from stickdog
In the recent NC plane crash, 3 WR Grace employees were killed: Joseph Spiak, general manager of specialty vermiculite (including the highly toxic asbestos containing Zonolite), Paul Stidham, director of environmental health and safety, and Richard Lyons, global health and safety manager.
From:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/080400-02.htm Although Halliburton is an enormous operation with more than 100,000 employees in 120 countries, it is a relatively small player when it comes to asbestos litigation, at least when compared with W.R. Grace & Co., GAF and the Johns Manville Corp. Nevertheless, Halliburton has spent $99 million to settle or dispose of 129,650 asbestos suits, according to company records.
From:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/9/12/192330/380 WR Grace Asbestos containing insulation was used at the World Trade Center (WTC). James Cintani stated that Grace Vermiculite did not contain asbestos. Unfortunately this was not true this material was 2-5 percent asbestos. 100,000 80 pound bags of this vermiculite was used in the WTC. In addition 9,150 pounds of MonoKote 3 was used at the WTC. Monokote 3 was about 20 percent asbestos. Therefore in total about 201,183 pounds of pure asbestos fiber from Grace was used in the WTC.
From:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/... White House budget office thwarts EPA warning on asbestos-laced insulation
The Environmental Protection Agency was on the verge of warning millions of Americans that their attics and walls might contain asbestos-contaminated insulation. But, at the last minute, the White House intervened, and the warning has never been issued.
The announcement to warn the public was expected in April. It was to accompany a declaration by the EPA of a public health emergency in Libby, Mont. In that town near the Canadian border, ore from a vermiculite mine was contaminated with an extremely lethal asbestos fiber called tremolite that has killed or sickened thousands of miners and their families. Ore from the Libby mine was shipped across the nation and around the world, ending up in insulation called Zonolite that was used in millions of homes, businesses and schools across America. Zonolite insulation was sold throughout North America from the 1940s through the 1990s. Almost all of the vermiculite used in the insulation came from the Libby mine, last owned by W.R. Grace & Co.
Interviews and documents show that just days before the EPA was set to make the declaration, the plan was thwarted by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which had been told of the proposal months earlier. Former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, who worked for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, called the decision not to notify homeowners of the dangers posed by Zonolite insulation "the wrong thing to do." "When the government comes across this kind of information and doesn't tell people about it, I just think it's wrong, unconscionable, not to do that," he said. " What right does the government have to conceal these dangers? It just doesn't make sense."
The question about what to do about Zonolite insulation was not the only asbestos-related issue in which the White House intervened. In January, in an internal EPA report on problems with the agency's much-criticized response to the terrorist attacks in New York City, a section on "lessons learned" said there was a need to release public health and emergency information without having it reviewed and delayed by the White House."
The EPA's files are filled with studies documenting the toxicity of tremolite, how even minor disruptions of the material by moving boxes, sweeping the floor or doing repairs in attics can generate asbestos fibers. Most of those who have studied the needle-sharp tremolite fibers in the Libby ore consider them far more dangerous than other asbestos fibers. In October, the EPA team leading the cleanup of lower Manhattan after the attacks of Sept. 11 went to Libby to meet with Peronard and his crew. The EPA had reversed an early decision and announced that it would be cleaning asbestos from city apartments. (NOTE: THIS STUFF WAS IN THE WTC TOWERS!!!)
Peronard told the visitors from New York just how dangerous tremolite is. He talked about the hands-on research in Libby of Dr. Alan Whitehouse, a pulmonologist who had worked for NASA and the Air Force on earlier projects before moving to Spokane, Wash. "Whitehouse's research on the people here gave us our first solid lead of how bad this tremolite is," Peronard said.
Whitehouse has not only treated 500 people from Libby who are sick and dying from exposure to tremolite. The chest specialist also has almost 300 patients from Washington shipyards and the Hanford, Wash., nuclear facility who are suffering health effects from exposure to the more prevalent chrysotile asbestos. Comparing the two groups, Whitehouse has demonstrated that the tremolite from Libby is 10 times as carcinogenic as chrysotile and probably 100 times more likely to produce mesothelioma than chrysotile.
(Please read. There's much, much more here.)
From:
http://www.msnbc.com/local/pisea/102011.asp?cp1=1 Murray promises to renew push for asbestos warnings
Dec. 30 - After revelations that the Bush administration squelched public health warnings about a widely used form of insulation that contains cancer-causing asbestos, Sen. Patty Murray vowed yesterday to renew her fight for a public education campaign. Murray, D-Wash., said she will demand an explanation this week for why warnings planned last spring by the Environmental Protection Agency were called off at the last minute by high-ranking Bush administration officials.
Internal EPA documents show that about 15 million to 35 million of the nation's approximately 105 million households contain a brand of insulation known as Zonolite. Mined for decades in Libby, Mont., Zonolite contains a particularly lethal form of asbestos known as tremolite. "I just find it astounding that when this kind of information is available that can save people's lives, that this administration has decided to keep that secret and not let people know," Murray said. "Here's a health risk we can do something about."
Murray's co-sponsor, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., died in October in a plane crash.
W.R. Grace says the insulation is safe, and wrote a letter to the EPA in April insisting that no health warnings are necessary.
In addition to its use in insulation, the brownish-pink vermiculite was contained in garden products, cement mixtures and many other products. One of those products was as fireproofing in ceiling tiles used widely in schools and federal office buildings. Helping manufacture those tiles as a side job while in college likely gave Brian Harvey of Marysville mesothelioma, a disease caused only by exposure to asbestos. Harvey criticized the Bush administration's decision to pull the public health warning. "I have a real problem with that," Harvey said. "That I consider unforgivable."
"At the top levels of the Bush administration, they are maintaining this cloak of secrecy that I can't imagine the people who I've worked with at the EPA are very happy about," Murray said. "Hopefully, the public will start crying out for Congress and the administration to do something about this."
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