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Venice on the web
A closer look at the city's
utilities department report on asbestos concrete Got a comment? Make it here. RELATED AND BACKGROUND MATERIAL
Cutting through the fluff The bulk of the report, maybe 150 pages or so, is made up of pages reprinted from OSHA's web site, pages that deal with asbestos concrete pipe, plus miscellaneous other reprinted material. For example, there's a curious section of the department's report entitled "Asbestos Standard For The Construciton Industry" (sic). It's curious not for the obvious misspelling on the cover sheet, but rather for its mere presence in the pile of documents. The document contains OSHA's rules for private sector construction, not a public utilities department. OSHA has no jurisdiction on asbestos use and disposal by a governmental agency. I was genuinely surprised to discover that. There are some strange rules that kick into play when asbestos is involved, and OSHA's jurisdictional limits is one of the strangest. According to one of the criminal investigators that I spoke with at the EPA, when it comes to federal, state, county or municipal agencies, the EPA, and only the EPA, has jurisdiction over asbestos use, storage and disposal. For all private sector storage, removal and disposal rules, the OSHA rules are applicable. All of which creates a very strange legal situation. Take the recent asbestos-concrete debacle that was told to me and that I subsequently wrote about and informed council (see above 'Related' links). Here you have a private company, Johnson Brothers, who are doing contract work on the bridges for the Florida Department of Transportation. It was the Johnson Brothers that dug up a reported three tons of asbestos concrete and transported it to the city's drinking water processing plant about a month ago. Since this is a DOT project, you would think that EPA rules and guidelines would apply, but you would be wrong. Since the Johnson Brothers are a corporation, they are bound by OSHA regs in handling and disposing of asbestos concrete. Once the Johnson Brothers dumped the pipe at the water plant, the city became responsible for handling and ultimately disposing of the pipe. Since the city is a governmental agency, OSHA rules are now inapplicable and EPA rules are now applicable. While the 150 or so pages of OSHA rules and regs that are used to bulk up the utilities report are educational, they really have little bearing on the matter at hand: OSHA is not the applicable enforcing agency for the city's asbestos concrete handling and disposal procedures. Within the context of this report, the OSHA reprints become a massive red herring, impressive in their bulk but ultimately useless for discussing the matter at hand. It's the same trick students have used in college for term papers -- pad 'em out with a lot of quotes and footnotes and hope that the teacher doesn't notice that the original content in the paper doesn't amount to very much. "If ya can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, ..." So, after discarding all of the irrelevant material, what is left of the report is about 20 pages of reprinted memos, e-mails and the like that paint a confusing portrait of an obviously seriously confused division.
Lane's and Adinolfi's opening remarks Lane, in his cover memo, correctly states that "...OSHA can only advise about asbestos safety but does not have jurisdiction over government entities." He never mentions which agency actually does have jurisdiction over government entities. In extremely odd decision, Lane states that the utilities department instead went to Risk Management for advice rather than the appropriate enforcing agency, the dreaded EPA. Reason: Lane's department is still under criminal investigation by the EPA over unlawful spills, falsification of documents, and a variety of other serious charges. This investigation is now going into its third year. In fact, Lane ducks any and all mention of the EPA as the correct enforcing agency, this either out of ignorance, willful ignoring or outright terror of the federal agency. Lane goes on to write that throw-away HazMat suits (hazardous material moon suits) are the norm, something that strongly contradicts witness accounts to Venice Florida! dot com. According to our information, employees were discouraged from using the HazMat suits as the suits are expensive and the employees were reportedly told that handling the pipe was completely safe. According to my sources, the HazMat suits have only been used once at the water plant to handle asbestos concrete that has been dumped and stored there, and that happened recently at employee insistence over the strong objections of the department due to costs. According to sources, Lane's statement that the department encourages using HazMat suits when handling asbestos concrete at the water plant is "an outright lie." For more info on this incident, see transcript of statement to Venice City Council, 04/13/04. Additionally, Lane tries to put a good face on the way Water Distribution Supervisor Dave Adinolfi was bushwhacked into giving a statement to me without knowing who he was talking to -- Lane had called Adinolfi and placed him on a speaker phone without letting Adinolfi know that I was in the room. Adinolfi was then asked about asbestos concrete practices and Adinolfi responded without knowing that I was listening (again, see transcript of statement to Venice City Council, 04/13/04 for background details). Lane states that he used the subterfuge on his subordinate in order to avoid the appearance of a staged response. Lane writes "[Adinolfi gave] an excellent accounting of our procedures, enough, in my opinion, to satisfy anyone who would be concerned about employee safety." Adinolfi was, as far as I could tell, truthful in his responses, so I was satisfied in that respect. Adinolfi stated that the recent Johnson Brothers load of used asbestos concrete had lain out in the open behind the water plant for some three weeks before it was picked up. After further questioning, Adinolf stated that used asbestos concrete had been stored in that same location for some 15 to 20 years and that nobody had ever received training or education in the handling of the material. After Adinolfi had hung up, Lane then told me that they had been cutting the used pipe back there for years as scrap pipe for use in repairing water lines. Lane insisted that the process was completely safe. Adinolfi's introductory memo is equally troubling. Adinolfi states that scrap asbestos concrete pipe has been stored at the water plant as far back as 1983. Adinolfi further states that some of the scrap was subsequently used as repair material as new asbestos concrete pipe was getting increasingly difficult to obtain. This would mean that asbestos concrete pipe was probably cut at some point in time on the water plant grounds, something that John Lane confirmed to me in our conversation on April 12. Adinolfi further states that asbestos concrete water main breaks were not that common, yet I know of three major asbestos concrete breaks within the past year alone. Since asbestos concrete pipe is used underground to transport drinking water to residents, Adinolfi notes that there is a schedule for checking drinking water for asbestos fibers -- samples are taken once every nine years. Adinolfi also goes into the resignation of Mike Hoop, an employee who left the city's employ in 2002 complaining of unsafe working conditions, specifically about the city's handling of asbestos concrete. There's an exit interview included later on in the report, written by Lane and addressed to former city manager George Hunt, that all but accuses Hoop of genocide. So far, I've been unable to reach Hoop to get his side of the story.
Then comes the incident of April 9, 2004 On April 4, I had gone to the water plant and had photographed two pieces of asbestos concrete pipe that were lying on the grass in back of the plant, including the valve in question here (see this page for the photos). On the same day I took the photos, I informed Reverend James Mitchell, of the nearby Union Missionary Baptist Church, in the hopes that he would advise his congregation to avoid the area where the scrap pipe has been routinely dumped -- this is only about 50 yards from the front door of the church. In spite of the fact that asbestos had been stored there for an admitted 20 years, this was the first time Mitchell had heard of it. Sometime in the next few days, someone from the church had asked a water worker if there really was asbestos back there and stated that I was looking into it. According to inside sources, the water department went into a kind of panic. City employee Andy Spafford went out back with a sledgehammer and beat the asbestos concrete out of the valve that I had previously photographed. The leftover asbestos concrete scrap from the valve was tossed next to a dumpster, unwrapped. I have no idea what happened to the valve. Spafford wore no HazMat suit or protective breathing apparatus. Whether anyone told Spafford to do this also remains a mystery. Accounts differ as to who instructed Spafford to destroy the pipe and one account I have received states that Spafford did it of his own volition. Immediately after that, gravel was brought in and the entire area where scrap asbestos concrete pipe has been piled for years was suddenly covered over with dirt and gravel and then compacted. The second pipe that had been photographed was wrapped in plastic and placed in nearly its original position as if on display to show that things are always safe behind the water plant. Extremely odd, all that, as I was still secretly collecting background information and had yet to ask anyone officially about the situation. My guess is that it was done to hide the evidence and that nobody was yet aware that I already had been back there taking photographs. While Lane insisted to me that his department has been doing everything properly, the sudden and quite literal cover-up of the area in question bends credulity to the breaking point. The one question in all of this that is begging to be asked is: Why was scrap asbestos concrete pipe being stored anywhere near a drinking water processing plant? Both Lane and other witnesses have stated to me that scrap AC pipe was cut back there on many occasions, thus creating friable (powdery and breathable) asbestos fibers. Why would anyone be doing this within such close proximity of the plant? Why, over the 20+ years that it had been going on, didn't anyone ever think to ask if maybe that wasn't such a good idea? And don't give me this crap about it's perfectly safe -- 1.) I don't believe it, and 2.) even if it was perfectly safe (yeah, right), it was a PR disaster waiting to happen.
Training, education and certification Stacy McKenzie, in an included e-mail dated 02/14/03, notes that she can find no training logs relating to asbestos pipe cutting. This is in response to a panicky e-mail from John Lane's assistant Colleen Winkler, in which Winkler writes about deposition subpoenas, presumably involving the Mike Hoop affair.
So where does this leave us? Since Halyard's visit, I have been in contact with the EPA, and there are several things that Halyard left town without learning. Halyard was apparently never told of the Spafford incident and he was not informed of the complaints made by Mike Hoop back in 2003. My attempts to contact Halyard directly have not been successful so far, so we'll see what the early part of this next week brings. In the meantime, Lane will no doubt be standing in front of a mirror practicing his now-famous accusatory catch phrase: "Lies, half-truths and no-truths." Maybe I'd better get one of those HazMat suits.
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
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