Plane Crashes, WR Grace, Deadly Asbestos, WTC Collapse & Wellstone

[seemslikeadream]

I am looking for this thread. It was in GD in Jan 03. Anybody save it? Archives do not go back that far. Thanks

[soup]

1. Sorry, checked my old DU bookmarks, and

it's not there. Sounds interesting, though. Hope you can find it.

It would be in GD 2 Archives in the 'old' DU. But, for some reason, I'm getting a 'script error notify admin' message (which I will do), when trying to access any of the archives.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Very much appreciate the help

Here's one from ED during the same time but the one in GD was incredible I wish I could get it.
Plane Crashes, WR Grace, Deadly Asbestos, WTC Collapse & Wellstone
LAST EDITED ON Jan-17-03 AT 09:03 PM (ET)
From: http://greenvilleonline.com/news/2003/01/08/2003010834140.htm

Crash ends promising lives in an instant
By Liv Osby
HEALTH WRITER
[e-mail]

Many were just starting their lives, like the two Clemson University graduate students, the Bob Jones University co-ed and the young father traveling with his adolescent daughter. Others, including the North Carolina computer salesman with two small children at home and three employees of W.R. Grace & Co., were just making a living when their US Airways plane flipped, crashed and burst into flames moments after takeoff Wednesday morning from Charlotte.

W.R. Grace & Co. veteran Richard Lyons was global health and safety manager at Grace Performance Chemicals in Cambridge, Mass. Lyons, 56, joined the company in 1969. Married with two children, he lived in Lynnfield, Mass.

Joseph Spiak, 46, also worked at the Cambridge site as general manager for specialty vermiculite (note: this includes the highly toxic, widely distributed brand of asbestos contaminated vermiculite marketed under the W.R. Grace brand name of Zonolite). A resident of Acton, Mass., he had been with Grace since 1981 and occasionally visited its Spartanburg facilities. He was married with two children.

Paul Stidham was a newcomer to the company, joining last July as director of environment health and safety for Grace's corporate headquarters in Columbia, Md. He and his wife, Dora, and their two young children made their home in Howard County, Va.

All three were on their way to a Grace facility in Enoree. "We are devastated and stunned by this tragic loss," said Grace CEO Paul Norris.


From: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/gard31.shtml

Asbestos found in many common garden products

EPA tests to determine health risks

Friday, March 31, 2000
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER and CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Federal investigators have found potentially lethal forms of asbestos in several lawn and garden products that contain vermiculite, a mineral used in hundreds of such products nationwide. "I think it is cause for concern," said Dr. Christine Oliver, assistant clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who has about 600 patients with asbestos-caused diseases. "There is no safe level of asbestos exposure," she said.

The EPA findings could explain some of the so-called spontaneous tumors that arise in people who have no known exposure to asbestos, Oliver said. "My contention is they are not arising spontaneously and these data support that," she said. "Who would have known asbestos was in these products?"

After the first results came in, the investigators repeated the tests and confirmed the findings. The types of asbestos found were fibrous actinolite and tremolite, both classified as carcinogens by several government agencies.

Concern about the safety of vermiculite was sparked by Seattle Post-Intelligencer stories in November about a now-closed W.R. Grace & Co. mine in Libby, Mont., where more than 300 miners and their family members contracted fatal diseases including asbestosis, cancer and mesothelioma because of their exposure to tremolite asbestos fibers in the vermiculite ore.

The EPA's results confirm similar tests of several brands of potting soil, soil enhancers and vermiculite conducted by the P-I from December through March as part of the newspaper's ongoing investigation of asbestos dangers in the United States. "We got numerous calls from citizens who had read about the deaths in Libby and asked if there was asbestos in garden products, will they be exposed to it and will they become sick from it," McDermott says. "Yes, there is asbestos in some of the products. And, yes, in using the product the way many people do, asbestos can be released.

Horticultural industry analysts estimate that at least 65 local, regional and national companies produce more then 375 lawn and garden products containing vermiculite. The world's largest vermiculite mine is in the northeastern corner of South Africa. Some U.S. companies buy it, but many say they purchase ore from the Grace mine in Enoree, S.C., or from Virginia Vermiculite's mines, owned by Robert Sansom, in Louisa, Va., and near Enoree.

Officials at the EPA regions responsible for Virginia and South Carolina said there was no indication that the agency had inspected any of the vermiculite mines in recent years. EPA studies on vermiculite mines were done in 1981, 1982 and 1991. The studies showed the presence of asbestos at Grace's Enoree mine, but at levels far lower than those at Libby.

"Asbestos is a toxic substance and if it's in commercial products, we have an obligation to look as far back as it takes, to get to the bottom of where it's coming from," says John Melone, EPA director of national programs, chemical division. "When that product leaves the mine, someone is putting it into commerce. Whoever that someone is, whether they own the mine or not, that person is responsible for knowing what is in the product. And we have a right to ask for that information."


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/ADD5A0C8A02AD67B86256C9C006CC522

White House budget office thwarts EPA warning on asbestos-laced insulation

BY ANDREW SCHNEIDER
Of the Post-Dispatch

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: TONS OF 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

By ROBERT MCCLURE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

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."


From: http://www.labournet.net/world/0201/asbest1.html

WTC asbestos horror from Montana vermiculite mine

Report by Andrew Schneider
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
First Published: 01/13/02

Mining town in Montana endured the horrors of disease from asbestos

LIBBY, Mont. Much of the asbestos-tainted vermiculite that spewed from the collapsing World Trade Center was dug from a mine in the Cabinet Mountains above this picturesque Kootenai River town. And in Libby, as in New York, environmental and health officials failed to disclose just how dangerous the mineral could be.

Miners digging vermiculite ore at the now-closed W. R. Grace Zonolite mine in Libby breathed dust containing asbestos fibers, then carried it home on their clothes to their wives and children. Trucks carrying the dust spread it throughout the town, and trains hauled the potentially lethal cargo to almost 300 towns across the nation. The company knew it was deadly. But it did not require miners to wear respirators. Federal and state officials knew the dangers, but they looked the other way. Until, that is, the death toll began to climb.

So far, hundreds of miners and their relatives have succumbed to the diseases caused by the asbestos fibers that painfully destroyed their lungs. Hundreds more are clinging to a torturous life, sucking air from portable oxygen bottles. And the federal government says its testing has found signs of the disease in thousands more who have been examined.

EPA and federal health investigators have been virtually living in this tiny town in the western corner of Montana just below the Canadian border since November 1999. Most arrived three days after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported the deaths and contamination. They have studied the way asbestos kills - up close and far too personal. Their findings make suspect many of the absolute statements the government is making in playing down the hazards those living in lower Manhattan face from asbestos.


From: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/54382_asbestos14.shtml

NYC under an asbestos cloud

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Monday, January 14, 2002
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
©2002 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Federal and state officials have grossly underestimated the number of people in lower Manhattan who are at risk of lethal asbestos-related disease because of the collapse of the World Trade Center, independent experts say. Evaluations by teams of leading asbestos researchers show the increased risk to people who live, work or study in homes or offices that have not been properly decontaminated could be as high as one additional cancer death for every 10 people exposed.

These figures come as leading government officials continue to insist that there is no long-term health risk to those living and working near ground zero from the dust of hundreds of thousands of tons of asbestos-containing products used in the floors, walls, ceilings and steel frame of the twin towers.

"I am glad to reassure New Yorkers ... that their air is safe," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Whitman said a week after the attacks.

When the World Trade Center went down, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rushed teams to the site. They have gathered thousands of samples of the dust that blanketed lower Manhattan, but they used 20-year-old methods for collecting and counting asbestos fibers to assess the health risks. The agencies and their state counterparts said only low levels of asbestos were found in the air outside. "The public faces little or no danger from asbestos," numerous agency heads echoed.

Civilian scientists and physicians hired by unions, tenant groups, contractors and New York political leaders found just the opposite. Taking hundreds of samples, many inside apartments, offices and condos, these experts used the newest electron microscope technology and fiber-counting protocols. They found far more asbestos fibers than did government investigators. These private experts -- all regularly used by the government as consultants -- found levels in the dwellings that alarmed many assessing the health risk faced by New Yorkers.

"If people continue living and working in places that still have dust in the carpets, furniture, drapes and heating and cooling system, these fibers will continue to be resuspended," Jenkins explained. "The elevated risk could be from around one in a thousand extra cancers to maybe as high as one in 10."

Four other federal health experts -- two toxicologists, an epidemiologist and a physician -- from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control, have studied the data gathered by Chatfield, Kominsky and a team headed by Hugh Granger of HP Environmental in Virginia. They agreed with Jenkins' interpretation of the data.


From: http://www.asbestosnetwork.com/news/nw_020102_nyc_wtc.htm

Asbestos Remains a Problem Near Trade Center

NEW YORK, NY February 1, 2002 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ombudsman Robert Martin recently opened an investigation into how the agency has handled air quality concerns in the World Trade Center area since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The study will concentrate on the type of testing performed and the EPA procedures for informing the public about levels of asbestos and other toxic substances.

Various testing laboratories hired by neighborhood tenants, labor groups, and contractors have found elevated levels of asbestos in apartments and offices, according to news sources (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 14, 2002; Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2002). However, EPA administrator Christie Whitman and many New York City officials have repeatedly assured Lower Manhattan residents that their community is safe. A senior EPA scientist, Cate Jenkins, thinks otherwise. The asbestos contamination in Lower Manhattan, up to seven blocks away from Ground Zero, is comparable or higher than that found in Libby, Montana, a designated Superfund site, she states in a recent report.


From: http://landofpuregold.com/truth38.htm

A Red Flag on Air Tests at WTC
By Juan Gonzalez, NY Daily News
March 21, 2002

In the days after Sept. 11, EPA officials used standards to determine dangerous asbestos contamination that were never intended to measure health risks, according to a new 43-page memo by a dissident Environmental Protection Agency scientist.

Cate Jenkins, a 22-year veteran with the agency's Hazardous Waste Identification Division in Washington, charged that the agency "misrepresented safety levels and standards for asbestos" and failed to accurately detect possible health risks to the public. Jenkins first criticized her agency's handling of the World Trade Center disaster in late November, arguing that EPA officials effectively "waived" federal asbestos guidelines by endorsing lenient cleanup methods.

In the days after Sept. 11, federal officials repeatedly referred to two "standards," one for asbestos in dust and debris and another for asbestos fibers in air. For dust and debris, the agency standard was 1% asbestos content. For air, it was usually 70 asbestos fibers per square millimeter of a testing filter. The "EPA has performed 62 dust sample analyses for the presence of asbestos and other substances. Most dust samples fall below EPA's definition of asbestos- containing material <1% asbestos," EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced Sept. 18.

Whitman was correct about one thing. Most dust samples were below the 1% standard, but a significant portion were not. Around 35% of those taken in the first few days were above 1%. But as Jenkins explains in her memo, federal regulations never meant the 1% figure to be considered a health standard or even to be applied to measure dust.

"She's absolutely correct, this is not a health-based standard," said Joel Shufrot, the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. "People exposed to 1% or less can have significant exposure with adverse health impacts," he said.


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Table of Contents


Subject Author Message Date ID
Whew! listenup Jan-17-03 1
WTC dust plaguepuppy 01/17/2003 2
you da' man, stickdog better2know Jan-17-03 3
stickdog has brought up some seemslikeadream Jan-20-03 4
Insider Trading... spooked 01/20/2003 5
Convenient fires plaguepuppy 01/20/2003 6
Of course insider trading seemslikeadream 01/21/2003 7
Here's some interesting stuff Stickdog Mr_SmokesTooMuch Jan-21-03 8
Asbestos problems - W.R. Grace plaguepuppy 01/21/2003 9
Bump. stickdog Mar-19-03 10



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Messages in this topic

listenup (1978 posts)
Jan-17-03, 08:32 PM (ET)
1. Whew!
long post, but this jumped out at me:
"The asbestos contamination in Lower Manhattan, up to seven blocks away from Ground Zero, is comparable or higher than that found in Libby, Montana, a designated Superfund site, she states in a recent report."

I wonder how many people in Lower Manhattan are aware of this.

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plaguepuppy (808 posts)
Jan-17-03, 09:19 PM (ET)
Reply to post #1
2. WTC dust
Juan González' book Fallout deals with the many toxics released in the WTC collapse, and the shameful dissimulations of the EPA and the mayor's office:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565847547/qid=1042856063/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-0366655-3037443


Plaguepuppy's Café

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better2know (125 posts)
Jan-17-03, 11:28 PM (ET)
3. you da' man, stickdog
let the original souces do the talking, with links!
thorough and sticking to the point
how do we get your voice(and voices like it) better heard?
go,go,go
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seemslikeadream (1381 posts)
Jan-20-03, 10:15 AM (ET)
4. stickdog has brought up some
extremely interesting stuff and I don't think enough people have put 2 and 2 together yet on all this info, maybe you have I haven't read everything. Just think of these coinsidences. Paul Wellstone and Murry's bill in the Senate that went no where. 3 WR Grace employees that died in that plane crash(what info were they holding in their minds and paper), EPA told by White House not to reveal how asbestos is EVERYWHERE! Do you think bush wanted to let it be known how much cancer causing stuff was in the Towers. Was the rubble sent to an EPA regulated dump? What would be the result for WR Grace if it was generally known that the Towers had to be demolished because they were full of cancer causing asbestos. What cost would that be, how would they do it? I think we're looking in the wrong direction with Wellstone's murder. Please read about this in GD under same post headline and comment before it goes into the archieves.

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spooked (38 posts)
Jan-20-03, 10:30 PM (ET)
Reply to post #4
5. Insider Trading...
I was just reading on another thread the list of companies that the SEC wanted to investigate for insider trading prior to 911.
W.R. Grace & Company is on the list!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID43/5478.html
(post #3)

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plaguepuppy (808 posts)
Jan-20-03, 11:29 PM (ET)
Reply to post #5
6. Convenient fires
Oddly enough when building 7 caught fire (several hours after sustaining minimal damage from the WTC-1 collapse) it was floors 11-13, housing the SEC, that burned first and most thoroughly.
The FEMA report details this ( http://www.house.gov/science/hot/wtc/wtc-report/WTC_ch5.pdf ) There was also fire damage on floors 7-8, home of American Express Bank International, and on floor 28, the bottom-most of Salomon Smith Barney's block of 17 floors. Until not long before the collapse, almost 7 hours later, the fire damage seems to have been confined to this oddly localized pattern.

Image

Fires on floors 11 and 12 of WTC-7, from chapter 5 of FEMA report


New York authorities' decision to ship the twin towers' scrap to recyclers has raised the anger of victims' families and some engineers who believe the massive girders should be further examined to help determine how the towers collapsed. But New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg insisted there are better ways to study the tragedy of September 11. "If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do," said Bloomberg, a former engineering major. "Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything."
From Eastday.com, 1/24/02 http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Jan/25776.htm

Plaguepuppy's Café

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seemslikeadream (1381 posts)
Jan-21-03, 06:07 AM (ET)
Reply to post #5
7. Of course insider trading
LAST EDITED ON Jan-21-03 AT 06:08 AM (ET)
Follow the money WR Grace had the most to gain of anyone if those towers came down! They are soon to be discovered as the worse pollluters on the face of the earth! They are soon to be discovered as being responsible for giving almost everyone in America greater risk for cancer! What would you do if faced with the possibility of being finiancially responsible for removing all that asbostos. Maybe have to silence someone before he blew the lid on all of this. Maybe have to silence some employees who knew too much. SMALL PLANE CRASHES! THEY ARE MASTERS AT IT! Maybe big plane crashes too! Thanks spooked I am too!

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Mr_SmokesTooMuch (3942 posts)
Jan-21-03, 09:10 AM (ET)
8. Here's some interesting stuff Stickdog
Of course, jsut becasue they have this doesnt mean they used it on Wellstone, right?
I mean, sure, he'd steal the White House, but murder?

</disgust with American people>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2679835.stm

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plaguepuppy (808 posts)
Jan-21-03, 10:33 AM (ET)
Reply to post #8
9. Asbestos problems - W.R. Grace
... and of course Haliburton.
Yes, I hear that these EM pulse weapons already exist as "shoulder launch" things the size of a small rocket launcher. Could account for the way Wellstone's plane lost control and voice contact at the same time.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=5471&forum=DCForumID43

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3. seemslikeadream

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
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