EPA against limiting rocket fuel ingredient in water — CNN
September 22, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency has decided there’s no need to rid drinking water of a toxic rocket fuel ingredient that has fouled public water supplies around the country.
EPA reached the conclusion in a draft regulatory document not yet made public but reviewed Monday by The Associated Press.
Jeremy Symons, who represented the Environmental Protection Agency on Vice President Cheney’s energy task force, described the Bush administration’s “carefully orchestrated policy of delay”:
“It’s a charade… They have a single-minded determination to do nothing — while making it look like they are doing something.” [or, in this case, pretend-lie that it won’t help! “let them die” or “eat cake”-Queen of England ages past]
The ingredient, perchlorate, has been found in at least 395 sites in 35 states at levels high enough to interfere with thyroid function and pose developmental health risks, particularly for babies and fetuses, according to some scientists.
The EPA document says that mandating a clean-up level for perchlorate would not result in a “meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public-water systems.”
The conclusion, which caps years of dispute over the issue, was denounced by Democrats and environmentalists who accused the EPA of caving to pressure from the Pentagon.
“This is a widespread contamination problem, and to see the Bush EPA just walk away is shocking,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, who chairs the Senate’s environment committee.
Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight in Mountain View, California, added: “This is an unconscionable decision not based upon science or law but on concern that a more stringent standard could cost the government significantly.”
The Defense Department used perchlorate for decades in testing missiles and rockets, and most perchlorate contamination is the result of defense and aerospace activities, congressional investigators said last year.
The Pentagon could face liability if EPA set a national drinking water standard that forced water agencies around the country to undertake costly clean-up efforts. Defense officials have spent years questioning EPA’s conclusions about the risks posed by perchlorate.
The Pentagon objected strongly Monday to the suggestion that it sought to influence EPA’s decision.
“We have not intervened in any way in EPA’s determination not to regulate perchlorate. If you read their determination, that’s based on criteria in the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Paul Yaroschak, Pentagon deputy director for emerging contaminants, said in an interview.
Yaroschak said the Pentagon has been working for years to clean up perchlorate at its facilities. He also contended that the Pentagon wasn’t the source of as much perchlorate contamination as once believed, noting that it also comes from fireworks, road flares and fertilizer.
Benjamin Grumbles, EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said in a statement that “science, not the politics of fear in an election year, will drive our final decision.”
“We know perchlorate in drinking water presents some degree of risk, and we’re committed to working with states and scientists to ensure public health is protected and meaningful opportunities for reducing risk are fully considered,” Grumbles said.
Grumbles said the EPA expected to seek comment and take final action before the end of the year. The draft document was first reported Monday by the Washington Post.
Perchlorate is particularly widespread in California and the Southwest, where it’s been found in groundwater and in the Colorado River, a drinking-water source for 20 million people. It’s also been found in lettuce and other foods.
In absence of federal action, states have acted on their own. In 2007, California adopted a drinking water standard of 6 parts per billion. Massachusetts has set a drinking water standard of 2 parts per billion.
EPA e-mail to workers: don’t answer inspector’s questions
Mon July 28, 2008
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Environmental Protection Agency advised employees last month not to answer questions from journalists, the Government Accountability Office or the agency’s inspector general, according to an EPA e-mail made public Monday.
“Please do not respond to questions or make any statements,” the June 16 e-mail said, advising staff to direct questioners to senior staff members cleared to answer questions from outside the agency.
Robbi Farrell, chief of staff of the EPA’s compliance assurance division, sent the e-mail to 11 managers in the department.
The e-mail was posted on a Web site of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The group, an alliance of state and federal environmental professionals, labeled the communication a “gag order.”
“The order reinforces a growing bunker mentality within an EPA that is the subject of a growing number of probes into political interference with agency operations,” the group said.
EPA press director Roxanne Smith rejected that characterization, saying the e-mail was about efficiency, not secrecy.
The memo was a response to a May 2007 audit by the Inspector General’s Office that found the EPA did not respond earlier to IG reports on problems with water enforcement and other issues, The Associated Press reported. The audit, however, did not make any recommendations governing communication between staff and the Inspector General’s Office.
“A senior staffer in the enforcement office sent out an e-mail to simply help her office efficiently respond to requests from the press, GAO and EPA’s inspector general,” Smith told CNN.
There is nothing in the procedure that restricts conversation between enforcement staff, the press, GAO and the IG,” she said, adding it is “consistent with existing agency polices.”
Smith is one of the people to whom recipients of the memo were told to direct journalists’ questions.
In a written statement, the EPA’s Office of Inspector General said it did not approve the language of Robbi’s warning and advised, “All EPA officials and employees are required to cooperate” with the office.
“This cooperation includes providing the OIG full and unrestricted access to EPA documents, records, and personnel,” the statement read. “We are currently engaged in discussions with OECA [Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance] to assure that OIG and OECA interpretations are consistent in this matter.”
And Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who has long battled with the agency’s administrator, Stephen Johnson, said the instructions showed that Johnson is “turning the EPA into a secretive, dangerous ally of polluters, instead of a leader in the effort to protect the health and safety of the American people.”
Last week, Johnson denied a request to appear before two Senate committees to talk about whether the EPA’s decisions comply with its staff’s legal and technical recommendations.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, has asked the inspector general’s office to assess the administration’s claims of executive privilege as it tries to keep documents related to EPA decisions from Congress.
Boxer chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works.
She is expected to hold a news conference Tuesday to talk about what she calls “political interference in recent EPA decisions” and discuss “apparent contradictions between the sworn testimony” of Johnson and accounts given by other sworn witnesses.