Following concerns raised in July by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about the safety of the beach at Illinois Beach State Park near Zion, a new round of testing began on Wednesday to determine the levels of asbestos there.

NBC5 Chicago reports that over the next eight days, EPA officials will try to mimic a typical day at the beach, participating in activities such as volleyball, Frisbee, and – of course – sunbathing. What they hope to determine is just how human activity can stir up asbestos fibers from the large pieces found on the beach.

According to NBC5, officials say they are trying to prove their hypothesis that the beach is safe.

“We are trying to look and assess is there any danger out here for the public,” said Richard Karl, who is with the EPA.

“Why wasn’t that done last time,” asked NBC5 political editor Carol Marin.

“That I don’t know,” he said.

“Every time they test the air, they find asbestos,” said Jeff Camplin, an asbestos professional who has battled with state and federal authorities over how safe the beach is.
“We have enough data to close down the beaches.”

Residents and environmental activists say the problem at the beach is two-fold: some asbestos is already buried in the sand and additional pieces are washing up on shore. Beach officials must keep tabs on both.

The story points out that despite a recommendation by an attorney general’s task force that three beach sweeps occur each week, the State Department of Natural Resources was only doing one. After the media picked up the story, the state finally upped that to three beach sweeps a week during summer months.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 12:48 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Four buildings at the Oyster Point Place Apartments in Newport News, Virginia have been evacuated after apartment owners discovered they were contaminated with asbestos.

A story on WWEC-TV stated that tenants in all four buildings in question “found a letter hanging from their doorknobs Thursday that told them their walls and ventilation systems were clogged” with asbestos, a known cancer-causing agent.

“There was no knock on the door, like, ‘Hey we need to talk about this,’” recalled Twane Shelton, who has only lived at Oyster Point for three weeks. “It was very, very, very sneaky.”

Shelton and his roommate say they aren’t very surprised at the turn of events. They say management placed them into a filthy apartment when they moved in on July 10th.

An inspection of the complex by the TV station revealed an unlocked apartment downstairs where they found plastic sheeting and asbestos warning signs just feet away from the rooms Shelton and his roommate Ryan Spiker call home.

The young men say they believe they were duped into moving into an unhealthy building and complex.

“If they know about it now, they knew about it before,” said Spiker. “It’s not right we weren’t warned about this before we moved in here.”

Spiker and Shelton say they scrimped to gather enough cash to move into Oyster Point Place and now don’t have enough to live elsewhere.

“We’re gonna be homeless, you know,” said Spiker.

Management at Oyster Point Place said they had no comment about the situation.

A story appearing on several Montana news stations highlights a recent report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, stating that the legacy of WR Grace vermiculite contamination reaches far beyond Libby, Montana, where hundreds have already died or been sickened by exposure to asbestos.

According to the story, the newly-released report focuses on different places across the country where WR Grace workers and their families were exposed to Libby asbestos. This includes 28 locations throughout the U.S. where Grace vermiculite was made into commercial insulation.

Like Libby, where vermiculite-containing materials were made available to locals to be used as fill, similar situations were found across the country, including in western Pennsylvania, where the mineral surfaced at a playground located beside a Grace facility, and in Minnesota, where dozens of families used the vermiculite waste rock as fill for their yards.

Next year, the agency expects to release a larger report on the 28 processing sites including recommendations about what to do next. In the meantime, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences was founded at University of Montana in 2000, in part to study asbestos-related disease in Libby, and will begin to look at exposure outside of this small Montana town. Earlier this month, scientists with the center learned they were receiving a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to assist in their research.

According to representatives from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the Professional Airways Systems Specialists, some of the nation’s many air-traffic control towers are plagued with deteriorating conditions, including exposed asbestos, toxic mold, and a variety of pests like bats and wasps.

In a report to Congress, members of these organizations said the deplorable conditions are “endangering airplane passengers and threatening the health of air-traffic controllers, union officials and equipment repairmen.”

“That’s intolerable,” responded Rep. James Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He and other lawmakers scolded the Federal Aviation Administration for failing to ask for as much fix-up money as Congress had suggested, reports an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Neglected buildings are in dire need of maintenance and repair, including removal of dangerous “friable” asbestos, but the FAA is ignoring cries for help, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the Professional Airways Systems Specialists.

“Congress recognized the problem, Congress authorized the money, but the FAA did not use the money,” said Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill., chairman of the panel’s aviation subcommittee, which held the hearing.

Pat Forrey, president of the controllers association, said the FAA has failed to answer pleas from controllers to fix chronic and dangerous conditions at dozens of sites.

“Aging air-traffic control facilities have not been a priority for the FAA,” he said.

Forrey added that many controllers are suffering from respiratory problems, skin rashes, and other ailments that may be a result of exposure to asbestos or mold.

The Washington Post reports that federal prosecutors in the case against asbestos giant W.R. Grace won a small victory yesterday when an appeals court panel ruled that the U.S. attorney in Montana might be allowed to call several witnesses and use studies that a lower-court judge had barred from a pending trial over Grace’s actions in Libby, Montana, where hundreds have been sickened from asbestos-related diseases.

Though U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy had rejected the federal prosecutors’ bid to present at least nine witnesses and evidence from three critical environmental health studies, saying the government had missed several deadlines, a panel of three judges determined that the district judge had exceeded his authority in presenting such a ruling. The appeals court said that Molloy must find that the government lapse was “willful and motivated by a desire to obtain a tactical advantage” to bar the witnesses from testifying.

“We are sympathetic to the district court’s attempts to manage this large and complex criminal trial,” the appeals court wrote. The panel said the trial judge could yet find a basis to “justify excluding or limiting testimony or documents — either as a sanction or as an evidentiary matter.”

One of the studies in question concluded that 1,200 people in Libby and surrounding towns suffered from some sort of lung problem, probably caused by asbestos exposure. This included not only workers at Grace’s Zonolite plant, but community members who were also exposed to airborne fibers on a daily basis.

William W. Mercer, the U.S. attorney in Montana, said the appeals court ruling moved the government “one step closer to the ultimate goal of trying . . . W.R. Grace and the individual defendants with a full complement of evidence.”

A report presented at the recent 2007 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) announced that the chemotherapy combination consisting of Alimta (pemetrexed) plus a platinum compound (Platinol® [cisplatin] or Paraplatin® [carboplatin]) has been confirmed as “an active therapeutic regimen in the treatment of patients with previously untreated malignant pleural mesothelioma.”

Those presenting the report cited the Phase III study of the drug, which involved 448 patients from 19 countries and was the largest study of mesothelioma patients to date. The study, which compared the use of Alimta and Platinol to the use of Platinol alone, concluded that the combination of drugs “significantly improved survival, response rate, and median time to progression.”

Following the success of the Phase III trial, the drug was released on an expanded access program. The program, which involved 745 patients and combined Alimta with either Platinol or Paraplatin, produced the following results, which were reported at the ASCO meeting:

• At one year, survival was approximately 64% for both treatment groups.
• The median time to cancer progression was approximately seven months for both treatment groups.
• Overall, partial response rates were 26.3% for patients treated with Alimta/Platinol and 21.6% for those treated with Alimta/Paraplatin.
• Partial responses plus stable disease occurred in 77.7% of patients receiving Alimta/Platinol and 75.8% of those receiving Alimta/Paraplatin.
• Severe thrombocytopenia, anemia, neutropenia and leucopenia occurred more frequently among patients treated with Alimta/Paraplatin than those treated with Alimta/Platinol.

New York Public Radio reports that a new study whose results were released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this week states that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “misled the public” regarding the presence of dangerous asbestos particles in many Lower Manhattan apartments after 9/11.

According to the report, the EPA had paid for the clean-up of about 4,000 apartments in the WTC area in the 2 years following the attacks. The report noted that “a very small number” of apartments contained unsafe levels of asbestos. What the report did not state, however, was that the air testing was done after the apartments were cleaned, not before.

The report was released on June 20th during hearings held by the Senate Health Committee. One GAO official described the EPA’s asbestos testing as “misleading.” During the hearings, EPA officials also answered questions about giving the “all-clear” to workers and residents to re-occupy Lower Manhattan after the attacks. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) said she will request that the GAO conduct another study to measure the preparedness of the EPA should another similar catastrophe occur in the future.

The hundreds of residents and volunteers who’ve been sifting through the debris in Greensburg, KS since the town was largely destroyed by a killer tornado several weeks ago may be in danger of exposure to hazardous asbestos.

The Kansas City Star notes that experts believe the government should be doing much more to protect those residents and volunteers from breathing in asbestos and other hazardous materials that may be lurking in the debris. Asbestos is especially prevalent in homes built prior to the mid 1970s.

Unfortunately, the article points out, federal and state regulations do not give regulators authority to require asbestos removal from single-family homes, said Becky Ingrum Dolph, an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency Region 7.

“It’s a shame, because people are out there and most likely getting contaminated,” added Leland Sumptur, a Lenexa asbestos abatement manager who teaches and has consulted nationally.

Just two weeks after the tornado hit Greensburg, the EPA arrived to take air samples to determine whether or not asbestos levels were dangerous. At that time, the tests were negative. If the samples had been positive, points out Dolph, the EPA would have been allowed to move in.

“Legally, we don’t have any authority to require the individual homeowner to do anything,” Dolph said.

Others believe that not just the air but also the debris should be tested. “For someone to suggest they did air sampling and they didn’t find anything, that is so wrong to do that,” said Celeste Monforton, a researcher and lecturer on public health policy with George Washington University. “It gives some people a false sense of security.”

“Really the risk is going to be to the people rummaging through the debris and what they are breathing there,” Monforton said. “For someone walking down the street it might not be such a problem.”

The Kansas City InfoZine, an online newspaper, reports that engineers and scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have completed their first project using a new method of asbestos removal. This new technology, dubbed the Alternative Asbestos Removal Method (AARM) was successfully used at a building at the now-defunct Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.

To conduct studies on the new method, EPA employees cleared one Fort Chaffee building using the new method and another using the standard method of asbestos removal, also known as the National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) method. As they were demolished, environmental emissions were monitored to determine if the alternative protected the environment as well as the NESHAP method, reports the article.

The old NESHAP process demands that some asbestos be removed prior to the demolition of the structure. It can be very time consuming and expensive, note experts. After the demolition, both the structure and the asbestos inside are taken to a landfill that is licensed to handle asbestos.

With the new AARM method, some friable asbestos is also removed before demolition but some asbestos-containing materials are allowed to remain, the article explains. The structure is then wetted with amended water to control asbestos fiber release prior to and during demolition. Demolition debris and several inches of affected soil from this process are disposed as asbestos-containing debris at an approved landfill, much like the first method.

The initial study indicated that levels of airborne asbestos were lower than expected with AARM, therefore providing a safer work environment for abatement professionals. There was also evidence that cost and time-saving would be substantial with the new method.

On International Workers Memorial Day on April 28th, the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization paused to honor the more than 100,000 workers killed worldwide by asbestos-related diseases, noting that “asbestos is still the number one carcinogen in the world of work and causes 54% of all deaths from occupational cancer.”

“Asbestos has touched the lives of millions of people, each with names and families, like Nellie Kershaw, the 33 year old factory worker, who was the first case of asbestosis published in medical literature in 1927,” said Dr. Richard A. Lemen, Assistant Surgeon General, USPHS (ret.), and Co-Scientific Director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “Today we think of the thousands of people, like Nellie Kershaw, who have lost their lives to the highly preventable diseases caused by asbestos.”

Dr. Arthur Frank, Co-Scientific Director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, spoke about the recent plight of the U.S. Capitol Tunnel Workers who have been unnecessarily exposed to dangerous asbestos inside the miles of tunnels that carry steam and cold water throughout the Capitol complex.

“Given that we are in the 21st century and the hazards of asbestos have been known since the 19th century, and further revealed in the 20th, it is outrageous that the Congressional tunnel workers were subjected to asbestos exposures over a protracted period of time. Given their exposures and the absence of adequate protection, they have an elevated risk of lung cancer, mesothelioma, and all the other diseases related to asbestos, on top of the asbestosis that has been diagnosed among of members of this group,” said Frank. “As we pay tribute to former workers on this day of remembrance, we need to take action to protect current workers who are still being abused.”