Federal and state officials used flawed calculations in a 2005 report that assured Nitro residents that dioxin levels in school buildings and a community center do not pose a health risk, according to government records recently made public.
Federal and state officials used flawed calculations in a 2005 report that assured Nitro residents that dioxin levels in school buildings and a community center do not pose a health risk, according to government records recently made public.
The corrected figures - which were not made public at the time - would have made the risks appear slightly worse, especially for children at a day-care center in the Nitro Community Center, the records show.
State and federal officials said last week they stand by their earlier assurances to the public, and an April 2007 study that also found no significant risks.
However, lawyers who are suing Monsanto Co. over the alleged contamination of Nitro-area residents and area streams say government agents greatly underestimated the hazards and then covered up flaws in their studies.
"You had to have known that an unacceptable cancer risk existed for schoolchildren using a 'worst-case scenario' analysis," Charleston lawyer Stuart Calwell said in a June 11 letter to state and federal agencies. "Did you withhold such information from the public on purpose? Sadly, that is what the evidence seems to suggest."
Calwell is litigating two class-action lawsuits over dioxin pollution from the former Monsanto plant in Nitro, which for more than 50 years churned out herbicides, rubber products and other chemicals.
The plant's production of the powerful Vietnam-era herbicide Agent Orange created dioxin as a dangerous toxic chemical byproduct. Dioxin has been linked to cancer, birth defects, learning disabilities, endometriosis, infertility and suppressed immune functions. The chemical builds up in tissue over time, meaning that even small exposures can accumulate to dangerous levels.
In one of the cases, thousands of current and former Nitro residents allege that Monsanto polluted the entire town with dangerous amounts of dioxin. Last month, the state Supreme Court rejected Monsanto's effort to overturn Putnam Circuit Judge O.C. Spaulding's decision to certify both cases as class actions.
Calwell has been fighting Monsanto over dioxin pollution since the mid-1980s, when he mostly lost a suit against the company over alleged poisoning of Nitro plant workers.
Three years ago, Calwell caused a stir when he encouraged the Kanawha County Board of Education to test Nitro school buildings for dioxin. Tests funded by Calwell's law firm had already found high levels of dioxin in Nitro homes, and results showing dioxin in the school buildings and the local day care briefly caused a public stir just before the 2005-2006 school year was set to begin.
During an Aug. 4, 2005, meeting with school managers, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the state Bureau for Public Health all insisted that any risks from the dioxin in the buildings fell within levels the government considers acceptable.
"They didn't see that there was any substantial health threat from exposure at those levels," said Jim Withrow, the school board's lawyer.
Steve Dearwent, an ATSDR scientist, agreed, to a point.
Dearwent said the dioxin levels did not pose "an immediate or imminent threat," but also fell within levels that needed more evaluation.
In notes from the meeting, ATSDR regional representative Lora Werner recalled that the state's calculation of a key figure - called the Toxic Equivalency Quotient, or TEQ - was lower than the school board contractor's calculation. "This issue needs to be resolved by further examining supporting documentation from the contractor," Werner wrote in the notes, made public Friday morning.
About a month later, on Sept. 6, 2005, the EPA released a further evaluation, in the form of short memo dated Aug. 30.
Levels of dioxin in the schools and the community center were acceptable, that memo said. But levels in the day-care center are "close" to the level that would require a cleanup.
The EPA said that, of the dioxin samples it studied, "the greatest potential risk is to young children in the day care." For day-care kids, the additional cancer risk from the dioxin is 0.91 in 10,000 - very close to the 1 in 10,000 risk that would be considered unacceptable, the EPA report said.
The memo again noted that the TEQ calculations by government officials - this time the EPA - and the school board contractor had differed. The "likely explanation," the memo said, was that the contractor used older figures than the EPA.
Two months later, the state's lead investigator on the issue, Barbara Smith, sent a memo to the EPA and ATSDR officials.
Federal and state officials used flawed calculations in a 2005 report that assured Nitro residents that dioxin levels in school buildings and a community center do not pose a health risk, according to government records recently made public.
The corrected figures - which were not made public at the time - would have made the risks appear slightly worse, especially for children at a day-care center in the Nitro Community Center, the records show.
State and federal officials said last week they stand by their earlier assurances to the public, and an April 2007 study that also found no significant risks.
However, lawyers who are suing Monsanto Co. over the alleged contamination of Nitro-area residents and area streams say government agents greatly underestimated the hazards and then covered up flaws in their studies.
"You had to have known that an unacceptable cancer risk existed for schoolchildren using a 'worst-case scenario' analysis," Charleston lawyer Stuart Calwell said in a June 11 letter to state and federal agencies. "Did you withhold such information from the public on purpose? Sadly, that is what the evidence seems to suggest."
Calwell is litigating two class-action lawsuits over dioxin pollution from the former Monsanto plant in Nitro, which for more than 50 years churned out herbicides, rubber products and other chemicals.
The plant's production of the powerful Vietnam-era herbicide Agent Orange created dioxin as a dangerous toxic chemical byproduct. Dioxin has been linked to cancer, birth defects, learning disabilities, endometriosis, infertility and suppressed immune functions. The chemical builds up in tissue over time, meaning that even small exposures can accumulate to dangerous levels.
In one of the cases, thousands of current and former Nitro residents allege that Monsanto polluted the entire town with dangerous amounts of dioxin. Last month, the state Supreme Court rejected Monsanto's effort to overturn Putnam Circuit Judge O.C. Spaulding's decision to certify both cases as class actions.
Calwell has been fighting Monsanto over dioxin pollution since the mid-1980s, when he mostly lost a suit against the company over alleged poisoning of Nitro plant workers.
Three years ago, Calwell caused a stir when he encouraged the Kanawha County Board of Education to test Nitro school buildings for dioxin. Tests funded by Calwell's law firm had already found high levels of dioxin in Nitro homes, and results showing dioxin in the school buildings and the local day care briefly caused a public stir just before the 2005-2006 school year was set to begin.
During an Aug. 4, 2005, meeting with school managers, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the state Bureau for Public Health all insisted that any risks from the dioxin in the buildings fell within levels the government considers acceptable.
"They didn't see that there was any substantial health threat from exposure at those levels," said Jim Withrow, the school board's lawyer.
Steve Dearwent, an ATSDR scientist, agreed, to a point.
Dearwent said the dioxin levels did not pose "an immediate or imminent threat," but also fell within levels that needed more evaluation.
In notes from the meeting, ATSDR regional representative Lora Werner recalled that the state's calculation of a key figure - called the Toxic Equivalency Quotient, or TEQ - was lower than the school board contractor's calculation. "This issue needs to be resolved by further examining supporting documentation from the contractor," Werner wrote in the notes, made public Friday morning.
About a month later, on Sept. 6, 2005, the EPA released a further evaluation, in the form of short memo dated Aug. 30.
Levels of dioxin in the schools and the community center were acceptable, that memo said. But levels in the day-care center are "close" to the level that would require a cleanup.
The EPA said that, of the dioxin samples it studied, "the greatest potential risk is to young children in the day care." For day-care kids, the additional cancer risk from the dioxin is 0.91 in 10,000 - very close to the 1 in 10,000 risk that would be considered unacceptable, the EPA report said.
The memo again noted that the TEQ calculations by government officials - this time the EPA - and the school board contractor had differed. The "likely explanation," the memo said, was that the contractor used older figures than the EPA.
Two months later, the state's lead investigator on the issue, Barbara Smith, sent a memo to the EPA and ATSDR officials.
Smith said the state and EPA calculations were wrong. When corrections were made, Smith said, the TEQ calculations "are comparable to those of the contractor."
"I got things confused, and I was wrong in my calculations," Smith said in an interview last week, but Smith insisted - contrary to what government documents show - that the EPA used the contractor's figures in its calculations. "I'm just telling you what I remember," said Smith, who has since retired from her state position.
Smith said, "If I've made a mistake, I want everyone to know about it." But she said she didn't recall if she informed school board officials about the incorrect calculations. "It's been a long time since I looked at that," she said.
In his June 11 letter to government agencies, Calwell explained that the miscalculation could have bumped the risks to day-care children to slightly above the 1 in 10,000-additional-cancer-case risk that those agencies consider acceptable.
Calwell said government officials should have immediately reworked their report and informed the public about the problem.
"Instead, your office did nothing," Calwell wrote. "You did not request that EPA amend its incorrect calculations. Nor did you make any effort to provide the public with the corrected information yourself."
Last week, Nitro day-care center director Rachel Ronk said she had not been told about the controversy over the dioxin studies.
"I haven't heard anything about this," Ronk said.
Bin Schmitz, the state public health agency's toxicologist, refused to comment and referred questions to her boss, program manager Anthony Turner.
Turner said he couldn't explain why the public was never informed. He said he didn't think it was that big of a deal, but that his agency would look at Calwell's letter and prepare a response.
"I don't think we misled the public," Turner said, "but we will consult with EPA. It's not going to end here. We will take a closer look at these concerns and try to address them appropriately. None of us want to hide anything. We want to be open to the public. If there is an issue, we want the people to know."
ATSDR's Werner and the EPA's Dawn Ioven agreed last week that the different TEQ number doesn't make a "significant difference" in their bottom line analysis of the dioxin risks.
"This is almost like an irrelevant point," Ioven said in a phone interview.
The difference between being slightly below and slightly above the 1 in 10,000 mark is not that important, Ioven said.
"Risk assessment is not as precise as people think," Ioven said. "There is essentially no difference."
EPA media spokesman Roy Seneca would not let Ioven answer direct questions about Calwell's letter, but EPA and ATSDR both pointed to the ATSDR's final "health consultation" report on the Nitro school building dioxin, published in April 2007.
That report concluded that the dioxin in the school buildings and the community center "poses no apparent public health hazard."
The report did not include the same sort of "worst-case" cancer risk analysis as the earlier EPA study. Instead of examining risks based on the highest dioxin levels found, as the earlier study did, the April 2007 report used an average of various dioxin samples.
And in his June 11 letter, Calwell charged that the April 2007 report had a variety of other flaws. The report wrongly said dust samples were taken only from ceiling rafters and did not consider cumulative dioxin exposures from attending school, living and working in contaminated buildings.
Calwell urged government officials to reopen their investigation of the Nitro dioxin, saying the problem should "not be ignored like the proverbial elephant in the room."
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kw...@wvgazette.com or 348-1702.
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