," said Virginia Ruiz, director of occupational and environmental health for Farmworker Justice.

"Why you would want somebody that young applying chemicals in the workplace is beyond me," Ruiz said.

Setting the minimum age at 18 would mean higher costs for the industry, the EPA said.

"EPA estimates that requiring handlers to be at least 18 years old would cost about $3.1 million annually, or $11 per agricultural establishment and $320 per commercial pesticide handling establishment per year," the proposed rule says.

Like others who have long pushed EPA to revise the Worker Protection Standard, Ruiz is heartened that some substantive changes finally came. But, overall, she called the proposal a "mixed bag."

Another area advocates question: That the EPA would eliminate a requirement that growers centrally post information about pesticides.

The posting requirement, the EPA said, has become the single most frequently cited area of non-compliance with the Worker Protection Standard. Industry and regulators have challenged it, the agency said.

"Keeping the information current at the central location has been problematic for agricultural employers, as records of frequent pesticide applications on an establishment with multiple crops can be difficult to maintain accurately during the growing season," the EPA wrote.

"Most workers," the proposed rules say, "do not routinely pass the central posting area because their workplace is at a different part of the establishment. The proposed change would continue to make available at a designated location pesticide application information for workers and handlers."

"Rather than continue a requirement that burdens employers without clear benefits to workers and handlers, EPA has decided to revise the requirement."

To the farmworker community, this is a change for the worse. With a central posting place, they say, farmworkers know there is a spot they can turn for information. But now, they say, the burden will fall on farmworkers – many of them working in the shadows – to actively seek out that information.

"It's going to be the very rare farmworker who's going to have the courage to ask for that information," said Jeannie Economos, Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida.

More than half of the employees at the association, Economos said, are former farmworkers. "We are the community of farmworkers," she said.

The EPA' rationales for cutting the central posting requirement and putting the minimum age to 16 are both "illuminating and disturbing," Earthjustice's Gartner said.

Farmworkers advocates also pushed the EPA to require medical monitoring of applicators who handle toxic pesticides, following the leads of California and Washington. That is not happening, either.

"Those programs have been around for many years, to much benefit," said Ruiz. "The fact that they're in these big agricultural states shows that they are feasible to implement … and are very helpful in helping to prevent overexposure."

The EPA cites other reforms, producing a before and after primer showing how the rules will change. The specific changes include:

An expanded mandatory posting of no-entry signs for the most hazardous pesticides; the signs prohibit entry into pesticide-treated fields until residues decline to a safe level.

A requirement that Personal Protection Equipment (respirator use) be consistent with the Occupational Safety & Health Administration standards, including fit test, medical evaluation, and training.

Measures to improve states' ability to enforce compliance including requiring employers to keep records of application-specific pesticide information.

"Today marks an important milestone for the farm workers who plant, tend, and harvest the food that we put on our tables each day," McCarthy said. "Protecting our nation's farm workers from pesticide exposure is at the core of EPA's work to ensure environmental justice."

The changes, the administrator said, follow "more than a decade of extensive stakeholder input by federal and state partners and from across the agricultural community including farm workers, farmers, and industry."

Florida's Economos cites the "good and bad" of the proposed changes, which will now go through a public comment period before becoming final.

"We really want to applaud EPA for all the work they've done on this. We know it's been a long time in the making," she said.

Economos added, "We've been waiting a long time."
 A pesticide plane dusts cotton plants in Lemoore, Calif. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene West Virginia chemical spill probe falls to overburdened Chemical Safety Board http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14095 Massive chemical spill in W.Va. adds to a growing backlog for the troubled Chemical Safety Board. Chemical spill = more trouble Environment;Safety;Disaster_Accident;BP;Chevron Corporation;Chemical accident;Independent agencies of the United States government;National Transportation Safety Board;U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board;Deepwater Horizon oil spill;Transport;CSB 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2014-01-13T12:05:35-05:00
Among the authorities responding to the massive chemical spill near Charleston, W.Va., which has left hundreds of thousands without water, is the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, whose investigative backlog was detailed in a Center for Public Integrity probe last year.

Last week's spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, a chemical used in processing coal, into the Elk River adds an urgent new case to the federal agency's workload. The CSB is akin to the National Transportation Safety Board — an independent federal board whose inquiries are intended to unmask systemic breakdowns, paving the way for reform.

Yet the CSB has been dogged by long-running delays that have frustrated Congress, residents and even former board members.

The Center's report, published last April, revealed how investigations into fatal accidents remain open, sometimes for years, amid what critics cite as a sluggish investigative pace. One former board member called the agency "grossly mismanaged."

The number of board accident reports, case studies and safety bulletins fell precipitously since 2006, the Center found. The board's executives said the agency was stretched thin, forced to decide which of the hundreds of "high-consequence" accidents that take place in the U.S. each year merit its attention. Agency representatives say the board is underfunded and must struggle to respond to requests — many of them from Congress — for investigations.

Even before the West Virginia chemical spill, a steady stream of serious accidents kept the small agency busy, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 to the fire at Chevron's refinery in Richmond, Calif., in 2012 and the explosion at West Fertilizer in Texas last April.

Read the Center probe in full: As critics press for action, Chemical Safety Board investigations languish
 People wait in line for water from a 7,500 gallon tanker truck near Charleston, W.Va. A January 2014 chemical spill left the water for 300,000 people in and around West Virginia's capital city stained blue-green and smelling like licorice, with officials saying Friday it was unclear when it might be safe again for even mundane activities like showers and laundry. Chris Hamby http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-hamby Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Energy Department 'bet' on Fisker Automotive ends in bankruptcy http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13817 An Energy Department program meant to spur development of electric cars faces another setback with Fisker Chapter 11 filing. Newest DOE-backed bankruptcy Business_Finance;Environment;Tesla Motors;Tesla Roadster;Sustainable energy;United States Department of Energy;Electric vehicles;Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program;Fisker Automotive;Henrik Fisker;Battery electric vehicles;Electric car;Transport;Private transport 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-11-27T06:00:00-05:00
Green-lighting a half-billion dollar loan to help a California electric car startup build a fleet of sleek plug-ins four years ago, the Obama administration's Energy Department promised cutting-edge cars and thousands of jobs.

"We're making a bet in the future," Vice President Joe Biden said in October 2009, standing in a shuttered Delaware plant slated to spring to life with electric cars. "We're making a bet in innovation."

The thousands of Fisker Automotive cars never did roll off assembly lines, and the thousands of jobs never surfaced. This month, Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — a symbol of a larger Energy Department electric car program that has yet to fully take off.

In October 2011, The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News explored the Energy Department's risky $1 billion bet on Fisker and another California electric car maker backed by political powerhouses, Tesla Motors. Tesla paid off its $465 million U.S. loan nine years early, but Fisker's project never gained traction.

The Energy Department earmarked $529 million to Fisker and ultimately dispersed $192 million. Of that, DOE said, it recovered $53 million.

Fisker was financed under an Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Program central to Obama's long-shot goal of putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. The DOE said this week it is moving ahead, accepting applications and conducting outreach.

The program "will help the U.S. compete in a rapidly-growing, global market for advanced electric and fuel-efficient vehicles," the agency said in a statement. "The Department has committed more than $8 billion in loans to date supporting projects that are supporting tens of thousands jobs, reducing our dependence on foreign oil and promoting U.S. leadership across an array of innovative vehicle technologies, including plug-in vehicles and high-efficiency gasoline vehicles."

While saying the Fisker loss "is not what anyone hoped," energy officials said it "represents less than two percent of our advanced vehicle loans."

"All our loan agreements include strong safeguards that allow us to protect taxpayers when a company can't meet its obligations. Accordingly, the Department stopped disbursements to Fisker in June 2011 after the company fell short of the rigorous milestones that we had established as conditions of the loan," the DOE statement said.

Yet the ATVM program itself has not yet reached the goals set by Congress, and came under criticism in Government Accountability Office reports in 2011 and 2013.

This year's GAO report found that the ATVM program had not closed a loan in two years and had spent just a fraction, $8 billion, of the $25 billion Congress allocated. The program was infused with another $7.5 billion to cover credit subsidy costs; according to the GAO report, $4.2 billion remained in that pool of money.

"Most applicants and manufacturers we spoke with told us that, currently, the costs of participating outweigh the benefits," the report said.

Fisker had hoped the $529 million loan guarantee would help it build thousands of luxury Karmas along with another car on its drawing board, the more affordable Atlantic. This April, company co-founder Henrik Fisker told the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform about a series of setbacks — from slow moving regulatory approvals to recalls and a bankruptcy dogging outside suppliers — that derailed his vision.

"From the outset, Fisker Automotive aimed to be a new American car company, setting pioneering standards for low-emission technology and cutting-edge design," he said.

While Fisker filed for bankruptcy last week, another company, Hybrid Technology, purchased its assets, including paying $25 million of its DOE loan. In its bankruptcy filing, Fisker estimated assets between $100 million and $500 million — and liabilities between $500 million and $1 billion.

Fisker was backed by an electric car program that is one piece of a larger, $30 billion green energy portfolio "that is helping to diversify our energy portfolio with clean, renewable domestic energy, spur U.S. industry, and make America more competitive in a rapidly-growing, global market for advanced vehicles," the DOE said.

The portfolio includes several other firms that filed for bankruptcy after receiving DOE money, including California solar panel maker Solyndra. In several cases, the Center and ABC reported last year, green energy companies paid six-figure bonuses or payouts to executives before filing for bankruptcy.

The Energy Department cited "estimated losses to date of approximately two percent" — less, the DOE said, than the 10 percent Congress set aside.

Congressional critics cited Fisker's bankruptcy filing as "yet another sad chapter" in DOE's portfolio. "The jobs that were promised never materialized and, once again, taxpayers are on the hook for the administration's reckless gamble," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-MI, and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy, R-PA, said last week.

Others who closely scrutinize green energy spending say the Fisker bankruptcy, combined with the other failings, spotlight larger questions about the role of government in financing start-up ventures with public money.

"I think structurally there were challenges right from the outset," said Doug Koplow, founder of Earth Track, a consulting firm that tracks energy subsidies.

For years, Koplow has raised questions about the way DOE allocates taxpayer money. "I'm not surprised to see some of these things go bankrupt," he said. "I think it would be inevitable."
 Henrik Fisker, CEO of Fisker Automotive, listens as Vice President Joe Biden makes an announcement about the company's plan for electric vehicles. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene About 'Breathless and Burdened' http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13630 The team behind the 'Breathless and Burdened' investigation 'Breathless and Burdened' team Hamby 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-10-29T06:00:00-04:00
Breathless & Burdened is a yearlong investigation examining how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung, even as disease rates are on the rise and an increasing number of miners are turning to a system that was supposed to help alleviate their suffering.

Center for Public Integrity reporter Chris Hamby explored thousands of previously classified legal filings and created original databases of medical evidence. Hamby traveled throughout West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland interviewing miners, their families and representatives, and experts in the medical and legal communities.

His reporting revealed how powerful — and, in some cases, unexpected — medical and legal forces undermine the promise of a 1969 law, leaving miners not only sick but also destitute.

Part of this series was produced in partnership with the ABC News investigative unit.

Project Staff

Author: Chris Hamby

Project editors: Ronnie Greene and Jim Morris

Web, multimedia: Kimberley Porteous, Erik Lincoln, Sarah Whitmire and Chris Zubak-Skees

Project illustration: Timothy Meko

Fact check: Peter Newbatt Smith

Data check: David Donald

Contributing reporting: ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross and investigative producer Matthew Mosk

 Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene California bypasses feds, presses ahead on regulation of toxic chemicals http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13480 The state formally adopts new rules that go well beyond the flimsy federal protection net weakened by decades of D.C. delay. California moves on toxics Environment;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Pollution;Toxic Substances Control Act;Pollution in the United States;94th United States Congress;California Green Chemistry Initiative;Environment of California;California Department of Toxic Substances Control 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-10-01T06:00:00-04:00
Aiming to identify and remove dangerous chemicals from consumer products, California today formally adopts new rules that go well beyond the flimsy federal protection net weakened by decades of D.C. delay.

California's Safer Consumer Products Regulations, described as the first of its kind in the country, allows the state to publish a list of potentially threatening chemicals — and then, by next April, target up to five priority products containing them.

Companies manufacturing those goods in California will have to launch detailed assessments to see whether safer chemicals are available and, if so, alter their products. The goal: To remove toxic chemicals from commerce and prompt industry to provide safe alternatives.

"We're not only saying something should be taken out," Karl Palmer, chief of the state's Safer Consumer Products Branch, said in an interview. "But we're saying, 'What's going to be used in its place?' So we are going to get from something bad to hopefully something that is better."

The initial target of five products, state officials say, represents the launch of an effort they envision bringing long-term change. "The program starts out small, but it sends a big message," Debbie Raphael, director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control, said in a statement. "Smart businesses are already planning ahead, looking for alternative chemicals they can promote as less-toxic, family friendly and environmentally safe."

California is moving ahead against the backdrop of long-running delays in revamping federal statutes meant to protect consumers from toxic substances.

The federal Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, grants the Environmental Protection Agency power to require testing of dangerous compounds. Yet some four decades later, the EPA has rarely used that power as Congress has been tied up in a protracted effort to reform TSCA.

Under TSCA, the EPA said, it has "only been able to require testing on a little more than 200 existing chemicals," and banned five. "Restoring confidence in EPA's existing chemicals chemical management program is a priority for EPA and the Administration," the agency said in a statement.

Continuing delays in enhancing the federal rules are "certainly a factor" in California's new initiative, the state's Palmer said. Consumers are also pushing for greener goods.

"The spirit and hope of TSCA, I think most people across the board would agree have not been fulfilled," he said. "Had TSCA worked maybe we wouldn't have needed to do this."

He added, "We hope if and when TSCA is revived it will be for the good of everyone. We don't really want to wait, we can't wait for that."

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State officials across the country share the sentiment, and legislators from Maine to Washington State have pushed bills to strengthen their states' abilities to disclose and remove harmful chemicals. Yet many such bills have failed in recent years, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found, amid heavy pushback from legislative critics, lobbyists and the chemical industry.

State officials across the U.S. support strengthening TSCA — but don't want changes to handcuff their ability to protect consumers in their own states. Just last month, the Environmental Council of the States, a non-profit, non-partisan association of state environmental leaders, passed a resolution urging reform of the federal statutes. Among the group's goals:

Preserving "state authority to protect citizens and the environment from toxic exposures and to manage chemicals of concern … "

Ensuring that "the burden is effectively placed on manufacturers to prove that existing and new chemicals are safe."

"States don't want to lose the ability to act to restrict a chemical in order to prevent harm to the public or the environment," Justin Johnson, Deputy Secretary of the Vermont Agency for Natural Resources, told a House panel studying TSCA reform last month. "This ability to act is important to states because it is the backstop to a weak federal program, or a federal program that does not work as intended, or a federal program that acts very slowly or one that fails to act when reliable scientific data indicates that action is needed."

The American Chemistry Council, an industry advocacy group, has opposed hundreds of state bills in recent years, the organization's tax forms show. The ACC says true toxic reform should come through TSCA, not the states, and backs a pending proposal pushed by the late New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

In California, the ACC pushed back against the new regulations. "At best the proposed regulation will produce a marginal improvement in human health and environmental safety, but at great expense and lost opportunities for businesses nationwide," the council wrote in October.

Yet unlike in other states, where multiple bills died amid industry and legislative opposition, California's measure — sown over five years of study — moves ahead. "We've had push back, push forward from all sides," Palmer said. "That's what we've done over the past couple of years — listen to everyone."

Now, the state department will develop a list of "priority products" that contain one of approximately 150 toxic chemicals.

By April, the state will cite up to five such products. "Companies that want to sell these 'priority products' in California will then perform 'alternative assessments' to determine if viable safer versions are available," the California Department of Toxic Substances Control said.

If viable options exist, manufacturers could make the change or take the item off the market. "Or ultimately we could restrict the sale of this product," Palmer said.
 California state flag Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Best of friends: Baltimore mayor, chemical lobbyist http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13324 As she lobbies City Hall, the ACC's Lisa Harris Jones remains exceedingly close to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Powerful ties in Baltimore Government;Maryland;Local government in the United States;Baltimore;African American women in politics;Stephanie Rawlings-Blake 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-09-09T06:00:00-04:00
The American Chemistry Council's influence is so deeply entwined with local and state government, it sometimes feels like a marriage. Sometimes, it is.

In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is so close to ACC lobbyist Lisa Harris Jones, the city leader officiated at Jones' Nevada wedding to a partnering lobbyist. The Harris Jones & Malone law firm doesn't shy from such connections — it boasts about them. "Power Couple's Vegas Nuptials Draw Host of MD Political Notables," said a May headline formerly linked on the firm's website.

Another link cited a report listing Jones as the 3rd top earning lobbyist in Maryland in a recent six month period, with $864,625 in compensation.

The website lists political fundraisers and spells out the firm's long list of corporate clients, including the ACC. The links between mayor and lobbyist have drawn attention in local media, including the Baltimore Brew website. Another account detailed how the mayor visited the lobbyist's Rehoboth Beach getaway.

There's also scrutiny of how the ACC lobbyist helped beat back city reform. In June, Jones helped the ACC delay a proposed bill that would have made Baltimore the first East Coast city to ban foam cups and containers for carryout food. The ACC testified against the ban, which was postponed the same day Jones lobbied against it in City Hall.

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Mayor Rawlings-Blake did not respond to four interview requests made with her office by the Center for Public Integrity.

Reached for comment, Jones asked the Center for questions in writing. She did not respond to written questions about the ACC's Baltimore bill opposition or her ties to the mayor.

The closeness between mayor and lobbyist raises significant questions, ethics advocates say.

"The most striking thing is, it's not just a lobbyist. It's a lobbyist who represents maybe 40 to 50 percent of the lobbying business in the city," said James Browning, Regional Director for State Operations for Common Cause. "The worrying thing is you have no way of knowing if that agenda is checked at the door when they are on vacation or doing these other things together."

 Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Session for state officials "intended to educate," not influence, corporate sponsor says http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13325 A forum for state officials at Procter & Gamble headquarters raises questions about industry's role in shaping environmental health policy. Brought to you by P&G Cognition;Mind;Framing;Knowledge representation;Philosophy of mind;Cognitive science 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-09-09T06:00:00-04:00
When the Council of State Governments met last year to discuss product safety, the session was sponsored by Procter & Gamble at its corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, with all presentations led by company scientists and members.

The government council said it took strides to avoid a "one-sided" agenda, and the company said it merely set out to inform, not influence, decision makers. But the session shows the closeness between industry and government in shaping environmental health agendas — and the stage industry is given in framing dialogue.

"The audience was a lot of us who sponsored toxic state legislation at the state level," said North Carolina Rep. Pricey Harrison, who has encountered hurdles securing reform in her state. "They were trying to show us what industry was doing to keep us safe."

The two-day session, held July 7 and 8, 2012, drew 25 Council of State Governments members from across the country, who heard P&G-led talks titled "Fundamentals of Human Safety," "Fundamentals of Environmental Safety," and "Regulatory Compliance of Consumer Products." The closing day explored "Current Issues with Safety Science and Public Policy," with a focus on the Environmental Protection Agency's chemical policy program.

"The purpose of the event was to provide an educational curriculum to policymakers regarding their use of scientific data, studies and reports when considering policy in their home states," the council wrote the Center for Public Integrity. "P&G provided access to members of their scientific community who in turn served as speakers and resources during the event."

Why did the council, founded in 1933 to foster "the exchange of insights and ideas to help state officials shape public policy," turn to a Fortune 500 company to sponsor the event for its Policy Academy on Consumer Product Safety?

Finances were one factor, the council said. "Given the limited budget for the event, it was determined that the best option would be to take the policy academy event to the resources/speakers, rather than incurring additional travel costs for the speakers to travel to another location," the CSG said. The council — headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, with offices from D.C. to California — stayed at a Cincinnati hotel whose meeting space was booked. "Therefore, P&G agreed to house our event on their nearby campus utilizing their conference facilities."

As it planned the event, the council acknowledged "concerns that such a program could be perceived as one-sided." To address the issue, the group said it convened a bipartisan council of state leaders to help develop the agenda. "The Council of State Governments hosted the event with material and in-kind support provided by P&G," the council said. "At no time did P&G have control over the program."

For its part, Procter & Gamble said its intent was to educate. "We weren't trying to influence decisions other than giving state legislators the tools they need to evaluate issues from a scientific standpoint," said spokesman Tim Long, who took part in the forum. "It was intended to educate them on the process used by industry in general to evaluate safety in ingredients in products."

 Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene In new battleground over toxic reform, American Chemistry Council targets the states http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13323 The fight between industry and activists over regulation of toxic chemicals has shifted from Washington, D.C., to state venues. Chemical lobby in the states Environment;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Bisphenol A;Toxic Substances Control Act;Love Canal;Pollution in the United States;American Chemistry Council;Endocrine disruptors;94th United States Congress;California Green Chemistry Initiative 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-09-09T06:00:00-04:00
HARTFORD, Conn. — In the bare-knuckle war over toxic chemicals, the fight between industry and activists has shifted noticeably from Washington, D.C., to state venues such as the golden-domed Capitol that rises over Hartford like a lordly manse.

What happened this year in Hartford shows how industry — fueled by the American Chemistry Council, a $100-million-a-year advocacy group glittered with Fortune 500 partners — is flexing its muscles from statehouse to statehouse to beat back efforts to disclose harmful chemicals or remove them from the shelves.

In Connecticut, grassroots activists worked with state Rep. Diana Urban, a former professor of economics and politics, to craft a bill they viewed as little more than a baby step toward reform. The measure — An Act Concerning Children's Products and Chemicals of High Concern — would have allowed the state Public Health Department to identify and list chemicals that posed dangers to children.

The bill came at zero cost to state government.

This session, it was snuffed out by an aggressive lobbying push from the ACC and state business groups, and an outcry from Republican members portraying the bill as an attack on business and duplication of federal efforts. Urban couldn't even get it to a vote: legislative critics literally talked the three-page bill to death for more than four hours one afternoon, killing it on an appropriations deadline day with question after question that kept the clock ticking to zero.

"It would have been, honestly, a very small first step," said Anne Hulick, coordinator for the nonprofit Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut. "The bill we were proposing was not revolutionary. All it was, was a report. Even that — even a report every two years — was something that was very unpalatable to them."

Her organization has an annual budget of $100,000 — one thousandth of the ACC's — funding one full-time employee, one part-timer and support for other nonprofits. On the last day of session in June, Hulick found herself literally surrounded by industry lobbyists as she grabbed coffee in the legislative cafeteria, accidentally taking a seat normally filled by an ACC lobbyist and then, after moving, having a toy industry lobbyist sit at the next table. She stepped outside to talk with a journalist.

"I'm pretty beaten down," Hulick admitted. "Our primary goal was in protecting children's health. I don't think we ever got the opportunity to see that."

For the American Chemistry Council, it was another in a string of victories in state houses from Maine to Washington State — and part of a vigorous campaign to smother toxics reform bills filed in states fed up with logjams at the Environmental Protection Agency. Connecticut is just one snapshot of a larger picture in state capitals across the U.S., a Center for Public Integrity examination found.

"It's becoming the new battleground for a lot of this work," said Steve Lester, science director for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a nonprofit headquartered in Falls Church, Va., and founded by Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs.

Defeating state bills ranks among the ACC's notable accomplishments, the group's tax returns say.

The ACC "helped defeat, amend or postpone the passage of more than 300 flawed bills dealing with chemicals and plastics in 44 states," the organization said in its tax return for 2010, echoing its other Form 990 reports.

The chemistry council doesn't shy away from — or apologize for — its lobbying efforts.

"We're an advocacy organization," said spokesman Scott Openshaw. "We're in business to advocate for our industry to ensure that public policy is balanced and formulated in the right way for all Americans, and for the value of our industry to ensure that we can continue to be a global leader. That's what we do. We advocate for our members."

The ACC's influence sometimes reaches deep into the fine print of state rules, the Center found.

In Iowa, a legislator proposed a resolution urging Congress to crack down on dangerous chemicals — only to see his measure diluted to mirror, nearly word for word, the ACC's own model legislation before being killed. That ACC model, targeting reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act, says a "robust" federal system precludes the need for state laws that could trigger "negative impacts on the national economy." The ACC model has been introduced in at least five other statehouses from New Jersey to Oregon, the Center found by analyzing a Sunlight Foundation database of bills.

When the Council of State Governments met for a conference on product safety last year, the session was sponsored by ACC member Procter & Gamble at its Cincinnati headquarters, with industry scientists leading talks.

From city halls to state houses, the ACC sometimes maintains strikingly close ties to political power. In Baltimore, where the chemistry council helped delay a potential city ban on Styrofoam cups and containers, the mayor officiated at the wedding of an ACC lobbyist.

In Maine, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, Patricia Aho, was an ACC lobbyist before taking office in 2011. In the 2011-12 session, Aho registered as the ACC's principal lobbyist on 10 different bills before her ascension to state office, records show. Her support for the organization is clear.

"The ACC represents the companies that make the products that make modern life possible, while working to protect the environment, public health, and the security of our nation," said Aho's lobbyist registration form for 2010. Aho declined an interview request from the Center, but her office said any potential conflicts were "thoroughly vetted" before she took office.

Now, as DEP chief, she oversees an agency that this April testified in opposition to a bill seeking to keep toxic chemicals away from pregnant women and children, on the same day as did the ACC.

The ACC and its allies, Lester said, use their resources to build doubt over claims that company products cause harm. "That's what they're good at, creating this element of doubt, questioning our science, our speakers, our information," Lester said. "They see these rules are making progress, and I think they are feeling threatened."

Big money, big connections — and results

The American Chemistry Council has resources to push back, representing members such as Dow, Procter & Gamble Chemicals Division and ExxonMobil Chemical Company, and listing annual revenue from $100 million to $135 million in recent years.

The ACC spends $8 million to $10 million a year in annual federal lobbying, and raised nearly half a million dollars in recent election cycles supporting federal campaigns. Over the last decade it has backed candidates of both parties, but more often favored Republicans over Democrats. Yet the industry's financial muscle is many times greater, as those figures represent just ACC contributions. From 2005 through part of 2012, the chemical industry "gave $39 million to candidates for federal office" and "spent $333 million on lobbying at the federal level," a Common Cause report noted.

In waging state campaigns, the D.C.-based group retains statehouse lobbyists to fight bills from Maine to Connecticut, from Iowa to Minnesota, Oregon to Washington State.

In the states, the ACC has developed a playbook that is at once boilerplate and effective: Convincing decision-makers that bills aimed at identifying, and potentially banning, chemicals would only kill businesses. And, stressing that state bills would merely duplicate federal efforts and add layers of government.

"The chemical industry keeps their message simple. Chemicals: Good. Business: Good. Banning chemicals: Bad," said Connecticut's Urban, who witnessed that success first-hand this session.

In killing bills from coast to coast, legislative critics sometimes echo power points developed by the ACC and its lobbyists. "It's an onslaught," said Urban, a Democrat. "It's very hard for me to fight that. You go into a committee and they're out here grabbing legislators one after another."

In Washington State, the ACC helped kill the Toxic-Free Kids and Families Act. The 2013 bill would have banned two toxic flame retardants from children's products and furniture, and prevented manufacturers from replacing them with retardants identified by the state Department of Ecology "as a high priority chemical of high concern for children." The bill was weakened in the Senate to ban retardants already being phased out by industry — but failing to grant the larger state powers. Then, as supporters tried to revive the original measure, it died.

"They do an all-out confrontation when these bills are drawn up," said state Sen. Sharon Nelson, a Washington State Democrat. "They nitpick. 'This isn't quite ready. We are not quite there.' So they just delay, delay, delay."

In Oregon this session, the ACC helped defeat a bill that would have allowed the Oregon Health Authority to maintain a list of "high priority chemicals of concern for children's health." The bill remained deadlocked in the Senate, 15-15, in the session's final day. "We never got a commitment from a 16th person, so it was not heard in the Senate," said Democratic Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, a co-sponsor. "I was really disappointed."

In Maine, the bill Aho's office fought — An Act To Further Strengthen the Protection of Pregnant Women and Children from Toxic Chemicals — was also watered down before winning approval, with the ACC among the critics pushing back. The initial bill would have identified products using the 49 "worst of the worst" chemicals and sought to remove them from reaching children. The final version would have effectively required $1 billion companies to disclose their use of Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that some studies suggest can impact the brain and behavior of children, in food packaging.

Then, in July, Gov. Paul LePage, who appointed Aho as commissioner, vetoed the bill over the objections of protesting parents.

D.C. red tape prompts states to act

The tussle in the states is fallout from the slug-like pace of reform in Washington, D.C., embodied by the Toxic Substances Control Act. TSCA was passed in 1976, granting the EPA power to require testing of dangerous compounds. But in the nearly four decades since, the EPA has rarely used that power — and for years has been tied up in a protracted effort to update TSCA.

"We're not getting much leadership at the federal level," said North Carolina Rep. Pricey Harrison, who has attempted reform efforts in her state for six years. "It's a little bit frightening to think there are 80,000 chemicals out there in commerce that haven't been studied. It's frustrating for those of us who have public health as a priority to have the lack of leadership in the federal level, so we need to do it in the states."

In state after state, officials echoed Harrison: The federal government is stuck in time, forcing states to act. The Government Accountability Office has also raised questions about the pace of EPA reform. Even with some changes, "it is unclear whether EPA's new approach to managing chemicals will position the agency to achieve its goal of ensuring the safety of chemicals," the GAO concluded in June.

The EPA reports modest progress under TSCA: Under the act, the agency said, it has "only been able to require testing on a little more than 200 existing chemicals," and banned five.

In September 2009, the EPA announced a set of principles to "update and strengthen" TSCA. "Restoring confidence in EPA's existing chemicals chemical management program is a priority for EPA and the Administration," the agency said in a statement, saying it aims to "modernize and strengthen the tools available in TSCA to increase confidence that chemicals used in commerce, which are vital to our Nation's economy, are safe and do not endanger the public health."

In large measure, the ACC is fighting both the states and the feds. Even as it tells the states to leave the job to Washington, the chemistry council has attacked the fine print of some proposals to reform TSCA.

The group, for instance, cited "fundamental flaws" in legislative proposals to strengthen the act. In a November 2011 press release titled "ACC Expresses Concern with Safe Chemicals Act," the group wrote: "We believe we can develop legislation that will give consumers confidence, learns from the success and missteps of reforms undertaken by other countries, and fosters innovation and job creation."

Meanwhile, to states, the chemistry council cites "EPA's Actions to Strengthen the Chemical Management Safety Net," as the group wrote in correspondence opposing Connecticut's bill. "ACC urges this committee to consider this information and, in light of it, to ask itself whether HB 6526 is even necessary and whether it would provide significant public health benefit to the children of Connecticut."

It's an argument the ACC had made elsewhere, providing fuel for legislative critics to douse state bills.

The chemistry council is not in conflict by challenging both states and Washington, spokesman Openshaw said. Instead, he said, the ACC supports tangible reform to TSCA through the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, one of the last bills filed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, the venerable New Jersey Democrat who died earlier this year.

"Our No.1 priority is to see the Toxic Substances Control Act, the national law that regulates chemicals in commerce, we want to see that reformed. It's time to do that now," Openshaw said. "It's an approach that will benefit all states when it comes to ensuring the safety of chemicals for consumers and workers and also ensuring that the U.S. remains a leader in innovation around the globe."

The chemistry council's model plan said consumers should have confidence the products they buy are safe, and that federal rules should "preserve America's role as the world's leading innovator and employer" in the chemical field.

While Lautenberg's bill has gained momentum and awaits congressional hearings, some environmental groups and states worry that the measure, cemented after compromise with critics, could weaken standards in some instances. The ACC said it strikes the right balance. "It was the first time in 40 years we actually have a bipartisan approach to reform TSCA," Openshaw said.

From Washington to the states, the ACC makes one thing clear: It supports reform — but only on its terms.

Iowa: The ACC lends a hand

In Iowa, Representative Charles Isenhart filed a proposed resolution in 2011 that would have prodded Congress to mandate reforms to TSCA, "the only major federal environmental statute that has never been updated or reauthorized," his proposal said.

"There was not an effort at the national level to address these issues in a meaningful way in Washington, so some of us … decided to take a run at those issues," Isenhart said in an interview.

His resolution included strong language, saying "children and developing fetuses are uniquely vulnerable to the health threats of toxic chemicals," and noting that "a growing body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence links exposure to toxic chemicals to many diseases and health conditions." The General Assembly resolution would have put the onus on chemical manufacturers to "prove that all existing and new chemicals are not harmful to human health."

"The toxics resolution in particular was opposed by the American Chemistry Council," Isenhart wrote the Center.

When his resolution came out of Iowa's Committee on Commerce, it was noticeably altered. Gone was language citing chemical dangers to children and fetuses. Gone was language forcing industry to prove its chemicals weren't harmful.

Instead, the substituted language adopted a clear concern for industry. It said the EPA's chemical management program "should preserve the role of the United States as the world's leading innovator and employer in the manufacture, processing, distribution, and use of chemicals." Federal reforms "should encourage companies and the EPA to work together to enhance public access to chemical health and safety information."

The substitute language mirrors, nearly verbatim, the ACC's model TSCA legislation.

What happened? Isenhart said the commerce committee member assigned the legislation, Republican Rep. Ralph Watts, introduced the ACC language. State legislative records show an ACC lobbyist, John Easter, registered as "for" the final version, after originally registered as "undecided."

Isenhart said he tried to change the language back, but to no avail. The resolution never came for a vote. "The bill was dead," he said. "They weren't interested in having a debate. I have a feeling Representative Watts just wanted to curry favor with the chemistry council, taking their language."

The initial proposal was "totally unacceptable," Rep. Watts countered in an interview. "As I recall, the proposal that Representative Isenhart made went way too far in adding more toxicity regulations," he said.

Initially, Watts said he didn't recall the ACC playing a role. Told lobbyist Easter registered on the item, Watts said: "As I recall John might have offered some suggestions on the bill, on the resolution."

Lobbyist Easter, reached in August, said he was at lunch and couldn't talk. He later said his office was preparing a statement, but the office did not follow up.

Iowa's experience was not unique. The ACC model was introduced in state houses in Oregon, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, Michigan and Texas — and adopted, in some form, in Michigan, New Jersey and Illinois but not in other states, the Center found.

In Iowa, several other toxic reform bills failed to move forward in recent sessions, an environmental health legislation database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows. "Iowa is an Ag economy," Rep. Watts said. "We're sensitive to over-regulation that sometimes is proposed that is damaging to industry and has no sound science background."

How much sway does the chemistry council hold in the state? "I think probably people will listen to them, just like a lot of other lobbyists," Watts said. "We listen to lobbyists of all stripes. Some we agree with; some we don't."

Maine: ACC lobbyist-turned-environmental chief

In Maine, the ACC's connection to the top is decidedly direct: The state's environmental chief was, until her arrival to the Maine department in 2011, a registered ACC lobbyist.

Lawyer Patricia Aho was the principal lobbyist for the ACC on multiple bills in the 2011 session, her filings show, after representing the chemistry council and other clients for years. Among the bills she registered on behalf of the ACC in the 2011-12 session:

An Act To Ensure That Children's Products Are Free of Cadmium

An Act To Provide the Department of Environmental Protection with Regulatory Flexibility Regarding the Listing of Priority Chemicals

An Act To Amend the Process for Prioritizing Toxic Chemicals in Children's Products

Aho joined the Maine Department of Environmental Protection in early 2011; that September, Gov. LePage named her commissioner. Aho has long touted her connection to business. Her official bio on the governor's website, for instance, notes that the Kennebec County Chamber of Commerce honored her "advocacy on behalf of the business community."

Under her watch, Maine has been slow to adopt toxics reform.

This session, the ACC was among organizations opposing the proposal to "further strengthen" protections for pregnant women and children from chemicals. In filings to the state, the ACC cited TSCA reform as one reason the bill was not needed. "In sum, TSCA's New Chemicals program is considered one of TSCA's major regulatory successes," the organization wrote.

As it had in Connecticut, the ACC asked whether the proposal was "even necessary and whether it would have any public health benefit to the children of Maine."

Advocates were trying to build upon earlier progress. Already, Maine had adopted a list of 49 chemicals of high concern, making it one of the few states to publicize such a list. But, heading into the 2013 session, supporters said, the state had not taken steps to remove products tainted with those same toxins.

"The bill will identify which products contain the 49 'worst of the worst' chemicals and set priorities for action to get those chemicals out of household products that Maine children encounter every day," wrote the Maine Conservation Voters. The bill would have pushed the state DEP to each year prioritize two chemicals, from the 49, and set about studying alternatives to replace them.

With the ACC and business leaders fighting the bill, it was seriously scaled back.

By session's end, the bill was narrowed to effectively require companies with $1 billion in annual sales to disclose their use of BPA in food packaging. But it would not require the state to keep adding high priority chemicals to the list.

"There was a clear shift … to more of a transparency bill, but it's important that we make progress," said the bill sponsor, then-Senate Majority Leader Seth Goodall. "And in the current climate here in Maine we had to be realists and pragmatic and move forward."

Aho's department had voiced objections, damaging the bill's chances.

"This bill is complex and includes many interwoven components that would greatly expand the reach of the current program, the consequence of which would be a big government program focused on churning out rules and processing paperwork, rather than engaging in meaningful analysis and informed decision-making," a DEP director testified in April.

Three months later, the governor vetoed it.

Aho's revolving door from industry lobbyist to state regulator drew scrutiny in a recent series in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, entitled "The Lobbyist in the Henhouse." It described how environmental regulation and enforcement has slowed considerably under her watch.

The Center for Public Integrity, exploring Aho's dual roles, sought an interview with the commissioner. Aho declined the request, but a spokeswoman said Aho had been an attorney in Maine since 1982, practicing government and regulatory affairs.

"And her background is no different than many other attorneys who have or are serving in agencies or departments in the state of Maine," said the statement from DEP spokeswoman Jessamine Logan. "And any questions about her potential conflicts of interest were thoroughly vetted when she joined state government over two years ago and later during her confirmation process as commissioner, where she was confirmed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, 35-0."

The attention over her dual roles triggered a firestorm, with the Sierra Club pressing Republican Gov. LePage to oust her. LePage's anger, instead, turned toward the press — not his director, who remains in office.

Following the critical reports, Aho dispatched an email to staffers in June, with the subject line 'Welcome to Summer.' It said the agency was moving to protect Maine's natural environment. "I remain committed to taking my responsibilities of environmental stewardship seriously and am proud that our DEP is a resourceful, respectful, and responsive agency," she wrote.

Aho added, "The protection of our environment and natural resources and a robust economy do not have to conflict."

Beth Ahearn, political director for the Maine Conservation Voters, said Aho had been respected as a lobbyist for being reasonable to deal with and having "a lot of integrity."

But her rise to the top environmental post raises larger questions.

"How do we separate our background from the decisions we make? And that's a tougher question," Ahearn said in an interview. "Obviously she knows those companies or worked with those companies really well, and has that perspective, the company's perspective.

"We want the commissioner of environmental protection to be all about environmental protection."

Reform bills filed, and fought, from Florida to Washington State

Across the country, a pattern has emerged: State officials pitch proposals to identify and potentially ban toxic chemicals, grassroots groups rally behind the proposals — and the bills die in committee or get watered down, with the ACC, business groups and legislative critics pushing back.

To many, Washington State is a leader in toxics reform. The state adopted a "Chemicals of High Concern to Children" list, 66 chemicals from formaldehyde to benzene to BPA the state considers potentially hazardous. Other states have tried to follow suit and create their own lists — the first step, advocates say, in ultimately removing products that can sicken children.

This session in Washington State, advocates filed the Toxic-Free Kids and Families Act, a bill aimed at banning two forms of toxic flame retardants from reaching children — and barring manufacturers from replacing them with similarly dangerous products. Even there, the larger reform butted up against opposition.

"The main opposition is the American Chemistry Council. It's a well-funded, well organized force and they are able to come in, organize in-state business and out-of-state businesses — Wal-Mart and Target come to mind," said Ivy Sager-Rosenthal, with the nonprofit Washington Toxics Coalition. Opponents are "able to sow enough doubt in legislators' minds that some put the brakes on this type of legislation."

"The ACC and their allies," she added, "their main tactic is to delay any meaningful reform."

In the Senate, the bill was weakened to target only products already being phased out. It failed to revive in the House and died entirely, said bill co-sponsor Sen. Nelson.

"Once again the chemical industry won the fight in Washington State," Nelson said in August. "We had the chemical industry and Association of Washington Business, the usual suspects, sitting in the gallery making sure once again protections for children die in the state."

Lobbyist Mark Greenberg, who represents the ACC in Washington State, routed a Center interview request to the chemistry council. The AWB, the state's "premiere advocate for the business community," said it pushes an economic climate benefiting "all citizens."

Nelson, trying for three years to adopt the change, said she won't give up. "I'm a mom and I'm going to be a grandma possibly this week," she had said in May. "It just makes me more committed to have something that is this clear that we need to ban. To have corporate interests continue to try to roll us on it makes me more committed to wanting to get it done."

In Oregon this session, House Bill 3162 would have required the state to list "high priority chemicals of concern" present in children's products from car seats to toys, jewelry and pacifiers. Under the initial bill, manufacturers would have to disclose if they used potentially toxic chemicals, and then phase them out in certain products.

Bill co-sponsor Keny-Guyer said she targets public health issues involving women and children. "I'm also very concerned about toxics in our environment, because we've had an explosion in chemical development over the decades, and our regulatory system has not kept up," she said.

She quickly encountered resistance. In public hearings, the ACC and Toy Industry Association squared off against bill public health backers including Oregon nurses. "The American Chemistry Council, the Toy Association of America, the Associated Oregon Industries, Procter & Gamble, the pulp and paper industry, the International Fragrance Association ... have all opposed the bill and they are putting up a really pretty big fight," Keny-Guyer said in June, with the bill still in play.

"Their arguments are it's a slippery slope, they think it's an undue burden on business, and it should be done at the federal level." Her reply: "The feds have not kept up with the development of chemicals and are not adequately addressing this."

By session's end the next month, the bill never made it to the Senate for a vote, even as sponsors scrambled to save the measure by cutting out some elements. "In order to try to gain support in the Senate, we pared back the bill," said Keny-Guyer. "The amendment was to take out the entire phase-out piece and only have disclosure. And even that could not get the 16th vote."

Industry pushback, she said, doomed it. "I mean they brought in lobbyists in the end who kind of banded together and fought it tooth and nail," the representative said.

In other states, some legislators are finding it hard to muster enthusiasm reforms will ever take root.

In Texas, Rep. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, tried for three years to push a bill banning the sale of children's products containing "bisphenol-A or certain other substances identified as known human carcinogens or banned hazardous substances." BPA is an industrial chemical found in plastic bottles and metal cans that federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, say have "potential effects … on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children."

Alvarado's proposals never came for a vote. "I wasn't surprised," Alvarado said, knowing politics in Texas. "With these type of issues you keep pressing and moving forward, you can't get bogged down. … You have to keep it moving forward and hopefully get some public discussion going on."

In Florida, Rep. Mark Danish co-sponsored a bill this session to identify chemicals of high concern. The idea was to let consumers know which products contain potentially toxic chemicals, with Florida's Department of Environmental Protection posting the information online.

As in Texas, his bill never came for a vote — one of a string of toxic reform bills extinguished in the Sunshine State, the state legislative database shows.

"My bill got absolutely no traction whatsoever. People took notice of it, said 'nice bill.' I could not even get it to its first committee. Never even saw the light of day," Danish said in an interview.

After he proposed the bill, he said, Florida's agricultural industry called a meeting, worried he was targeting pesticides. Danish said he tried to calm nerves by saying he aspired only to inform the public about household chemicals of potential concern to pregnant women and children. No matter. The bill did not move forward — the victim, he believes, of legislative pushback against new regulations, along with resistance in the Republican controlled House to bills pitched by Democrats.

"It was kind of a shame, because I thought it was a good bill," Danish said.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Harrison proposed the Toxic Free Kids Act this session. Its aim: Protecting children "from harmful chemicals in their toys, furniture, car seats and other products that children touch, lick, inhale and snuggle up with every day," advocates said.

It, too, failed to come for a vote, but instead was deemed by the House Commerce Committee to be a "study bill," meaning it was going back for more study and could return next year.

"This is a legislature that's highly anti-regulatory and there's very little support for enacting stricter regulations on anything. This time around we had a Republican lead sponsor, we recruited a couple of Republicans to be on the bill," Harrison said. "But unfortunately we couldn't get the bill moved into the session, so we turned it into a study.

"I've been trying to get this issue studied forever."

In other states, some reform measures have moved forward — after compromise with industry.

In Minnesota, State Sen. Katie Sieben helped sponsor a bill this session that bans BPA in toddler and infant food. It passed.

"It certainly took some negotiating with industry. One thing that helped was that BPA was already banned in Minnesota in sippy cups, and we were the first state in the nation to do that," Sieben said in July, a baby bouncing on her lap during a phone interview. "And there are manufacturers who produce baby food without BPA in it, so there was a viable and known alternative."

The final version was scaled back from an earlier proposal, which could have applied to any food targeted to children, to focus solely on toddler and infant food and formula. "There was a lot of pushback from food manufacturers. 'It was too sweeping. Anything could be defined as children's product,' " Sieben said. "Ultimately we had to take a more measured approach."

Connecticut: 'Baby step' bill falls flat

In Connecticut, advocates thought they, too, had taken a measured approach.

Their bill, they thought, was simple: An Act Concerning Children's Products and Chemicals of High Concern. Initially the bill would have followed the leads of Washington state and Maine, which already compile lists of chemicals of high concern. Citing states that had made strides in toxic reform struck some the wrong way in Connecticut.

"When we reference the list in Maine and Washington, the minute we reference those lists it becomes a huge red flag with industry," said Urban, who later deleted reference to the states and scaled the bill back to simply allow the state to compile a list, every two years, of potentially harmful chemicals. It was crafted so it would not cost the state a penny.

Critics, led by the ACC, turned the conversation away from the potential harm to kids to the potential harm to Connecticut businesses, portraying the bill as an intrusion by state government into a job already held by the feds.

"They can't win on science," said Hulick, of the Connecticut advocacy group. "It became not about the health of kids. Somehow, that became second."

She added, "Obviously, they are afraid of something."

And opponents put lobbyists into play in a state with 187 legislators and more than 1,000 registered lobbyists. "The lobbyists for the toy and chemical industry are much better funded," said Noele Kidney, project coordinator for the Connecticut Public Health Association. "They have a huge presence here, all day long, every day."

Hughes & Cronin, "Connecticut's Oldest Contract Lobbying Firm," represents the ACC in the state. Founder Carroll J. Hughes did not respond to a July interview request. The ACC said its lobbying push is centered on supporting change at the federal level — change it said would aid the states.

For bill advocates, the low point was a four-hour hearing before the Connecticut Appropriations Committee April 23, the deadline day for the committee to move bills forward. In a hearing room filled with mostly empty chairs, Urban opened with a brief overview.

"The purpose behind this bill," she said, is to "start to get a handle on what kind of chemicals are out there that might be a problem for our children."

Republican opponents didn't see it that way, probing the three-page bill for hours, sometimes asking Urban to define words in the proposal, or explain how it compared with practices in Europe. Critics pitched their own amendments, each one triggering more questions — and more delay. Seventeen Republican critics took turns picking the bill apart word by word.

Twice, legislators invoked the ACC by name in challenging the proposal. Several echoed the chemistry council's chief argument, saying the EPA was already on the case.

"I know the implications and the harm that come to commerce when we as a state start to nitpick into issues that very frankly we are not the ultimate authorities in. We should leave this to the EPA," said Republican Rep. Mitch Bolinsky, citing "very, very deep concerns."

Connecticut businesses "are not feeling reassured by the openness of our state government to doing everything possible to make it easy to do business in this state. In fact, quite the contrary," said Republican Rep. Gail Lavielle, who asked, among other questions, how the word 'biological' was used as a noun, and for the definition of 'polyester resins.'

Lavielle did not respond to an interview request. During the hearing, she said her multiple questions were necessary "due diligence" for a measure drawing supporters and detractors.

"We're just putting too many restrictions on businesses," added Republican Rep. Jay Case. "From what our governor tells us, we are open for business and we need to keep the tax rolls coming in."

Nearing hour four, Republican Rep. Al Adinolfi noted that the proposed list could include chemicals of high concern "after considering a child's or developing fetus' potential for exposure."

He asked: "Now, what would be the definition of developing fetus?"

Urban, taken aback, replied: "I'm not the person to make a definition of what is or is not a fetus."

"Many of us believe that a fetus is formed immediately after conception," Adinolfi continued. "So does that mean if this bill becomes real … that when these lists are given to us by these commissions … that we can amend that and add the morning after pill as not legal?" Adinolfi, rehabbing from surgery, was not available for comment, his office said.

Urban became flustered at times — "Madam chair, I believe that we are really getting into minutiae at this point," she said after the first wave of questions from a half dozen legislators — and focused at others, trying to shift discussion to the bill's focus. "This is the first baby step toward protecting our children and getting a handle on these chemicals" that could be carcinogenic, she said as the final minutes ticked away. "It's merely creating a list."

In a statehouse controlled by Democrats, Republican critics held sway that day. At hearing's end, with continuous criticism of a "one-sided" bill opponents said gave industry no voice, the gavel was pounded. Discussion over, bill dead. Another victory for the ACC. "It was a filibuster," Urban said later. "It was very clear they were killing the bill. They decided to talk it until 5 o'clock."

Republican State Sen. Rob Kane, ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, was among opponents holding the floor with amendments, questions and more amendments. In an interview on the session's last day in Hartford, Kane said the intent was not purposeful delay, but to drill down into the bill's particulars.

"We have a great deal of questions with regard to the policy, the science and the economic impact," he said, noting that "proponents of the bill certainly are in the majority of both houses."

Why did the committee spend so much time focused on the impact to businesses? "That's because it was the appropriations committee," Kane said, where the focus is on finances. "Anytime you add more hurdles, it makes it more and more difficult for businesses."

Legislators' fear over toxics reform could be felt in other bills, too. This session, Connecticut pushed a bill creating a Mental Health Task Force to deal with emotional issues following the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012. Among other issues, the task force will study the impact of nutrients, genetics and psychotropic drugs on the mental health of children.

Urban, one of the bill's prime backers, said she initially included the phrase "environmental toxins" among the issues to be studied. She said the leadership told her to strike the phrase. Initially enraged, she said she closed the door for 30 minutes by herself "and used four-letter words as a stress reliever." Then she looked at the "greater good" — a measure to help children.

That bill passed. Her toxics bill did not. "It's dead," Urban said in the exhaustion of the session's final day. "Night, night. Bye, bye."

The bill died even though the Connecticut Department of Public Health supported the final version, which came at no cost to state government.

"The legislation could have helped the Legislature understand what our research is showing, and opened communication a little bit more in this area," said Gary Ginsberg, a state toxicologist. "So I think it's a loss in that regard that the Legislature doesn't have that automated reporting mandated. But there are other ways for us to get our message out to the public."

When she crafts a bill, Urban said, she is mindful of how industry and critics will attack. So she wrote a bill targeting the most vulnerable. "And I'm thinking, how do you say no to babies?" she asked, in an interview at the Capitol. "But guess what? They were able to say no to babies."

Visibly worn, Urban admitted she "didn't realize the extent of their negativity early enough."

She has learned, she said, that critics engage in what she calls "The Ali Rope-A-Dope" — bobbing and weaving, doing anything to avoid a hit, just as heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali used rope-a-dope to frustrate foes in the ring.

"It's rope-a-dope, and I know it's rope-a-dope."

She sighed. "I don't know how to get this done just yet. But I will."

Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this report.
 Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Farmworker advocates press EPA to update pesticide rules http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12975 Worker rights and pesticide safety advocates are in Washington this week, urging updates to the EPA's Worker Protection Standard. Peril in the fields Health;Environment;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Soil contamination;Agriculture;Environmental health;Environmental effects of pesticides;Pesticides;Farmworker;Shelley Davis;Worker Protection Standard;SENSOR-Pesticides 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-07-17T06:00:00-04:00
Saying they are plagued by pesticides but protected by only a thin layer of government regulation, farmworkers and their advocates are pressing the Environmental Protection Agency to update rules that are two decades old, and, critics say, dangerously dated.

Farmworker advocates from Florida to California were in Washington Monday and Tuesday to press the EPA and members of Congress to tighten rules meant to protect agricultural laborers from pesticides in the fields.

Their target: The Worker Protection Standard, a set of EPA rules meant to reduce the risk of pesticide-related injuries for some 2.5 million agricultural workers and pesticide handlers at 600,000 agricultural establishments nationwide.

Yet, even as the perils of pesticides have become better known, EPA protections have not been seriously updated in 20 years.

And, the Center for Public Integrity reported last year, the federal agency can only guess at the number of pesticide-related injuries for workers who often toil in the shadows. In addition, the Center found, the EPA often hands off pesticide enforcement to the states — which receive and investigate modest numbers of complaints each year.

The mix of old regulations and thin enforcement leads to tangible problems for laborers in the fields, advocates say.

"For me it's gut-wrenching to sit across from someone, look at their face, hear their stories, and what can we do? It's terrible," said Jeannie Economos, Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida.

Recently, Economos said, an undocumented worker — a woman about 30 years old and employed by a Florida plant nursery — came to complain about verbal abuse by her boss. As they talked, she said, the worker said she had trouble breathing for days after working near pesticides. "She sat in front of me and she shook the whole time, and she said she shakes all the time because she is exposed to pesticides," Economos said.

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Citing such cases, worker rights and pesticide safety groups are pressing the EPA to enhance protections. Among their suggestions, they are asking the EPA to:

Provide more frequent and thorough pesticide safety training for farmworkers;

Ensure that agricultural laborers receive information about specific pesticides they handle, and protective equipment limiting exposure;

Mandate medical monitoring of workers handling pesticides that affect the nervous system.

"Farmworker families are exposed to pesticides in the form of residues on workers' tools, clothes, shoes, and skin. The close proximity of agricultural fields to residential areas also results in aerial drift of pesticides into farmworkers' homes, schools, and playgrounds," Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law organization, said in a statement this week. "Research shows that children are especially vulnerable to harms from these exposures, even at very low levels."

Such groups have long pressed for reform. In 2011, for instance, Earthjustice and Farmworker Justice sent then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson a 31-page letter seeking "long-overdue revisions" to rules.

Now, farmworker advocates say they expect the EPA to soon issue recommended updates to the Worker Protection Standard. Anticipating that, the advocates are pressing the agency and members of Congress for substantive changes.

"We feel it's about time that they do this, and we're really concerned that what the EPA has proposed does not get watered down in the process," Economos said.

In a statement to the Center Wednesday afternoon, the EPA confirmed it is revamping the Worker Protection Standard. Among other areas, the EPA said it is examining the minimum age for handlers, personal protective equipment and ways to "improve enforcement capability."

"The proposed rule intends to reduce the risk of adverse effects to worker health from the use of agricultural pesticides," the agency said, adding that it intends to release proposed amendments in the spring of 2014.

 A pesticide plane dusts cotton plants in Lemoore, Calif. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Two DOE electric car loans, two different paths http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12714 As Fisker Automotive struggles to stay afloat, Tesla Motors pays off its Energy Department loan. Electric cars and the DOE Business_Finance;Tesla Motors;Tesla Roadster;Fisker Automotive;Tesla Model S;Fisker Karma;Henrik Fisker;Battery electric vehicles;Plug-in hybrid;Electric car;Transport;Private transport;Wilmington Assembly 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-05-23T15:45:00-04:00
They are two cutting-edge electric car makers, headquartered in California and backed by powerhouses of politics and money. In 2009, each secured half-billion dollar loan commitments from President Obama's Department of Energy to help transform their clean-energy cars from drawing boards to showrooms.

But this week, the fortunes of Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive took sharply divergent turns.

On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced that Tesla repaid the balance of its $465 million government loan nine years early. Fisker, meantime, has ceased making cars as it weighs potential bankruptcy, confronts a $171 million loan balance with DOE and, last month, faced questions from the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform.

In October 2011, The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News explored the Energy Department's risky $1 billion bet on two companies lauded for their innovative design, but facing warnings from experts over the marketability of cars that, in some models, carry price tags hovering around six figures.

In announcing Tesla's loan repayment this week, the department said the risks were worth taking, coming at a time the industry itself suffered a deep downturn. "The lack of financing for the automotive industry was critical and potentially lethal," Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement. "Providing these loans was a calculated risk — but it was the right decision for the country."

Yet for Fisker, whose loan was heralded by Vice President Joe Biden, the risks remain ripe. The company's vision of developing a muscular Karma and more practical sedan faltered amid a series of setbacks from slow- moving government approvals to recalls and financial downturns involving suppliers.

DOE initially agreed to loan Fisker $529 million to help the company develop two lines of plug-in hybrids. Of that, $359 million would help the company re-open a shuttered former GM plant in Delaware, where Fisker would develop "Project NINA" — a mass-market hybrid sedan to be called the Atlantic. "The company estimates it will build 75,000-100,000 of these highly efficient vehicles every year by 2014," DOE announced in 2009.

The remaining money would help Fisker complete its luxury Karma.

"We understood a new chapter had to be written, a new chapter in which we strengthen American manufacturing by investing in innovation," Biden said in 2009, citing Fisker's loan.

Yet reality collided with those projections, and Fisker Automotive has not come close to meeting its goals.

The company began drawing down on the DOE loan in 2010, and by the middle of 2011, had collected $192 million in government money, records show. But then, as Fisker encountered production hiccups, the Energy Department cut off the money spigot. DOE has recouped $21 million of the $192 million it loaned Fisker, leaving the company $171 million in debt to the government as it weighs a potential bankruptcy.

Testifying before the Oversight and Reform Committee late last month, co-founder Henrik Fisker said the company had sold 2,000 Karmas worldwide. He cited a series of setbacks that, like a domino, helped topple production of the company's fleet.

In 2011, Fisker said, regulatory approvals for the Karma in the United States "took longer than anticipated." Then, after the company began delivering the car to customers, two parts provided by outside suppliers had to be recalled. "The recalls generated bad publicity, diverted management attention, impacted sales, and further delayed our production schedules," Fisker said.

Then came a bigger blow: In October 2012, Fisker's lithium ion battery manufacturer filed for bankruptcy protection. Fisker's exclusive supplier — another recipient of DOE funding — stopped manufacturing batteries.

"Fisker Automotive had to cease production of the Karma," Fisker said. "We explored options for other battery suppliers, but due to large investment costs and long development cycles, we could not secure arrangements that would allow us to resume production immediately.

"This was a crippling factor in restarting production of the Karma."

With Hurricane Sandy came more bad news. More than 330 Karmas, awaiting shipment at Port Newark in New Jersey, were "damaged beyond repair during this unforeseen natural disaster. This constituted a major share of the company's inventory and resulted in a drastic loss in revenue," Fisker said.

Fisker's other car, the Atlantic, has yet to go into production.

Henrik Fisker stepped down as CEO in 2012, and resigned from the board in March. Yet he told the committee the company's technology earned honors, and said Fisker Automotive "still has the potential to build on these achievements" if it can secure financing.

"From the outset, Fisker Automotive aimed to be a new American car company, setting pioneering standards for low-emission technology and cutting-edge design," he said. "I sincerely hope that the company can find a way to move forward and repay its Department of Energy loans."

Tesla, the other California electric car company backed by DOE money, repaid its loan this week.

Both companies received backing from heavyweights in business and politics. Fisker's prime supporters included the California venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore. Tesla's prime backers include venture capitalist and Obama fundraiser Steve Westly, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

While Fisker searches for a potential buyer to help salvage the company, Tesla has, of late, pointed to headlines: Its Model S was recently named Motor Trend Car of the Year. On its website, Tesla prices the sedan from $62,400-$87,400, depending on the model — after a $7,500 federal tax credit. Its six-figure Roadster sports car, it said, is sold out in North America.

Tesla's $465 million loan, the DOE said, enabled the company to open a shuttered plant in Fremont, California, "and to produce battery packs, electric motors, and other powertrain components."

In a brief interview Thursday, Diarmuid O'Connell, Tesla's vice president of business development, said the company raised money to pay off the DOE loan this week.

Asked why the two electric car companies have forged disparate paths, he provided a concise answer.

"Fisker and Tesla have always been on different trajectories, our business models have always been different," O'Connell said. "What we are focusing now on is building market."

For the Energy Department, the next focus could be Fisker — and bankruptcy court, should the company take that route. On Thursday, energy officials did not respond to questions about what steps the department would take if Fisker files for bankruptcy, or how much the government anticipates recovering.

 Tesla Motors was one of the companies selected to receive loans from an Energy Department program meant to create jobs and spur development of fuel-saving cars. Other recipients include Ford Motor Co., Nissan North America and Fisker Automotive. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene EPA adds safeguards to spotlight conflicts on scientific panels http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12615 The Environmental Protection Agency announced new steps Friday to help reveal potential conflicts of interest in scientific review panels. EPA conflict policy overhauled Health;Occupational safety and health;Chemistry;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Matter;Hexavalent chromium;Chromium;Erin Brockovich;Scientific Advisory Panel 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-05-03T11:55:00-04:00
The Environmental Protection Agency announced new safeguards Friday to prevent conflicts of interest or bias from tainting its science, including efforts to assess the dangers of toxic chemicals.

The reforms, targeting scientific review panels selected for EPA by outside contractors, follow a Center for Public Integrity-PBS NewsHour examination revealing ties between scientists and industry on a panel reviewing hexavalent chromium, a compound commonly found in drinking water that may cause cancer.

In that case, three panelists who urged the EPA to delay potentially stricter drinking water standards had been expert witnesses for industry in hexavalent chromium litigation. The scientists denied any conflict and said their input was based on research, but the case study revealed how the EPA is unaware of potential conflicts on its own panels.

Under its own process, the Center reported, the agency turns over the job of selecting panelists to private companies, which handle conflict-of-interest reviews in secret. All information the vendors collect, including financial disclosure forms, is "considered private and non-disclosable to EPA or outside entities except as required by law," the EPA policy says.

The changes announced Friday add more layers of review — and provide more public disclosure — to the process.

Environmental watchdogs, who had questioned EPA's existing process, say the steps are overdue.

"It brings transparency to a process that wasn't there before," said Francesca Grifo, a senior policy fellow and expert on scientific integrity at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One key change: After an EPA-hired contractor selects members of a scientific review panel, "the contractor will consult with EPA to review whether the contractor followed existing conflicts of interest guidance and requirements, and identify and provide input on any issues."

That step adds an extra layer of review by EPA.

Also, the agency said, the names of chosen panelists will be publicly posted before any meetings take place.

The new steps do not change EPA's existing standards for assessing conflicts, the agency said, but instead add sunshine to the process.

"This process will ensure that existing conflicts of interest guidance and requirements are applied correctly and where a potential conflict of interest is identified, allow EPA to determine whether the contractor's plan to address the conflict is acceptable," the agency said.

The EPA's acting administrator, Bob Perciasepe, said Friday the new steps show the agency is "committed to scientific integrity."

"Improving the contract-managed peer review process and increasing transparency will lead to stronger science at the agency," Perciasepe said in a statement.

Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, has been outspoken about industry influence at the EPA. Denison praised the EPA for bringing more openness to the process.

"The hexavalent chromium example was the major impetus for this revision," he said.

Hexavalent chromium, best known as the toxic chemical compound from the hit film Erin Brockovich, is found in the drinking water of more than 70 million Americans, according to the Environmental Working Group.

New animal studies published in 2008 showed that mice and rats given high doses of the compound developed large numbers of tumors. The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, cited the compound as a "clear carcinogen."

The EPA planned to revise its assessment of the compound in 2011, even as a trade group, the American Chemistry Council, urged the agency to wait for industry funded studies. Several members of the peer review panel also urged the EPA to wait.

One was Steven Patierno, then a scientist at George Washington University, who was a consultant on ACC studies.

Another was Joshua Hamilton, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., which is affiliated with Brown University. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the company that polluted the water in Hinkley, Calif., with chromium, hired Hamilton as a consultant in 2009.

Hamilton said that just before the EPA peer-review panel met, PG&E asked him if he would go back to Hinkley to discuss the health effects of hexavalent chromium. PG&E said it paid Hamilton $110,000 for his work in Hinkley. Hamilton said he revealed the PG&E work to the private contractor hired by EPA, Eastern Research Group, and that the firm concluded it was not a conflict.

Officials with Eastern Research Group, based in Massachusetts, have not responded to interview requests.

Meanwhile, some members of Congress are pushing potential change to support industry.

The House science committee recently approved a bill to change the rules at the EPA for setting up scientific advisory panels. It would prevent the EPA from excluding people from panels with industry ties, as long as those ties are disclosed. It would also exclude panelists whose research is incorporated in the assessment. The bill is awaiting action by the full House.
 David Heath http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/david-heath Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene From homemaker to hell-raiser in Love Canal http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12465 In 1978, Lois Gibbs was a mom with sick kids. Her fight prompted a president to free 900 families -- and paved the way for U.S. buyouts. Fighting to leave, part 2 Love Canal;Pollution in the United States;New York;Environment of the United States;Niagara Falls, New York;Environmental issues in the United States;Lois Gibbs 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-04-16T06:00:00-04:00
FALLS CHURCH, Va. — The woman who helped free an entire community from a toxic dump, literally rewriting environmental laws in the process, was so shy at the start of the struggle she tried to hide behind a tree when neighbors called on her.

Lois Gibbs took to the stage that day 35 years ago, in the seemingly idyllic community of Love Canal, N.Y., and began to find her voice. Transforming herself from homemaker to hell-raiser, she helped convince then-President Jimmy Carter to come to town in 1980 and remove 900 families from a 21,000-ton toxic dump. Earlier that year, Gibbs and her neighbors held two Environmental Protection Agency officials captive in a ploy to get the president's attention. It worked.

Long before Erin Brockovich became a movie, Gibbs helped secure an environmental victory of greater heft. Love Canal's war against the toxins under its feet prompted the federal government to create the Superfund cleanup program and earned Gibbs the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Today she is still in the fight as executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a nonprofit squired in a third-floor corner office in a nondescript building in Fairfax County, Va., a few miles from Washington, D.C. A tiny gray sign hangs outside the door, betraying no sense of the history inside.

Aged photos cover the walls and floors alongside stacks of environmental reports. One giant picture shows Gibbs aside President Carter, moments after he announced the relocation pact. Another photo shows a 3-year-old boy wearing a T-shirt announcing: "Love Canal Guinea Pig. Used by New York State and federal government." Another picture — published by Today's Suburban Woman magazine in 1979, a year into the struggle — shows Gibbs clutching her daughter in front of a boarded-up building.

These aren't museum pieces, but reminders of a journey. Across the country, other communities, sickened by pollution but bereft of know-how, ring the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.

"I see myself in the people who call," Gibbs, 61, says today. "These women call up and say 'Nobody understands me.' I can relate to them. I see myself in exactly the same place. If I don't have that connection to the people, I would just walk away. "

From dream town to toxic dump

Gibbs began finding that connection in 1978, as she went door to door in Love Canal after learning the community sat atop a landfill of toxins. "Who would build a school on top of a dump? Who would build a playground on top of a dump? And why didn't anyone tell me?" she asked.

The discovery ignited a woman who, growing up in Grand Island, N.Y., 15 minutes upstate from Buffalo, busied herself sewing draperies and aspiring to be a housewife. In Love Canal, her vision took root. Her husband worked at the Goodyear plant and they had two children, Michael and Melissa. This neighborhood, just miles from Niagara Falls and her childhood home, was filled with the noisy chorus of kids, two churches and mom and pop shops. Gibbs walked her children to the 99th Street Elementary School and to the playground next door each day.

Michael was born just before the family settled into a three-bedroom home on 101st Street in 1972. Healthy at birth, Michael started getting sick not long after they moved in, and each ailment became more serious. His asthma led to pneumonia, which was followed by a urinary tract disorder, and then a seizure disorder. Finally, a doctor told Lois her son had an immune system problem. Melissa, conceived in Love Canal and born three years after Michael, developed a rare blood disease. Gibbs searched for clues, but found none; she didn't even allow soda in the house, but her children could not shake their sicknesses.

Then, one day in 1978, the Niagara Falls Gazette published a story about toxic dump sites cluttering the region. Love Canal was one, and the news screamed from the page: 21,000 tons of toxic waste had been buried next to the school property, underneath the playground. The now-defunct Hooker Chemical Co. had sold the site to the school board 25 years earlier, for $1. "Oh, my God!" Gibbs thought, reading the Gazette. "Every single day I took my children to the playground to play."

Pressing to move her son to another school, Gibbs won an audience with the school board superintendent. The school chief settled into an oversized leather chair behind a broad, shiny wood desk. He seated Gibbs in a school desk normally used by kids. Sunken in her seat, she slid two doctors' notes across the desk saying her son's sickness could be tied to the dump, she said.

The superintendent glanced at the notes, then slid them back. "'We're not going to do that because of one hysterical housewife with a sick kid,' " he said, as Gibbs recalled it. " 'Well, if your kid is so sick, why don't you go home and take care of him? Why are you running around to City Hall and the school board?' "

Tears streamed down Gibbs' face. "All of a sudden, I became the bad guy."

At home, her Irish-Catholic temper began to burn. Raised on Love Road in Grand Island, one of six children of a stay-at-home mom and union dad, Gibbs was taught to vote at election time and fly the American flag. Now, as she raised two sick children in a town smothered in waste, the government had turned its back. "After I got sad, I got mad," she says, recalling the conversation that helped propel her on a lifetime of activism. "Don't ever tell me I'm a bad mother."

When neighbors answered her knock, Gibbs opened up about her children's illnesses. In living room after living room in Love Canal, neighbors shared that they also had sick children. "It wasn't until I went door to door that they started saying, 'My son has asthma too, or my daughter has epilepsy,' " Gibbs said. "Women talked to me about birth defects."

Residents began paying closer attention to evidence before their eyes. One couple grew squash so huge it could win prizes at a community fair; now they worried toxins bulked it up. Kids dubbed a local creek "Beverly Hillbillies" — after the show about a family that struck riches in black gold — because they could stick a piece of wood in the water and it would come up slimy black. Rocks on the ground were so explosive they would pop like firecrackers if kids threw them against a wall.

One afternoon, a child stuffed rocks in his pocket and began running home when, suddenly, the rocks caught fire and burned him severely, Gibbs said. With each story, the community began to absorb the larger picture.

"She was like a hurricane and we just kept going," said Luella Kenny, a fellow Love Canal resident-turned activist who serves on the board of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. "She was a housewife, and there's nothing wrong with being a housewife, and she did not have all of this shall we say Wall Street and Washington know how the politicians had and the Wall Street investors had."

Instead, Kenny said, Gibbs possessed a "hidden talent she wasn't even aware of. But when push came to shove and your children are being threatened, I think you find that energy that you are going to protect them, for heaven's sake."

Her son, Jon Allen Kenny, the only of her three children born at Love Canal, died at age 7 in 1978 from kidney failure.

Another day, Kenny was showing health officials her backyard when a bird flew into the creek, sipped some water, and plopped down dead, she said.

Among the toxins brewing in the underground cesspool: A mix of halogenated organics, pesticides, chlororbenzenes and dioxin, according to EPA records. The community linked the chemical waste to failing health, producing charts showing high rates of miscarriages, crib deaths, birth defects, kidney and urinary failings — and nervous breakdowns.

As the evidence mounted, Gibbs pressed for answers, thinking back to the preaching of her father, a war veteran and bricklayer for Bethlehem Steel. "'The system will work, if you play by the rules.' "

In the spotlight

As she made the rounds, Gibbs kept searching for someone to emerge as the face behind the neighborhood's mission. "Where's the leader?" she wondered. "I'm a housewife of sick kids. My job is not to become a community leader."

On Aug.2, 1978, the spotlight found her. That day, after gathering hundreds of signatures on a petition demanding that the state close the 99th Street School, Gibbs and a neighbor piled into Gibbs' green Cutlass Supreme convertible and drove five hours to the capital in Albany.

As they arrived, petitions in hand, light bulbs went off and commotion filled the air. "Are you Lois Gibbs? Are you Lois Gibbs?" reporters asked.

Serendipitously, New York health officials were holding a press conference, declaring a state of emergency in Love Canal and ordering the 99th Street School closed. The state health commissioner was recommending relocation for pregnant women or parents with children under two living on the two streets nearest the landfill. New York directed Niagara County to clean the site. The state said it would help residents find temporary housing — but not pay for it — and families could return after the cleanup.

Back in Love Canal, the state's announcement ignited fiery protests. Why move just the closest streets? What about parents with sick three-year-olds? "It was a kind of running joke," Gibbs recalls. "If you get pregnant, you get out. It's pretty pathetic."

When she returned from Albany that night, neighbors were burning mortgages in a barrel. As Gibbs stepped from her Cutlass, homeowners called her to the stage. She tried to hide behind a tree. Spotting her brother-in-law, she sought advice. His counsel: Call a meeting. Gibbs gathered her strength, took to the stage and — making the first public speaking appearance of her life — announced that everyone would meet in the following days.

At that meeting, the community elected Lois Gibbs president of the Love Canal Homeowners Association. Suddenly, she felt the burden of 900 families on her back. It was one thing to fight for your own children, but another to know your decisions impacted thousands. "Here's this huge burden," she said.

Her solution: To make the homeowners association the most democratic organization on earth, with 50 street representatives, each responsible for fanning out to different corners of the community. Church leaders took on some roles, activists others. No decision was made unless the majority agreed. This democracy was her blanket — and helped shield her when, a year into the struggle in 1979, some neighbors, frustrated at the slow pace of reform, pressed for a new leader.

In a meeting room packed with 500 residents, one group shouted to replace Gibbs. Another said she should stay. The session threatened to veer into hysteria. Sitting at the head of the room, Gibbs thought: What would my mother do? She imagined two children fighting and pictured a mother taking away the toy at the heart of the struggle.

She took the microphone. "My first question is, how many people like blue?" she asked. Bewildered looks filled the hall. Slowly, a few hands reached upward.

"How many people like red?" she asked. Another cluster raised theirs.

"Look," Gibbs said. "Everybody has a different opinion."

Her tactic worked. The room settled into calm. Turning to her blanket once more, Gibbs cited the association bylaws, which laid out the process the homeowners needed to follow in order to elect a new leader. It never happened.

Instead, the residents pulled closer. "I just thank God that we had Lois at the time," said Kenny, her former neighbor. "You just had never heard of people being able to take over and be able to win and to beat the government."

A new face comes to town

As the fight evolved, a new face arrived in October 1978: The state tapped Stephen Lester, a Harvard-trained environmental scientist, to be a technical adviser to the residents of Love Canal.

Lester heard stories about the shy housewife who had never spoken publicly before. But now, sitting before him was someone entirely different. His first impression of Gibbs: "Hotheaded."

"She was a fiery fighter," Lester recalls. "She was very emotional, very opinionated, very active in the community. One of the very first things she told me was that the state of New York was lying to the public and they were hiding information and I couldn't trust them. So I needed to listen to her and to the community.

"When I met the state Health Department, I was told Lois was very emotional and she lies to the public and makes things up. These two sides clearly don't like each other. I decided I wouldn't take sides."

A month into his assignment, Lester said, "I quickly realized that Lois was telling more of the truth than the state people were."

Evidence of harm continued to shake the community.

In 1980, the EPA issued a study showing that the chemicals in question could trigger genetic damage for future generations. In other words: That the community's children could be sickened, and their grandchildren too. Yet the federal government still resisted pleas to move everyone out.

"That was the straw that broke the camel's back," Gibbs said. Her neighbors "just went crazy." Housewives in pink hair rollers rocked cars in the streets one Saturday, she said. Neighbors poured gasoline on one lawn, spelling E-P-A, and lit it afire. "That's when you knew you no longer had control," Gibbs recalls. "It was scary."

As the lawn smoldered, two EPA officials were holed up in a hotel nearby. Gibbs invited them to come to an abandoned home, where residents were meeting, to talk about their study.

When the officials stepped in, a communal brainstorm built up: Let's hold them hostage. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the residents blockaded the EPA spokesman and scientist from leaving.

The FBI swooped into Love Canal and shut off outside access to the phones. The scene put the spotlight just where the community wanted it — upon President Carter, deep in a rough re-election campaign. The nation would see what the sitting president would do.

Six hours later, residents let the EPA men go, but they gave the president four days — until noon Wednesday — to act. Or else. Gibbs and her neighbors never knew what "or else" was. They prayed their spur-of-the moment deadline would work.

Convinced the FBI would lock them up for taking federal officials hostage, some residents went to bed fully clothed. "I didn't want to go to jail in my jammies," Gibbs said.

The feds never stormed their homes. But two days later, the White House agreed to temporarily relocate all Love Canal families.

"This is not an ordinary situation," an EPA official announced May 21, 1980. "This case presents special circumstances warranting this extraordinary action. The studies completed to date are sufficiently suggestive of a threat to public health … "

On Oct. 1, 1980, Carter came to town to cement a permanent relocation. As Carter spoke, Gibbs stood in the audience. There was a problem. Interest rates had skyrocketed, and homeowners worried they'd be underwater in their new homes. They pressed Gibbs to get the ear of a president flanked by Secret Service agents.

For a moment, Gibbs sat quietly. Then she made her move. Secret Service agents stopped her. "I'm not going to go away, and if you take me away I am going to scream," she recounted. "How's that going to look, Lois Gibbs taken out screaming because they wouldn't let her talk to the president?"

The officials let Gibbs to the stage, where she turned to the president and whispered: "Can we talk about low interest loans?"

He turned to the activist, and said yes, they could talk about loans. He asked if she had heard of the Superfund program. That moment, captured in a giant black and white picture, is a keepsake Gibbs keeps on display today, leaning against the wall at the CHEJ.

In all, more than 900 families were moved out, 350 homes were demolished and the school torn down. The fight helped spur the Superfund program, in which government dollars clean up toxic sites across the U.S.

Carter lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. But in his final State of the Union address in 1981, he cited Love Canal's resonance. "The regulations establish comprehensive controls for hazardous waste and, together with vigorous enforcement, will help to ensure that Love Canal will not be repeated," he said.

In 2004, Love Canal was officially removed from the Superfund list, though some residents still raise environmental concerns. "Love Canal taught us that we needed a mechanism to address abandoned hazardous waste sites, especially those that posed a threat to people's health," Jane M. Kenny, EPA's Regional Administrator, said at the time. "Decades later, Love Canal has become a symbol of our success under Superfund."

A new mission

Gibbs formed the Center for Health, Environment & Justice in 1981, and in the years since has traveled to every state except Alaska. The group's goal is to help communities face off against industry and government — and to flee pollution, just as people in Love Canal had. The organization has produced a 43-page guide — Relocation: Getting Organized and Getting Out (Go Go) — that offers how-to advice for communities new to the environmental battleground.

Victories don't come easily in a landscape where industry flexes political muscle, governments move slowly and communities have little more than their wits.

In every stop, she asks: "What can you do to make them uncomfortable? I try to convince them that the more people you have the more power you have. At Love Canal we won because we turned out 550 people at every meeting."

The Center's science director is Stephen Lester, the same expert hired by New York to work in Love Canal. He is also Gibbs' second husband. Married in 1984, they have two children along with Gibbs' two children from her previous marriage.

"Lois is most comfortable in the communities," said Lester. "She's got eight balls in the air, and she's going to a community on a weekend when she doesn't have to. Her response has always been, 'If I don't go to these communities, then I can't do this other stuff that keeps this organization going.' "

Recently, she traveled to Texas — to visit a row of refineries in Corpus Christi and discuss children's school health concerns in Austin. Later she was in Annapolis fighting hydraulic fracturing.

In February 2012, Gibbs traveled to Wilmington, N.C., at the request of activists fighting to block construction of a cement plant proposed in the coastal city.

Gibbs visited for 24 hours, making three presentations. Her main message to organizers: To empower the citizens most likely to be harmed by the cement plant. Until then, the prime organizers were pushing the fight largely by themselves. But now, here was the mother of Superfund saying the larger power came from the people.

"She just changed the way we viewed our citizens," said Sarah Gilliam, coordinator of the Stop Titan Action Network, who had invited Gibbs to Wilmington. "It was really just a giant light bulb going off for me."

When she speaks to communities, Gibbs paces in front of the podium, speaking in common sense prose. "This is a big company. They've got lots of money and you don't," she told the residents in Wilmington.

Gilliam had studied Love Canal's story while an environmental policy student in the Master's program at UNC-Wilmington. Now, with the community's struggle hitting dead-ends, she turned from the history books to the real thing.

"Before she came down here I had her up on this fake pedestal," Gilliam said. "And when I met her she was just so real. … We've got this new mantra where we're channeling Lois."
 In this 1978 file photo, Lois Gibbs, president of the Love Canal Homeowners Association, makes adjustments to a Christmas tree trimmed with decorations naming some of the chemicals found in the Love Canal, in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Louisiana sinkhole shatters calm, prompts buyouts on the bayou http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12462 A massive sinkhole roils a Louisiana bayou community — forcing many to seek buyouts, part of a U.S. trend of communities fighting to leave. Fighting to leave, part 1 Bobby Jindal;Louisiana;Hurricane Katrina;Southern United States;Geography of the United States;Indian American history;Punjabi people;Baton Rouge metropolitan area;Sinkhole;Bayou 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-04-15T06:00:00-04:00
BELLE ROSE, La. — Tim Brown eases his john boat from his back yard dock into his daily therapy: The Bayou Corne that courses through this patch of southern Louisiana like a lifeline. Brown powers past the Tupelo Gum, Cypress Moss and Swamp Maple trees that drape the bayou in a frame, and steers to the spot where he reels catfish and collects thoughts.

"If I had to actually leave this place and go back to a house on dry land, I'd probably be dead in two years," says Brown, 65 and retiring next year. "I guess you can say it's a totally different life out here."

But now that life, for Brown and 350 other residents in a neighborhood with "Crawfish Crossing" signs and roads named Gumbo, Jambalaya and Crawfish Stew Street, has been shattered by discovery of a 14-acre sinkhole that fractured the community's calm and may bury its dreams.

The sinkhole, triggered by a collapsed cavern operated by salt mining operator Texas Brine Company LLC, swallowed trees and fouled the air when it appeared August 3. Its discovery sent the Bayou Corne community here in Belle Rose into a state of emergency: Assumption Parish and Louisiana officials ordered a still-in-effect evacuation as state officials scrambled to unearth what happened.

"Initially the concern was, that first day, you have a sinkhole … and you don't know what caused it. All you know is a 400-by-400 section of marshland just got converted to a muddy pit. Trees were sinking into it and not coming back. It was like quicksand," said Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources.

Natural gas filtered into the aquifer, and crude oil floated to the top of the sinkhole, about a third of a mile from the nearest homes anchored on each side of Highway 70. Louisiana officials feared explosion hazards and "potentially toxic constituents of crude oil and other hydrocarbons," though the state said continuous monitoring has detected "no hazardous concentrations." Yet earlier this month, sampling by Texas Brine found two homes with "concentrations of natural gas below the structure foundations that were above normal background levels," Assumption Parish officials reported.

"That is just too close to the community to take any chances with what comes next," Courreges said.

Eight months later, what comes next roils a community so close-knit it hosts its own Mardi Gras parade: The prospect that the entire Bayou Corne neighborhood, all 150 homeowners, will be relocated and not come back; that this haven for retirees and working class Louisianans will be, symbolically, swallowed by the sinkhole.

What's happening in Belle Rose has played out in dozens of communities threatened by environmental hazards so dire residents feel compelled to demand that industry or government move them out. But as Bayou Corne's experience shows, winning buyouts is never easy, and leaving is often painful. The community's travails reveal the human cost of pollution.

"It's been an ongoing, really to me, like a science fiction novel. You have this big hole that caves in and then it keeps growing and growing and growing," said Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, an advocacy organization based in Baton Rouge. "Mysterious bubbles. It's like watching the crawfish pot, bubbling the crawfish pot."

Bayou Corne "is really a little piece of heaven," Orr said. "It's a paradise to them. They could go out, be on a boat, it's absolutely beautiful. But now a lot of people think it's ruined forever."

Many residents have pushed for buyouts from Texas Brine. Last month, after pressure from Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and parish political leaders, Texas Brine began contacting individual homeowners to begin the process of assessing their property values and, ultimately, making offers. How much the company will pay is unknown, leaving Jindal to tell residents, during a press conference in Bayou Corne last month, that Louisiana will "make them do it again" if the first offers are too small.

"The finger is pointed at us, and we understand that, and we are going to try to make a fair offer," Sonny Cranch, a Texas Brine spokesman, said recently while giving a visiting journalist a tour of the sinkhole on company property.

Many of those pushing for buyouts are crestfallen by the prospect of packing up from a place where they fish, hunt and occasionally encounter alligators. When school is out, visiting grandkids pop up like spring flowers, giving the community the feel of camp on the water. Since the sinkhole's arrival, many grandchildren have stopped returning.

Other long-timers refuse to leave homes they saved a lifetime for, state of emergency be damned.

"I don't care if I'm the only one standing here. I'll live here as long as I can," vows James Bergeron, a 14-year resident of Crawfish Stew Street and retired deputy sheriff and offshore crane operator. "I'm 76 years old. This is all paid for. What am I going to do, go somewhere and buy something else?

"Come on!"

As he spoke, his eyes glistened.

Across the U.S., buyouts move slowly, painfully

While the environmental hazard in Bayou Corne is new — state officials say they know of no other instance in which a cavern's sidewall collapsed to trigger a sinkhole — the wrenching prospect of relocation is not new for many communities from Florida to California.

Residents living on the fence-line face long odds in their quest to escape. Few communities flex political power, their voices faint against big-muscled industry or slow moving government.

"The vast majority of relocations in this country have come as a result of politics," said Lois Gibbs, executive director of Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a nonprofit based in Falls Church, Va., that works with communities seeking relief from pollution.

Gibbs knows this firsthand. More than three decades ago, she was a housewife with sick children in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y., when she learned that her supposed dream town was built atop a 21,000-ton mound of toxic chemicals. Gibbs' push lured President Jimmy Carter to come to town and, in 1980, free some 900 families from Love Canal's toxic dump.

Today, Gibbs and her colleagues at CHEJ have prepared a 43-page guidebook to help communities navigate the tangle of industry and government.

The guidebook includes two dozen case studies of communities that did just that, winning relocation bankrolled by government or industry. But even successful relocation bids take years, sometimes decades.

In Pensacola, Fla., Gibbs said, residents sought for a decade to free themselves from the dioxins, arsenic and heavy metals from an abandoned former wood treating facility. By 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency said it excavated 225,000 cubic yards of contaminated material — creating a mound nearly 60 feet high — and "stored it under a secure cover on-site." Residents dubbed the site "Mount Dioxin," and complained of cancers and respiratory disease. The community launched a letter writing campaign demanding the EPA move them out.

Four years later, in 1996, the EPA said it would relocate a third of the residents. Enraged, the blue- collar community turned up the heat. Taking in small donations from across the country, CHEJ took out a full page ad in USA Today challenging President Clinton — then running for re-election, and needing the Florida vote. The ad juxtaposed a Clinton quote — saying that children should not live near hazardous waste sites — with a picture of Pensacola children aside the wood treating plant. Advocates delivered the ad to Hillary Clinton, then in Florida stumping for her husband.

The message, Gibbs said: "Clinton, put your words and your actions together." Soon after, the community won a full relocation. Some activists refer to Pensacola as the "Black Love Canal."

Other fence-line fights stretch out even longer.

In Norco, La., a four-street, all-black community named Diamond won a historic relocation from Shell Oil in 2002 after decades spent enduring illnesses and sometimes-deadly plant explosions. The grassroots victory was 13 years in the making, and came five years after a St. Charles Parish jury returned a verdict in favor of Shell in a citizen lawsuit alleging the company's chemical plant and neighboring refinery contaminated the air and sickened residents. As in Pensacola, the Diamond residents were aided by aggressive activists who helped push intransigent industry and government.

Some communities harmed by pollution never do get out.

In Tallevast, a largely black southwest Florida town founded by turpentine workers, industry and government officials discovered in 2000 that a former beryllium plant had leached a 200-acre underground plume of cancer-causing TCE and other toxins in a town of 1.5 square miles. Lockheed Martin, the property owner at the time, discovered the leaching and set out to clean it up.

Yet for three years, no one — not the county, the state nor industry — told residents what was under their feet. Tallevast homeowners unearthed the news by chance in 2003, when community leader Laura Ward noticed workers on her lawn and started asking questions.

A decade after that discovery, the company has yet to agree to a full relocation.

Ward said residents continue to press for buyouts — with no success. "I think their decision to not do the buyout and do the move, was a bad decision," Ward said. "We felt like that eight, 10 years ago, and we still feel that way."

Meantime, Lockheed Martin's cleanup will unfold over decades. The company vows to "continue to invest in the environmental, health and economic needs of the community."

In Tallevast, as in Bayou Corne, residents seeking a buyout would depart with painfully mixed feelings — leaving homes they thought would pass down the generations.

Unexplained bubbling — then the sinkhole

Trouble in Belle Rose began months before the sinkhole arrived, with residents noticing a bubbling in the bayou and smelling gas in the air. In June and July of 2012, Assumption Parish, state and federal officials began examining the unexplained bubbling in Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou.

On August 3, an area of wooded swamp in Bayou Corne began to subside, prompting state Commissioner of Conservation James Welsh to issue a Declaration of Emergency. Assumption Parish issued its own state of emergency, and Gov. Jindal did too.

By 7:30 that night, the Assumption Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness had called for a mandatory evacuation as state and federal scientists searched for answers, "uncertain of what the actual possible risks are," the state said.

Louisiana authorities discovered that the sinkhole was caused by the collapse of a sidewall of a previously plugged cavern. "The collapse had created a pathway to the nearby groundwater aquifer and the surface for crude oil and natural gas which had been confined in a hydrocarbon-bearing layer," wrote the state's Courreges.

The collapse is unprecedented, he said — the "first reported failure of a brine cavern sidewall." Caverns have collapsed before, but always from the top, he said.

The state directed Texas Brine to remove natural gas in the aquifer through vent wells, provide home methane detectors for any resident wanting them — and to pay residents under terms of the company's permit and the Parish evacuation order.

Since then, Texas Brine has cut $875 weekly checks to all homeowners, whether the residents left or stayed back. The state's evacuation order was mandatory — but not forced. Many residents have fled to temporary quarters, but return regularly to check on their properties as the company and state try to keep a lid on the sinkhole and monitor its environmental impact.

State officials have ordered underground 3D seismic technology to get a clearer picture of what is happening underground.

The biggest public safety concern, Courreges said, is "to get the gas out of the aquifer, and stop it from recharging the aquifer."

"We've got to stop the source of it, because it's still being fed. We've got to figure out the source, find some way to intercept it, stop it," he said. "We're looking into that 3D seismic to get some information, to get that underground picture."

The state also intends to gain "a full understanding of the impact the collapse had on the stability of the ground surface," Courreges said.

The sinkhole continues to stir concern. In late March, more than two dozen trees collapsed into it. And then on March 28, authorities temporarily halted work around the sinkhole after seismic monitoring detected "fluid and gas movement below the sinkhole." More trees and a sinkhole access ramp sloughed in. On April 1 came another work stoppage amid signs of "fluid and gas movement below the sinkhole," and water movement at its surface.

Explosion hazards are another worry. The state, working with the EPA, conducted a series of flights over the area scouring for potentially hazardous plumes. Monitoring to date has not "detected concentrations at or above surface that have reached the lower explosive limits," Louisiana officials say. Concerned that crude oil and saltwater could spread to surface waters, the state ordered a containment berm to be built around the sinkhole.

So far, tests results by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality show "no harmful environmental releases," the state said.

Yet for residents, the harm is right before their eyes: A community facing potential extinction.

'Keep Out' signs where residents frolicked

Today, homes once filled with bustle now feature "No Trespassing" or "Keep Out" signs. Along Highway 70, where giant trucks rumble past and dead armadillos occasionally dot the sideway, an insurance company's ad has suddenly turned ironic: "Dreams can come true."

The homes range from modest to modern, but all share a link to the water. The sinkhole's mysterious arrival — and its murky long-term consequences — has taken a psychological toll.

"It's just horrible," said Wilma Subra, a Louisiana environmental chemist who has studied the area and visited recently. "This was a very close, very small community. You cannot imagine what they must be going through, day in and day out. Not knowing if you're ever able to come back or not."

Julie Albarado said she and her husband, drawn by a love of fishing, hunting and the water, moved to Bayou Corne in 2003. "It's just terrible that we may have to leave," said Albarado, who said she was diagnosed with cancer several years ago. "We don't know where we are going."

Nick and Brenda Romero say they dread leaving, but see no other option.

The Romeros bought their home in 1991 as a getaway retreat, and moved in fulltime in 1996. "We decided we enjoyed it so much we wanted to retire here," said Nick. For several years, the couple drove back and forth to jobs in Baton Rouge, some 50 miles away. Nick is retired from the U.S. Postal Service, and Brenda a retired loan closing manager.

They started the community's annual Mardi Gras parade, replete with live music, beads and hearty food. Their house connects with a vein of canal that leads into the bayou, and their yard features an orange tree that spouts so much fruit they share it with neighbors.

In summer, a cluster of their 10 grandchildren came to visit, with fishing on the bayou, and an occasional encounter with gators.

"Our grandkids loved coming here. It was one experience they never experienced anywhere else," Nick Romero said. "We don't have that anymore. Our grandkids can't come out here anymore."

Brenda, battling breast cancer, has developed a second career as an artist, often using wildlife as her muse. "To be on the water, peacefully on the water … We feel it would be impossible to find another place like this," she said. "This is where we wanted to be for the rest of my life."

Her husband worries about what Texas Brine will offer. "I didn't and she didn't cause this," said Nick Romero. "We still have a mortgage on this. I'm retired with a mortgage."

Karen St. Germain, the Louisiana state representative for the area, said she understands the residents' anxiety. "You have taken a piece of their life that they can't get back," St. Germain, a Democrat, said on a steamy afternoon last month, just before Gov. Jindal swooped in on a helicopter visit. "I grew up on the water. It's our sense of calmness."

The sinkhole threatens to destroy that calm. St. Germain said she is keeping close tabs on how Texas Brine addresses the situation. The company, she said, didn't initially move quickly to permanently relocate residents. "Not till they got pushed," she said.

As he landed in Bayou Corne, Jindal shook hands with residents and heard their stories. "For the people that want to leave, there should be that option," the governor told residents clustered around him. "But it shouldn't be mandatory."

Jindal then huddled inside with dozens of residents, emerging later to address the community and press, flanked by Assumption Parish and state officials. Jindal had drawn some criticism for not coming to Bayou Corne sooner — the press conference was his first visit since the sinkhole's emergence — but he told residents he has been on their side from the start.

"We will hold Texas Brine accountable," he said. "We're going to make sure they're responsible for cleaning up the mess they have caused."

He cautioned that solutions will not come quickly. "This is a marathon."

Jindal said Texas Brine has "missed many commitments and deadlines they made to the state. We said, 'Enough is enough.' " The state, he said, will closely follow the company's offer of buyouts, which could potentially begin coming later this month.

"The real proof will be in whether residents are actually accepting their offers," Jindal said.

Before the sinkhole, "For Sale" signs were scarce in Bayou Corne. Over the last year, just three properties had been sold, a lawyer for Texas Brine told homeowners at a town hall meeting several hours after the governor's visit.

Cranch, the Texas Brine spokesman, said the company has moved to address the environmental damage in the community while responding to citizen lawsuits already filed. "We have tried and made a good faith effort to respond as quickly as we possibly could" to the demands of the state, Cranch said. "We were faced with an awful lot of issues."

Texas Brine's website includes regular bulletins. "It's been a big hardship on a lot of these people. Truly it has, and we recognize that," Cranch said.

Four citizen lawsuits have been consolidated into one case in federal court. A fifth case moves ahead in state court, and more are likely. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, working with Los Angeles attorneys, came to town in March to meet with homeowners who contacted her after the sinkhole surfaced.

Under a buyout process approved in court, Texas Brine is first contacting residents not represented by lawyers. Getting to that point has taken time, Cranch said, with the myriad environmental and legal issues triggered by the cavern collapse. Another question Texas Brine has grappled with, he said: "What to do with people who stay?"

Back on the bayou

Tim Brown is among them. A lab technician for a chemical plant, he and his wife Kathryn have lived on the bayou for 14 years, hosting crawfish boils and feeling securely at home.

"I've always wanted to be on the water," said Brown, originally from French Lick, Indiana. "We've got too much invested in our home to try to move. … Once you live on the water, you don't want to leave."

"The fishing is still good," said his wife. Indeed, Tim Brown said. He caught some catfish that day.

The Browns say they confront the catastrophe with a sense of perspective built from overcoming hardships. Kathryn's mother and brother lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. One of their daughters has had breast cancer. Tim Brown underwent heart surgery and a series of knee surgeries in recent years.

Yet they bring a dash of Cajun personality to the chaos. Each Christmas, the Browns decorate their lawn with three giant alligators. In March, the display remained in their front yard — with sinkhole related additions. "Texas Brine Sinkhole — Stink Hole," says one sign. "We're having a little fun with it," Tim Brown said. "And the Texas Brine people thought it was funny."

Soon, he is back on the water.

"Money's not everything," Brown said, recalling the day he encountered beavers, eagles and otters. Giant signs on the water warn of a natural gas pipeline, but Brown betrays little worry. Testing in his yard has not revealed any harm from the sinkhole, he said.

He points out his favorite fishing spot, just past the juncture where the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou merge, then spins his boat back home. One of his three dachshunds stands beside him as the boat picks up speed.

"Hang on, hound dog," Brown says to his dachshund, Fritz. As he pulls up to dock, he turns to a visitor and glances upon the water. "This is what we're staying for."
 On the bayou: Tim Brown steers his boat on Bayou Corne, along with his dog, Fritz. A 14-acre sinkhole threatens to destroy the calm in this Louisiana community. Many residents are seeking buyouts, making the neighborhood just one of many across the country seeking to flee environmental hazards. Brown is among residents who plan to stay. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Energy Department auto loan program sputters http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12323 A $25 billion Department of Energy loan program has not closed a loan in two years amid the specter of Solyndra. DoE's languishing loans Business_Finance;Tesla Motors;Energy in the United States;Sustainable energy;Solyndra;United States Department of Energy;Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program;Fisker Automotive;Plug-in hybrid;Electric car;Solyndra loan controversy;Transport;Energy policy in the United States 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-03-15T16:45:00-04:00
A Department of Energy loan program, infused with $25 billion to spur a wave of fuel-efficient vehicles, has not closed a loan in two years and is likely to leave two-thirds of the money unspent amid fallout over the Solyndra debacle and other factors.

Those findings, revealed Friday in a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, rekindle questions over how effectively the Energy Department picks winners and losers for its lucrative green energy portfolio.

The audit focuses on DOE loan programs, including one known as ATVM — the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program.

That program was pitched as part of a broader government campaign to spur innovative, clean technologies that would both rev up the economy and clean the environment. Under ATVM, the government would help bankroll electric cars and other fuel-saving initiatives; this seed money would, in turn, trigger a domino effect for industry and consumers.

Yet the last loan closed in March 2011, and just $8.4 billion has been spent so far in five projects.

The money, records show, helped stalwarts Ford Motor Co. and Nissan North America transform factories to build fuel-efficient vehicles, and cutting-edge upstarts Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive develop electric cars and plug-in hybrids. A smaller loan went to a Miami company to develop wheelchair-accessible vehicles to run on compressed natural gas.

Yet not all the projects have found success.

An investigation by The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News, published in October 2011, revealed that DOE made a $1 billion bet on two politically connected California car companies — Tesla and Fisker — despite questions from analysts and others about how well their electric cars would fare in the market.

Both companies said the government investment ultimately would pay off. Yet Fisker's CEO stepped down this week, as the company seeks new investors to jump-start its production.

The ATVM program was infused with another $7.5 billion to cover credit subsidy costs, yet $4.2 billion remains in that pool of money, the GAO report said.

The Energy Department does not expect to issue any more loans under a program once pitched with promise.

As of January 29, 2013, "DOE was not actively considering any applications for using the remaining $16.6 billion in loan authority or $4.2 billion in credit subsidy appropriations available under the ATVM loan program," the GAO's Frank Rusco wrote.

The Energy Department told auditors it had seven ATVM applications on file, totaling $1.48 billion. But those applications were "inactive," DOE said, "for reasons including insufficient equity or technology that is not ready."

"DOE is not likely to use the remaining ATVM loan program authority given the current eligibility requirements," the GAO said.

Some potential applicants said they were hesitant to seek Energy Department funding. One factor: The ghost of DOE's Solyndra debacle continues to hover over the program.

Solyndra, the first green energy loan guarantee unveiled by the Obama administration, was announced with fanfare in early 2009. Yet the Center and ABC reported in May 2011 that DOE initially green-lighted the $535 million loan without all due diligence in hand, putting taxpayers at risk. Later in 2011, Solyndra shuttered its California headquarters and filed for bankruptcy.

The FBI and the Energy Department's Inspector General have been conducting a joint investigation of the Solyndra project since 2011. No charges have been filed. "It's still an ongoing, joint investigation," an FBI spokeswoman told the Center January 31.

"Most applicants and manufacturers noted that public problems with the Solyndra default and other DOE programs have also tarnished the ATVM loan program, contributing to the challenges," the GAO wrote. "They believed the negative publicity makes DOE more risk-averse or makes companies wary of being associated with government support."

Applicants and manufacturers said the loan program is needed to help advance technology. Yet several told auditors the cost of participating "outweigh the benefits." Some cited a "lengthy and burdensome application and review processes."

This is not the first time auditors have questioned the ATVM program. An earlier GAO audit, released in 2011, warned that the $25 billion may never fully be spent in a program lacking clear benchmarks to ensure taxpayer dollars were properly spent.

An Energy Department spokesman did not respond to an interview request Friday.

The agency, in a written response to auditors, acknowledged it "is not likely to use the remaining Advanced Technical Vehicles Manufacturing loan program authority under the current eligibility requirements."

The loan office "would be pleased to share our lessons learned in implementing the program and discuss options for program modifications to improve implementation of the original legislation," wrote David G. Frantz, the Loan Programs Office's acting executive director.
 Fisker Automotive owner Henrik Fisker, who resigned in March 2013, with the company's electric Karma in an earlier photo. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene EPA unaware of industry ties on cancer review panel http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12184 An EPA panel appointed to study hexavalent chromium included scientists who had consulted for industry in lawsuits. EPA in the dark Health;Occupational safety and health;Chemistry;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Matter;Hexavalent chromium;Chromium 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-02-13T06:01:00-05:00
In September 2010, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency came to a startling conclusion: Even a small amount of a chemical compound commonly found in tap water may cause cancer.

The compound, hexavalent chromium, gained infamy in the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich, based on the David-vs.-Goliath legal duel between desert dwellers in Hinkley, Calif., and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. The film ends in Hollywood fashion, with the corporate polluter paying $333 million to people suffering from illnesses.

But in real life, the drama continues. More than 70 million Americans drink traces of chromium every day, according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

And now, more than a decade after the film, EPA scientists cite "clear evidence" that the chemical compound, also known as chromium (VI), can cause cancer. The federal agency was poised to announce its findings in 2011, a step almost certain to trigger stricter drinking-water standards to prevent new cancers and deaths.

The chemical industry's trade association and chief lobbyist, the American Chemistry Council, urged the EPA to wait for more research, a common practice to delay action on toxic chemicals. However, Vincent Cogliano, the soft-spoken head of EPA's chemical-assessment program, rebuffed the powerful group, writing in an April 2011 letter that "strong" new research was already available.

Ten months later, the EPA reversed itself, quietly posting a notice on the Internet that it was pushing back the release of its findings for at least four more years. Environmentalists were stunned at the reason: The agency would wait for the results of new studies costing $4 million and paid for by the American Chemistry Council.

The EPA decided to wait at the urging of a panel of scientists chosen to give an unbiased review of the chromium findings. But the EPA doesn't vet these scientists directly, instead handing the task over to outside contractors. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that several of the panelists had worked on behalf of PG&E to defend the company in the Brockovich lawsuits.

President Obama pledged during his 2008 campaign to halt meddling and interference in government science. The president put restoring integrity to science on his short list of priorities in his first inaugural address, right after fixing the economy and before health care reform. "We'll restore science to its rightful place," he said.

The story of chromium (VI), full of twists and turns, offers a case study in how the Obama administration has failed to shield science at the EPA from industry influence.

Companies with a stake in chromium have borrowed from the Big Tobacco playbook, using science to create doubt. Ever since the brassy Brockovich knocked on doors in Hinkley to organize a class-action lawsuit, scientists paid by industry have tried to convince the courts and regulators that chromium (VI) poses no health risk.

Some of those scientists ended up on the panel chosen to review the EPA's chromium findings, the Center for Public Integrity found:

Three of the five panelists who urged delay had worked on industry's behalf in the Hinkley court cases.

One of those scientists was retained by PG&E in the company's ongoing chromium cleanup in Hinkley at the same time he was serving on the EPA panel.

Another scientist who urged the EPA to wait for the American Chemistry Council studies served as a consultant on those studies.

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this is corrupt and unacceptable," contends Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the Center for Progressive Reform, a think tank that recently published a report on the chemical industry's influence.

Those members served on the EPA's toxic-chemical-assessment program, the Integrated Risk Information System. IRIS, as it is known, is the pure science upon which clean air and water rules are based. But IRIS has become a major bottleneck, delaying new federal and state air and water standards amid industry influence and other factors. Critics say the EPA has only itself to blame.

Since October, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has declined interview requests to discuss IRIS or loopholes that open the door for potential conflicts of interest. Yet Jackson is pushing reform before she leaves office this week that would address some of the conflicts unearthed in the Center's review, and cited by environmental activists.

And recently the EPA decided to move up its timetable to complete its chromium assessment to later this year.

Case study of industry's muscle

The issue of scientists with industry ties serving on special EPA peer review panels goes beyond chromium. One out of every six scientists appointed to such panels since Obama took office had been a primary author of research articles funded by the American Chemistry Council over the past dozen years.

In all, 11 of the 68 members appointed to EPA panels assessing chemical health hazards were significant authors on studies funded by the ACC, a review of the council's research database reveals. That number does not capture all scientists backed by industry, just those with work funded by the ACC. The authors of the hexavalent chromium studies, for example, are not included.

One scientist who has served on several EPA panels and co-written more than a dozen ACC-funded studies said that working with industry does not necessarily suggest a conflict.

"Scientists by and large want to get at the truth, so this really becomes more a matter of a perception of a problem than a real problem, in my opinion," said Frederick J. Miller, an independent consultant who once worked at the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, a North Carolina research institute formed in the 1970s by leaders from 11 major chemical companies.

"The people that serve on these panels … know if somebody is trying to make an argument that doesn't hold water," said Miller, who began his career in government.

However, studies have shown that when industry pays for research, it may influence the outcome. A 1998 analysis of more than 100 articles published on secondhand smoke reported that 37 percent found no health risk. At least 74 percent of the articles exonerating cigarette smoke were written by scientists with ties to the tobacco industry.

The American Chemistry Council has a stake in the outcome of research. Lobby disclosure forms from 2011 reveal that the ACC lobbied the EPA on its assessments of three highly controversial chemicals: dioxin, formaldehyde and chromium (VI). The group boasts on its Web site that "in 2012, we helped defeat or amend 281 chemical regulation and product ban proposals."

The ACC, whose members such as ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Merck and Procter & Gamble are a who's who of the Fortune 500, is one of the freest-spending lobby groups on Capitol Hill. In 2011, it laid out $12.6 million on lobbying, four times the amount spent by the National Rifle Association.

David Fischer, a senior director at the ACC, defended the group's research program. "We feel we have an obligation to step up and fund studies to assist the agency — whether it's EPA or others — to answer questions that might be posed about chemicals that we manufacture," he said.

Asked if any of the ACC's studies had ever shown that a chemical was more toxic than previously thought, Fischer replied, "I'm not aware of one right at this moment."

The ACC said it was not involved in selecting the peer reviewers studying chromium (VI). "EPA's peer reviewers were selected by EPA. They were vetted in the normal peer review process from EPA and we from the ACC do not have any direct links to these people," said Ann Mason, the ACC scientist who commissioned the group's new studies on chromium.

However, few scientists in the world specialize in chromium, a compound used to add color to paints, make stainless steel, add finish to chrome and inhibit rust. During its lawsuits, PG&E hired several of these scientists as expert witnesses; some say the debate over the compound's toxicity caused lasting splits in the tight-knit scientific world.

One of PG&E's key experts was Steven Patierno, a former professor of pharmacology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who had conducted numerous studies on the metal. Patierno, now the deputy director of the Duke Cancer Institute, has been an expert defense witness in seven chromium lawsuits. He hasn't wavered in his view that drinking low doses of chromium (VI) does not cause cancer.

By early 2011, Patierno was selected for the peer review panel critiquing the EPA's chromium (VI) findings. At a public meeting on May 12, 2011, he revealed a potential conflict of interest. There's no recording or transcript of the meeting. Nothing in the EPA's public record reveals the conflict. Two EPA officials who were there say they cannot recall what Patierno said. Patierno himself declined requests for an interview.

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, took notes at the meeting and said that Patierno revealed he was an investigator — though not a principal investigator — on the American Chemistry Council studies.

The ACC's Mason disputes that Patierno was involved. But Travis O'Brien, one of the principal investigators on the studies and a former colleague of Patierno's at George Washington University, told the Center for Public Integrity that Patierno was a consultant on the research.

Max Costa, now a professor at New York University's medical school, knows Patierno well. When Costa taught at the University of Texas Medical School, Patierno worked in his laboratory. The two published research together. Costa said they became rivals when they took opposite sides in the PG&E lawsuit.

He argues that Patierno's opinions are not credible because he works for the chrome industry. "He's been a paid a large amount of money by them, and he's totally biased because of that."

Patierno levels the same charge against Costa, attacking his conclusions in a lawsuit as "unsubstantiated" and "severely flawed." Patierno criticized the EPA for even citing Costa's papers among hundreds of others in its report. In his peer review comments, Patierno said two of Costa's articles should not be taken seriously because "they were written and published at a time when the senior author was actively engaged as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in high-profile hexavalent chromium lawsuits."

Patierno was an expert witness for PG&E in the same lawsuits. When he was asked in a 2006 lawsuit if he discloses his expert-witness work for industry when submitting articles on chromium (VI), he answered no. Patierno said his articles were based on laboratory studies that were not relevant to his legal work.

Costa was originally listed as a candidate for the EPA peer review panel, according to documents obtained by the Center through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Costa says he disclosed his work in the PG&E lawsuit but doesn't know if that work disqualified him. An EPA official said privately said that Costa's work as an expert witness may have kept him off the panel.

Industry ties and EPA panel

Patierno was not the only defense litigation expert who served on the EPA's IRIS panel. Two others were John P. Wise Sr., a toxicology professor at the University of Southern Maine, and Joshua Hamilton, a chief academic and scientific officer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., which is affiliated with Brown University.

Wise, who worked in Patierno's laboratory as a graduate student, said that in 1997 he worked for a consulting firm and was assigned to do research for an industry client in the Hinkley lawsuit – but that he has not accepted industry money in the past 15 years. Wise added that he was never told the identity of the client and that he does not believe "such limited contact so long ago" influenced his opinion.

Hamilton was a defense expert in a PG&E chromium lawsuit that settled in 2006 and worked for the company as a consultant again starting in 2009, according to PG&E. PG&E acknowledged that it hired Hamilton in May 2011 — the same month the EPA panel met — to consult on the ongoing chromium cleanup in Hinkley. PG&E said it paid him $110,000.

Hamilton appeared before a California Regional Water Quality Control Board on June 8, 2011, to speak on behalf of PG&E about its cleanup of Hinkley. The EPA peer review panel issued its final comments one month later, on July 6, 2011.

Hamilton's consulting work included criticism of the California EPA's own scientific assessment of chromium (VI), which was nearly identical to the EPA's.

In an eight-page statement to the water board dated July 9, 2011, Hamilton wrote that the state agency's findings did not represent "established science." He described California's regulations as "overly protective."

The PG&E director in charge of the Hinkley cleanup, Sheryl Bilbrey, said Hamilton's work should not have affected his objectivity. "PG&E expects all of our experts to give us unbiased advice," she said. "So we would never ask anyone to change their scientific opinion to fit something that we would want."

Asked whether it was appropriate for an EPA peer reviewer to be working simultaneously for PG&E, the ACC's Fischer said, "That sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Generally, the way you get around it is you just — you don't appoint that particular scientist to that particular panel."

It was not the first time Hamilton had been paid a substantial sum by PG&E. In 2001, Hamilton said he was surprised to get a $100,000 check in the mail before doing any work as an expert witness. According to his deposition, Hamilton talked to PG&E's lawyers about the check and learned that it was on top of his hourly fee. PG&E ultimately paid Hamilton nearly $300,000 for his work on the lawsuit.

(Hamilton has since disclosed that he repaid the $100,000; see editor's note below)

"That's completely outrageous," said Francesca Grifo, director of scientific integrity at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. "I don't know how anybody could stand up logically and say I got $100,000 but it didn't affect how I handled this."

Hamilton declined interview requests.

EPA farms screening to consultants

Working for a chemical company appears to violate the EPA's guidelines on conflicts of interest. The EPA's Peer Review Handbook says peer reviewers should appear to be impartial, defined as not having anything that "may cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question the expert's ability to carry out official duties without bias or influence."

The handbook offers, as an example of a conflict, a scientist paid to be an expert witness for a chemical company in a class-action lawsuit.

Yet, the EPA doesn't ask scientists if they've worked as expert witnesses or have taken money from industry. Instead, it turns that job over to private companies, which handle conflict-of-interest reviews in secret. All of the information the vendors collect, including financial disclosure forms, is "considered private and non-disclosable to EPA or outside entities except as required by law," the EPA policy says.

The contractor examines candidates' published work, and prospective panelists fill out a questionnaire detailing potential conflicts. Once the panel is picked, the contractor certifies to the EPA that "no unresolved actual or potential conflict of interest issues" remain.

What's more, the ethics guidelines are not binding on contractors, and the EPA handbook says the agency should not override decisions on conflicts of interest. "EPA should not attempt to make any changes in the contractor's conclusions as this would compromise the independence of the peer review conducted by the contractor," the handbook says.

The EPA said it set the system up this way to ensure impartiality. But, the Center found, this structure helps shield the very conflicts the agency aims to avoid.

A year ago, the Center sought information on the screening of IRIS panelists through a FOIA request. The EPA withheld most documents, including emails between the vendors and agency.

Officials at Eastern Research Group Inc., the Massachusetts firm that vetted the peer reviewers on the chromium (VI) panel, did not return emails and phone calls. An official at another company handling peer reviews, Versar Inc., said he was prohibited by EPA from talking.

The EPA's administrator, Jackson, and its chemical-assessment officials declined requests for on-the-record interviews. But an EPA official acknowledged privately that the agency was not fully aware of the chromium (VI) peer reviewers' ties to PG&E. The official defended the use of private vendors, contending that if the EPA chose peer reviewers, it could pick scientists it knew would be friendly.

However, the EPA routinely selects scientists for other advisory panels. Critics said it's not clear how checking financial disclosure forms would taint the process. The Peer Review Handbook does note that checking disclosure forms would activate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a law meant to make panels more open.

"It's bizarre," Grifo said of the EPA's secretive screening process. "At its core it's supposed to increase the public trust in the system. If it looks like the whole system is rigged to begin with, then why should a citizen trust it?"

The EPA said it was working to reduce the potential for conflicts. "We are exploring the best ways to provide for public review of contract-managed peer review panels and ensure that contractors are held accountable for their assessment of any conflicts of interest," the agency said in a statement.

The 'pure science' bottleneck

Some 700 new chemicals hit the market each year, adding to the tens of thousands already in use. Yet the EPA has assessed only 557 chemicals since the IRIS program began in 1985. A typical review takes six to eight years, sometimes much longer. It took 27 years for the agency to issue a partial assessment of dioxin, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing and burning.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in 2008 that the IRIS program was so bogged down that it was in danger of becoming obsolete.

In 2009, EPA Administrator Jackson made bold promises within her first weeks in office to fix the program. She pledged to finish many more assessments and to try to complete each one within two years. Since May 2009, the EPA said it completed 24 IRIS assessments, "double the number" completed in the same time period prior to May 2009.

Yet its overall progress remains slow, and in the past two years, the program produced as few assessments as ever. Last year, the EPA planned to complete 40 assessments. It finished three.

The reasons for the logjam are complex. But it has become common for industry and its allies inside the federal government to push for delay. "Even a single delay can have far-reaching, time-consuming consequences, in some cases requiring that the assessment process essentially start over," the GAO reported.

In the case of chromium (VI), evidence shows that industry worked closely with the EPA as the agency conducted its assessment. On Oct. 8, 2009, a scientist at a law firm representing chemical companies complained in an email that the EPA was pushing ahead on its assessments without waiting for studies to address "gaps" in the science.

"EPA moved Chrom VI up by about two years after 'we' entered into a process of planning research with them to address gaps," wrote Richard Canady, a former scientist at the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who was then working at the private law firm of McKenna, Long & Aldridge. "I'd like to make a case for EPA planning ahead in cooperation with industry."

Canady's email was sent to Nancy Beck, a toxicologist at OMB who reviewed the EPA's findings. Beck referred Canady to an American Chemistry Council official for help in gathering data. A 2009 investigation by a subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee criticized Beck for improperly interfering with IRIS assessments during the George W. Bush administration. Beck now works for the ACC. She did not return a call last week seeking comment; an ACC spokesman said Tuesday he would seek her perspective.

In a recent interview, Canady said he could not recall the precise details from his email and declined to reveal clients for which he was working. But Canady said he thought the process of planning research with the EPA "wasn't that formal." Instead, industry scientists would call EPA scientists to find out what new data would help them in their chromium (VI) assessment, he said.

His 2009 email also said, "Peter made a point to me the other day about how boron and methylene chloride were good examples of working together on developing data ahead of assessments in ways that influenced the outcome."

Canady said this was a reference to Peter Preuss, then the director of the EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment, which oversees IRIS.

The EPA originally planned to issue its chromium (VI) assessment last summer, giving the ACC time to finish its new studies. However, under Jackson's imperative to quicken assessments, the EPA moved up its timeline by six to nine months.

When the EPA's Cogliano rebuffed the ACC's request for a delay, the trade association turned its attention to the peer review panel.

Critics say the industry uses comments on chemicals that are under review to overwhelm the agency.

"There's a very elaborate process that involves multiple opportunities for industry to pick away and blast away and confuse and overload the staff of IRIS, and the IRIS staff reacts by trying to address each and every one of industry's concerns," said law professor Steinzor.

"The chemical industry has made IRIS its leading target, one of its leading targets, for spoil in the current age of greed," Steinzor said

Of the 49 public comments submitted to the EPA on chromium before the peer-review panel met, the American Chemistry Council and its research partners authored 29 of them, totaling 1,661 pages. In addition, 10 other comments totaling 137 pages came from industry urging the EPA to wait for the ACC studies.

As the EPA stood poised to announce potential new safeguards for chromium (VI), the ACC had hired a scientific consulting firm, ToxStrategies, to manage the $4 million studies of mice and rats given the chemical for 90 days.

The panel met May 12, 2011, at a Hilton hotel near Reagan National Airport. Patierno was highly critical of the EPA's findings and suggested the agency "absolutely consider the extensive new data being provided." Hamilton and Wise agreed.

In a recent interview, Wise said he wasn't entirely familiar with ToxStrategies' findings, which hadn't yet been published. But he assumed the delay would be short, only a few months. The EPA initially said the delay would take four years. Later, the agency said the assessment would be done this year.

Anatoly Zhitkovich, a professor at Brown University who chaired the EPA peer review panel, was upset with the results and wrote his own review published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, according to Costa, a close colleague. Zhitkovich declined an interview request, but his article supported the findings of the EPA.

In lobbying for delay, the American Chemistry Council quietly enlisted the help of a small office within the U.S. Small Business Administration.

SBA Chief Counsel for Advocacy Winslow Sargeant, an electrical engineer by training, submitted a comment to the EPA on Oct. 5, 2011, challenging its scientific conclusions and urging it to delay its chromium assessment pending completion of the ACC studies. Winslow cited the peer review comments from Hamilton and Wise to support his argument.

But emails obtained through FOIA by the advocacy group Center for Effective Government revealed that the ACC helped shape the SBA letter. An ACC lobbyist, Randy Schumacher, sent an email to Sargeant's office on June 28, 2011, asking for its help.

"Administrator Jackson calling upon her to stop the Cr6 risk assessment process to do exactly as EPA's peer reviewers deemed advisable," Schumacher wrote. "Since it appears EPA needs to hear from more constituents for it to listen to its own peer review team, would SBA be willing to send a letter to Ms. Jackson to weigh in on this matter?"

Later emails from Schumacher suggested editing changes to Sargeant's letter. The SBA official has not responded to interview requests.

Frustration prompts reform push

Now the EPA is in the process of revamping its IRIS program once more. Cogliano has proposed releasing the names of prospective peer reviewers in advance, giving the public an opportunity to explore conflicts. "This will improve transparency in the peer review process," the EPA said in a statement. The changes could be formally announced this week, as Jackson departs.

The ACC's Fischer says he's in favor of a conflict-of-interest policy that allows industry to participate on peer review panels. "Bias in and of itself should not necessarily disqualify a particular scientist from serving on the panel," he said. "Industry perspective is a bias but so [is] every other perspective."

The EPA is also weighing whether to set "stopping points" for new research, a deadline after which no additional studies would be considered. Kenneth Olden, a senior EPA official who oversees IRIS, has proposed announcing assessments two years in advance, giving industry time to complete new studies.

Such proposals drew criticism at an EPA meeting in November, with an environmental group's scientist stating bluntly that industry seeks delays because it wants IRIS to fail. His comments drew faint gasps from a conference room filled almost entirely with industry consultants.

"The practice of waiting for one more study to be completed, as has happened repeatedly under IRIS – especially when that study is to be conducted by an entity with a vested financial interest in tilting the outcome – simply must stop," said the scientist, Richard Denison, with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. "Simply put, a decision delayed is health protection denied."

This story has been clarified to reflect that, as an employee of a consulting firm, John P. Wise Sr. worked for an industry client in the PG&E lawsuit but that he was never told the identity of the client. After the story was published, Joshua Hamilton provided proof that he repaid a $100,000 check from PG&E more than three years after he received it. Hamilton now says he was confused about the July 2001 check at the time he was deposed in August 2002. A 2001 letter he provided from PG&E that came with the check says it was prompted by the company's Chapter 11 reorganization and was meant as "security for additional work you may be asked to perform on this matter." The letter says that Hamilton could keep the full amount of the check until his final invoice, but he was expected to repay the $100,000 when his work was done.
 A Pacific Gas & Electric pipeline operations station is seen in Hinkley, Calif., in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles. David Heath http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/david-heath Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Ouster of scientist from EPA panel shows industry clout http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/12199 The removal of a respected Maine toxicologist from a panel six years ago reveals industry influence on EPA's IRIS program Double standard on EPA panels? Environment;Chemistry;United States Environmental Protection Agency;Flame retardants;Persistent organic pollutants;Brominated flame retardant;Polybrominated diphenyl ethers;Organobromides;Decabromodiphenyl ether 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2013-02-13T06:00:00-05:00
In 2007, when Deborah Rice was appointed chair of an Environmental Protection Agency panel assessing the safety levels of flame retardants, she arrived as a respected Maine toxicologist with no ties to industry.

Yet the EPA removed Rice from the panel after an intense push by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry lobbying group that accused her of bias. Her supposed conflict of interest? She had publicly raised questions about the safety of a flame retardant under EPA review.

Rice's travails through the EPA's Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, program reveal the flip side of industry's sway. Not only does the ACC back many scientists named to IRIS panels, it also has the power to help remove ones it doesn't favor.

The ruckus over the Maine scientist surfaced six years ago, but its lesson echoes today.

To Rice, her removal points up an irony borne out by a Center for Public Integrity investigation: Scientists with deep ties to industry are allowed to continue on IRIS panels. But she — with no financial link to industry — was booted.

"It wasn't like I was a consultant, saying this stuff is really bad because someone is paying me to do it. I was the toxicologist working for the state of Maine asked by my department to do these reviews," she said. "That was the basis on which they said I was in conflict."

Another irony: Rice's assessment was on target. Two years later, the EPA moved to cease production of decaBDE, a chemical it views as a possible carcinogen. In Maine, Rice's research had supported a state ban on the chemical.

Rice was with the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention when she was appointed to the EPA panel convened to study the safety of brominated flame retardants used in products ranging from building materials to electronics and plastics. The panel was tasked to assess the safe reference doses of four forms of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — including decaBDE, which Rice had studied for several years in Maine.

A former EPA toxicologist, Rice had been honored by the agency in 2004 for outstanding scientific work.

Her undoing came after she made public comments about a compound that was under EPA review.

Before her appointment to the IRIS panel, Rice, like other members, was asked whether she had taken public positions on the chemicals being studied. She answered "No" — but reported that in 2004 and 2005, as a toxicologist for the Maine CDC, she had written a review of the health effects of PBDEs.

With the IRIS panel due to convene Feb. 22, 2007, members were asked on Feb. 16 if any of their information had changed. "No changes," Rice reported.

A day earlier in Maine, Rice had testified before the Legislature supporting a ban of decaBDE. "Deborah Rice with the Maine CDC's Environmental and Occupational Health Program told lawmakers there is no question in her mind that deca should be eliminated because it is a persistent toxin that accumulates in the food chain," the Bangor Daily News reported.

The ACC seized on those public statements and, in May 2007, dispatched a 10-page letter to the EPA urging that she be stricken from the panel. The chemistry council cited "certain information that has come to light that could suggest the potential for bias exists on the part of the Peer Review Chairperson."

The ACC cited her comments in Maine and in articles she had written. "Thus, EPA staff had to know or should have known that the Chairperson has been a fervent advocate of banning deca-BDE — the very sort of policy predisposition that has no place in an independent, objective peer review," wrote an ACC vice president.

Rice's inclusion on the panel, the ACC said, "ultimately calls into question the overall integrity of the entire IRIS database."

An EPA official met with the ACC that June. In the end, the agency sided with industry, concluding that Rice's statements created a "perception of bias." Reviewers found, however, that her comments did not influence others — "because her comments were echoed by the other panelists."

In August 2007, the EPA deleted Rice's comments from its website. A day later, an IRIS official called Rice to tell her the news.

The EPA site today says: "The final report includes only four of the five reviewers' comments. One reviewer's comments were excluded from the report and were not considered by EPA due to the perception of a potential conflict of interest."

Rice had already completed her IRIS service when the EPA took its action. She said she was simply reporting her findings as a toxicologist and had no conflict. "All of a sudden my comments disappeared as if I had never been part of this panel," she said.

Rice wonders whether industry targeted her as part of a larger plan to discredit attempts to ban deca. At the time, several states were raising concerns over the retardant's safety. The EPA itself had raised concerns — ones so significant that in late 2009 the agency and several chemical companies agreed to phase out its production.

"I think the motivation just has been to discredit me personally," Rice surmised. "To say, 'She's biased, she has a conflict, she's discredited. These other states shouldn't pay attention to what Maine has done.' And it seemed to me they saw a good opportunity to do this."

The ACC said it sought Rice's removal to ensure the peer review was independent.

Her ouster triggered a dustup. Groups ranging from the Environmental Working Group to the Center for Science in the Public Interest chastised the EPA for removing Rice while, in other cases, keeping panelists with ties to industry. "The actions taken by EPA against Dr. Rice call into question the credibility of EPA management," the groups wrote in 2008, urging the EPA to reinstate Rice as panel chair. "When it allows itself to serve the interests of the polluting industries that it is charged with regulating, it has perverted its mission."

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., then-chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, pressed the chemistry council to explain why panelists with industry ties "have not been targeted by the ACC as also having conflicts of interest that would disqualify them from serving on EPA panels."

The EPA's Office of Inspector General investigated, and found no wrongdoing in the agency's actions. "We conclude that EPA did not violate existing federal law, regulations, guidance or other relevant requirements in its actions," an IG official wrote in January 2009.

Still, the removal of Rice shone a light on the system — for a time. The EPA "kind of promised to clean things up," said Rice, who recently retired. "Once the spotlight shifts to something else, it's business as usual."

 Deborah Rice Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene David Heath http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/david-heath About the 'Mystery in the Fields' project http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/10868 About the Project: Mystery in the Fields MYSTERY in the FIELDS Political geography;International relations;Republics;Earth;Sri Lanka 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2012-09-17T06:00:00-04:00
Mystery in the Fields, a three-part series, explores how a rare form of kidney disease is killing laborers and crippling communities in three different regions, from Central America to Sri Lanka to India. As death tolls mount, researchers remain puzzled, unable to definitively uncover the disease's causes.

The series is an outgrowth of an earlier investigation, "Island of the Widows," published last December in the Center for Public Integrity and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In that piece, reporter Sasha Chavkin exposed how chronic kidney disease was so prevalent in some regions of Central America it left communities filled with widows and scientists searching for answers.

Building from that research, Chavkin discovered that the disease had also developed in clusters in India and Sri Lanka. Over several months this year, he and video journalist Anna Barry-Jester traveled to the countries to tell the story from the ground, and pressed governments and leaders of the medical community for answers.

Their report is also being published or aired in news outlets including PRI's The World, the BBC, The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka and The Week in India.

Project staff

Reporter: Sasha Chavkin

Photographer/videographer: Anna Barry-Jester

Web team: Christine Montgomery, Paul Williams, Sarah Whitmire

Fact-checking: Peter Newbatt Smith

Project Editor: Ronnie Greene

 Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene Fishing deaths mount, but government slow to cast safety net for deadliest industry http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/10721 Commercial fishing is the deadliest industry in the U.S., but with federal reform moving slowly, some fishermen are stepping in. Dangers on the water Fishing;Fisheries management;Fishing vessel;Disaster_Accident;United States Coast Guard;Coast guard;Ship;Fisherman;Commercial fishing;Marine safety;Lobster fishing;The Perfect Storm 2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:00 2012-08-22T06:00:00-04:00
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — "Get your panic out now!"

Veteran fisherman Fred Mattera stands atop a fishing trawler at the Point Judith Harbor, seagulls squawking by and a fishy mist in the air, and instructs the seven mostly young, tattooed men standing before him to pull on life-safety immersion suits that cover them from foot to head, to zip up and plunge feet first into the water. Then two groups of fishermen interlock like centipedes and take turns paddling backward until they reach a life raft where, going smallest man first, they pull in one by one.

This is survival training, and the plunge-and-rescue dry run is meant to gird the fishermen for the real thing, which comes too often in an industry beset by a high death rate and fragile federal net of protection.

Commercial fishing is the deadliest vocation in the United States. Four years running, from 2007 to 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked commercial fishing as the most dangerous occupation in the United States. From 2000 to 2010, the industry's death rate was 31 times greater than the national workplace average.

And no place, a recent National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report reveals, is more deadly for commercial fishermen than the East Coast. From 2000-2009, the NIOSH report shows, 165 fishermen died from Florida to Maine. That's more than Alaska — 133 deaths — which had long been viewed as the most brutal place for commercial fishing but saw deaths dip amid a safety push. It's a greater death toll than in the Gulf of Mexico, which suffered 116 deaths, or the West Coast, with 83.

The U.S. Coast Guard has been granted only spotty powers to safeguard commercial fishing vessels, and the industry, steeped in a tradition of independence on the high seas, has long resisted government intrusion. Yet some longtime fishermen from Alaska to New England agree the federal safety net has left workers vulnerable.

"This has been an industry where there just hasn't been a vigorous pursuit of safety at the federal level," said former congressman James Oberstar, who held fishing safety hearings in 2007 as chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Advocates are trying to cast a new culture of safety. The immersion training in this seaside resort is one piece of a still-in-the works campaign — and, until full federal reform comes, a key ingredient to curbing losses at sea.

"Panic sets in when you don't know what to expect," said Mattera, who scrapped his dreams of going to law school 40 years ago when a roommate took him on a fishing boat, and who now runs a company leading safety seminars. "We're taking that unknown out of it."

In this tightly knit Rhode Island community, nearly everyone knows someone who died at sea.

"It's like being a race car driver, one of those things you don't want to talk about," said lobster boat captain Norbert Stamps, who took part in the safety session with three crew members from his boat, the Debbie Ann.

"We were all resistant in the beginning," he said of the hands-on drills. "You now realize this isn't fun and games. This is really serious stuff."

Stamps began fishing at 13 and, after more than four decades on the water, said he takes his family to services for brethren lost at sea. "I'm preparing them for the fact that someday, something might happen," he said. "You stay at sea long enough, everything happens."

A decade ago, Mattera tried to rescue a friend's 22-year-old son from a fishing hold 125 miles out to sea. The Rhode Island fisherman, Steven Follet, had collapsed, apparently after poisonous gases accumulated in the hold. Airlifted to a Cape Cod hospital, he died.

"Believe me, to this day it's haunted me," Mattera said. "Could I have gotten there five minutes sooner? All these things: My kid's the same age as his. I will never forget coming in, going to see the family. In their eyes I was a hero. In my eyes I was a failure.

"In the end he's not alive, and I swore to them, promised in his legacy we would change this culture of fishery."

At his office overlooking the docks here, Mattera keeps a small picture of Follet on the wall near his desk. "It's always in the back of your mind," he said.

Inspection push snagged in Congress

For decades, safety advocates and government regulators have pushed for mandatory inspections of the often decades-old boats that take to deep water to bring back scallops, fish, squid and lobster.

And for decades, Congress has stood still. Despite the strikingly high death rate among the men and women who live by the boat, the federal government has never required inspections of commercial fishing boats. The Coast Guard performs voluntary exams of safety equipment, and Congress recently acted to make those dockside reviews mandatory. But the law has yet to mandate detailed inspections of the vessels themselves.

"Fishing vessels are uninspected, so the Coast Guard doesn't have jurisdiction to go on and look at the condition of the vessel. There's no standards that a fishing vessel has to be built to or maintained to. That's much different than a ferry or cargo ship," said Jennifer Lincoln, a NIOSH epidemiologist based in Alaska who leads the agency's Commercial Fishing Safety Research and Design Program.

"Every time there's a vessel loss with high numbers of lives lost and the Coast Guard has done an investigation, one of the recommendations that always comes back is that these vessels should be inspected," Lincoln said. "There's industry push back: 'That would be an expensive thing to do.'"

Pushing for sweeping safety changes, she said, is "like planting a tree." The government can press for one change, and hope it sprouts into another. NIOSH can suggest reform, but has no law-writing power. That rests with Congress.

The National Transportation Safety Board has argued for vessel inspections and, in 2010, held a forum on fishing safety. "Fishermen tolerate long absences from home, inhospitable environments, and workplaces that are teeming with heavy, dangerous equipment while constantly in motion," board member Robert L. Sumwalt III said at the hearing. "For some, the price paid is even higher: hypothermia, loss of limbs, and even death."

From 2000 to 2010, 545 commercial fishermen died in the U.S., reported NIOSH, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than half of these deaths occurred after a vessel disaster, with boats sometimes swallowed by the sea. Another 30 percent involved fishermen falling overboard. Other deaths came from accidents on board, or while crew were diving or injured on shore.

Atlantic scallop fishermen suffered some of the highest death tolls, with a fatality rate more than 100 times the national average from 2000-2009, and some of the industry's most notable disasters.

In December 2004, vast swells rolled the New Bedford, Mass., scalloping boat Northern Edge on its side, plunging the crew of six into frigid waters 45 miles off Nantucket. One man survived, making the Northern Edge New England's deadliest fishing tragedy since the sinking of Gloucester, Mass.'s Andrea Gail in 1991, a case that inspired The Perfect Storm book and movie.

"I often wonder what is the true price of a pound of scallops," fisherman Christopher Gaudiello said at the funeral for Northern Edge victims.

Mattera said the work can be brutal. "If you went scalloping for 10 days and stood in that box for 18 hours a day, day after day after day, you would not believe how fatigued you are," Mattera said. "You cannot compare it to anything. Shuck and shuck and shuck, you would not believe the monotony. You are in constant pain. … You are bringing a steel cage swinging in the seas. Man, that stuff hits you, you are a dead man or you are breaking hands, you are cracking skulls."

There's a human cost to the industry push back and congressional inaction, experts say.

Richard Hiscock, a longtime marine safety advocate from Vermont who worked as a U.S. House of Representatives staffer in helping to write safety laws, said government is too often "reactive to casualties."

Marine safety laws on the books, he said, "have been what I described as the little Dutch boy going around putting his finger in the dike," Hiscock said. "Every time there's a major casualty there will be a lot of hubbub and there will be an investigation to see what we can do to improve the existing statutes and plug a loophole.

"And they've been doing this since 1838."

Hiscock draws a contrast between the Federal Aviation Administration, which has broad power to ensure airplanes fly safely, and the Coast Guard. "Congress has given the Coast Guard little bits and pieces of authority, not the broad authority," he said.

The Coast Guard's website includes a Hiscock report, "The Tragedy of Missed Opportunities," that details failed reform attempts dating years. In 1999, a Coast Guard task force issued Living to Fish, Dying to Fish, a report citing the industry's high casualty rate and lack of deep reform.

"Despite long-standing recognition of the serious hazards of commercial fishing, a long succession of proposed laws were not enacted," the report concludes. "Many fishermen accept that fishing is dangerous, and lives are often lost. Many of those harvesting the bounty of our ocean frontier staunchly defend the independent nature of their profession, and vehemently oppose outside interference."

Indeed, many fishermen have fiercely opposed government regulations — challenging, for instance, fish catch quotas some say hasten dangers at sea.

Reform's Piecemeal Rollout

Strides have come, but slowly.

In 1988, Congress passed the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act, requiring fishing boats to carry survival craft, personal flotation devices and other safety equipment on board.

The regulations went into effect in 1991. A year later, the Coast Guard sought authority to inspect fishing boats. Approval never came.

"Whether the industry was lobbying enough or Congress didn't see the need for it, we just weren't given the authority," said Jack Kemerer, division chief of the U.S. Coast Guard's Fishing Vessels Division.

Kemerer said the 1988 law and subsequent tweaks have helped drop death tolls from even higher numbers in the 1980s. "There have been improvements based on the law and safety programs and safety initiatives," he said.

"But," he added, "fishing still remains the most hazardous occupation in the country."

In 2007, the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation held hearings, citing a string of tragedies from Alaska to Maine that had taken 22 lives in recent months.

A core of veteran fishermen, their spouses and safety advocates told the panel how they had lost friends to the seas.

"If we had regulated airline safety the same way we have regulated fishing vessel safety, all passengers on an aircraft would be issued a parachute and be trained in how to use it," said Jerry Dzugan, executive director of the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association. "The fishing vessel safety act focuses on survivability after a vessel loss. By anyone's definition, this is a reactive, rather than a proactive approach to casualties."

Maine lobster fisherman Robert Baines described finding two teenage boys — aspiring fishermen — drowned in the cold April waters after their boat, inadequate for the weather conditions, capsized. One boy's body washed ashore; Baines found the other in the water. "I will never forget that unnecessary tragedy," he said. When the 1988 law passed, he said, the Maine Lobstermen's Association opposed safety requirements for state registered vessels. "Times have changed," said Baines, chair of Maine's Commercial Fishing Safety Council.

Oberstar, then the transportation committee chair, concluded that the government needed a "much more vigorous program" and national standards to safeguard the industry.

He too draws a contrast between the FAA's powers and those handed the Coast Guard. "Safety in aviation shall be maintained at the highest possible level, not the level industry can afford," Oberstar said, and flights can be grounded with a mechanic's signature. "That's the kind of standard we need for Coast Guard inspectors."

That standard has not come, but another reform swell passed with the U.S. Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2010. Congress approved an amendment requiring the Coast Guard to examine safety equipment on commercial fishing vessels every two years.

Now, fishermen can seek voluntary examinations of their safety equipment. If they pass, they get a sticker. If they fail the so-called "No Fault Exam," no violation is issued. Captains of failed boats do risk citation if they take to the seas and happen to be boarded by the Coast Guard. The 2007 congressional hearing, however, revealed that less than 10 percent of the commercial fishing fleet took advantage of the voluntary program.

But even that voluntary review couldn't ensure fishermen knew how to use the equipment. "That's like taking your car in to go in for a safety sticker, and then you get into it and you don't buckle up and you drive down the highway," said Rodney Avila, a New England fisherman and safety advocate.

Under the new rules, which could go into effect later this year or next, the Coast Guard will check to ensure safety equipment is up to date and boats have proper life preservers, survival suits, life rafts, flares, alarms and documentation. The Coast Guard has not yet decided what consequences would follow a failed exam — but one possibility is that the boat would not be allowed to sail.

The rules also call for enhanced training of fishermen and lay the groundwork for safety compliance programs for older or substantially changed vessels.

Still, the pending mandatory dockside exams do not call for Coast Guard inspections of the vessels themselves. That would entail a "cradle-to-grave program" in which the Coast Guard issues a certificate of inspection, re-inspects the boat every year and conducts an out of water inspection every five years.

There's a big difference, the Coast Guard's Kemerer said, between an exam and a fuller inspection. "Safety would certainly be improved," he said.

To some, having equipment exams but not the vessel inspections is like checking a car's seat belts and air bags, but never getting around to the engine and frame.

Who is to blame?

"That's the $64,000 question," Hiscock said. "It's a shared responsibility. Congress has never had the courage to do it, and the industry has never pushed for it."

Kemerer said the exam could be a step toward more extensive inspections one day. The stakes, he said, warrant it. "When a serious emergency develops … the fishermen, if they haven't practiced getting into their life suit or how to deploy a life raft, they are facing death," he said. "Sometimes you only have a matter of minutes."

Still, a question begs: If inspections came, who would pay for them in an industry with approximately 20,000 federally documented fishing boats and some 50,000 state registered vessels?

"We're talking about hundreds of inspectors that would be needed, but right now with the budget climate the way it is, there's no way we could get the number of inspectors," said Kemerer. "It would be great to have it. The challenge would be: How do we accomplish it?"

Hiscock, the former House official, questions just how hard the Coast Guard has pushed for a full vessel inspection program. "They're not up there lobbying for inspections constantly," he said.

Deaths at Sea

In a stretch of the U.S. where seafood is king, tragedies continue.

Up and down the East Coast, fishermen set out to make a living, but then lose their lives. Some were unprepared for the catastrophe confronting them, government records show.

In March 2009, the 76-foot fishing vessel Lady Mary sank in 210 feet of water 65 miles off the New Jersey coast, killing six crew members. The NTSB said flooding, triggered by a hatch mistakenly left open during rough weather, sank the ship.

In January 2009, the Patriot sank 14 miles east of Gloucester, drowning its two crew members. "The Coast Guard attributes the vessel's loss to a rapid event, most likely a capsizing, that did not allow the crew time to respond or access lifesaving gear," a Coast Guard report found.

"Everyone thinks it's never going to happen to them, that's the problem," said Avila, who served on the New England Fishery Management Council. "A lot of fishermen have never set off flares … A lot of fishermen have been fishing for 40 years and they may not have inflated a life raft. Most people don't read [the instructions] until you need it.

"And when you need it, you have a minute or two until the boat sinks."

Avila is among the reform advocates in New Bedford, a city of 95,000 some 60 miles south of Boston founded by whalers. Fishing remains the city's lifeblood and, occasionally, a cause of mourning.

A string of New Bedford fishing boats sank in frigid, rough waters beginning in 2004.

When the Northern Edge went down that winter, the sole survivor was a crew member who had taken safety training in Portugal. That survivor, Pedro Furtado, later filed a lawsuit and contended the boat operator improperly stored life safety suits in an engine room — where the crew couldn't reach them in emergency.

In January 2007, New Bedford's 75-foot Lady of Grace — battered by 40-knot gales, and taking on ice — went missing at sea as it staggered to escape the weighty chill and return safely to harbor.

On January 28, five days after Lady of Grace set out to lure fish and scallops, the Coast Guard found the vessel submerged in 56 feet of water at the bottom of Nantucket Sound. Like so many New England fishing boats, Lady of Grace was workmanlike, not sleek, and aged — built 29 years earlier, its blue facade dotted with black marks.

Divers recovered the bodies of the captain, a fisherman for 25 years, and another crew member, in the business for 27 years. The bodies of the other two men did not surface. Heavy ice literally sank the boat, the Coast Guard concluded, drowning the men before they could reach port. Once more, the Catholic Church held solemn funerals, and the close-knit Portuguese community prayed for families left fatherless.

Avila knew everyone on that boat.

"I lost a lot of my friends that year, and it wasn't a good feeling," he said. "I was already into safety a little bit before that happened but that just confirmed it. I just dedicated myself to the safety program."

A fisherman for more than five decades, Avila said he felt invulnerable to tragedy. After all, he reasoned, he always spent money for safety equipment.

"Even though I had all the best equipment, I didn't know how to use it," he told the NTSB forum in 2010. "And right then and there, a light bulb went off and I started looking at all my fellow fishermen in my port one by one, who had started fishing with me, and they were in the same boat — different vessels, but same boat. They had the best equipment, but they didn't have the knowledge to use it."

Avila got a wakeup call when he flew to Alaska for safety training himself. "I thought I knew everything there was to know about it until I sat in his class. And then I scratched my head the first, maybe the second day and I said, 'Boy, I really know nothing about this,'" he told the NTSB.

Now, like his friend Mattera, he leads drills that prepare fishermen for the worst — and get them intimately acquainted with equipment that could save their lives. The best safety equipment is useless, he learned, unless you know how to operate it: How to quickly zip into a life suit. How to inflate a life raft, send a mayday call, plug a gaping leak on a boat taking on water. With help miles away and unforgiving waves pounding, fishermen have scant moments to act.

"The problem with a boat, when something happens or breaks, you are out in the middle of the ocean," said Mattera, the long-time fisherman from Rhode Island. "It's not like you are out at the curb and can call AAA."

Using the life-saving gear can mean the difference between death and survival.

Lincoln, the NIOSH official from Alaska, said getting into an immersion suit increases odds of survival by 7 percent. Getting into a life raft, she said, increases survival chances by 15 percent.

In Alaska, a safety campaign supported by industry helped lower the death totals. There, NIOSH studied the industry's high fatality rate and focused on the sectors, such as the crab fishery, with the highest numbers. "NIOSH would look at the fishing data for the entire state, and we identified a hazardous fishery and then we worked with the Coast Guard and crab fishermen," Lincoln explained. "What can we do to prevent these fatalities from happening?"

NIOSH intends to use the same targeted approach in the East Coast, Gulf Coast and West Coast, using its region-by-region breakdown as a guide. "What's that one or two things we need to focus on to intervene so that fatalities start decreasing?" Lincoln asked.

Lasting reform, she said, requires industry buy in and a focused, not "one-size-fits-all mentality." Having fishermen help lead safety drills is one piece of the puzzle. "If the training can be led by the fishermen, then they already have credibility by the people they are trying to train," Lincoln said.

The potential for tragedy is compounded by the economics of an industry that experiences steep price swings — and feels the domino effect of a still-shaky economy. Looking to save money, some captains set out with fewer hands on deck, leading to fatigue during the long days on the water. They stay out in dangerous weather to lure the extra fish that will reel in a bigger bounty. And, they put off housekeeping.

"When you have economic hardship, a lot of times the first thing you neglect is the safety equipment," Mattera said.

"Stretching it out," he calls it. "It's like having a home and knowing you should paint your home every 10 years. And when 10 years comes it costs you $10,000 to paint it and you already have a second mortgage. You either do it yourself, which ends up being half-ass, or you wait."

Mattera said he and Avila had been complacent before tragedy spurred them to act. "Now we're like pains in the asses to everybody because we're so committed to this," said Mattera, who until recently owned an 84-foot trawler, Travis & Natalie, named after his now-adult children.

After a boat goes down, Avila said, everyone starts pointing fingers. At the boat owner, the government, the regulations. His goal is to shift from the blame game to a culture where fishermen are prepared for chaos at sea. "If you go out fishing and you're not prepared for any disaster, that's like you going into a gunfight with a pea shooter."

In Rhode Island this month, Mattera played the role of man overboard in another drill. Using their might and a yellow lifeline, two men pulled him back aboard. "Like a swordfish," Mattera said, "235 pounds."

One of the rescuers, Mike Gallagher, recalled finding a friend dead on a boat in 2002. The man, fishing alone, had not returned at day's end, and Gallagher searched for him the next morning. Trapped by equipment onboard, the fisherman was dead from head trauma.

"I used to fish alone back then," said Gallagher. "I never went alone after that."
 As safety instructor Fred Mattera looks on, a fisherman jumps into the water in Narragansett, R.I., during a safety drill this month. The immersion training is intended to help curb casualties in the deadliest vocation in the United States, an industry beset by a high death rate and fragile federal net of protection. Ronnie Greene http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/ronnie-greene