Washington Gas Starts To Pay The Piper

Washington Gas to clean Anacostia riverbank under new agreement

By Darryl Fears, Published: December 12

Washington Gas Light Co. has agreed to clean a section of land along the Anacostia River that it contaminated with harmful chemicals for more than a century, federal officials announced Monday.

As part of an agreement involving the utility, the U.S. Interior Department and the D.C. government, Washington Gas will also pay for a comprehensive investigation of toxic contamination of soil and groundwater on the site. It will repay nearly $1 million to federal agencies for investigations that revealed how badly the river was fouled where the company once processed gas.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the agreement “a milestone in our efforts . . . to transform what was once known as America’s forgotten river into a model urban park.” A walkway is slated to traverse the area once when the work is done.

But the Anacostia Watershed Society said much is unknown about the agreement, including its cost and how the utility will be held accountable for its work. “How much they’re committing is really unclear at this point,” said Brent Bolin, director of advocacy for AWS.

A Washington Gas spokesman said contaminated soil will be removed and replaced with clean soil over four acres. The spokesman, Reuben Rodriguez, declined to give an estimate of the cleanup cost.

For 60 years, from 1888 to 1948, the utility manufactured gas feed stocks at a facility along Water Street SE, just upstream from the 11th Street Bridge on the river. Waste created by the gasification process contained harmful organic compounds such as benzene, cyanide, arsenic and other contaminants such as tar, coal and coke.

The company continued to use the “East Station” site intermittently until it was closed in 1983 and demolished in 1986. Between that time and 1999, six major federal environmental investigations were performed at the site.

“This has been a cleanup 100 years in the making,” Bolin said. “These are known carcinogens. They are an exposure risk for people who fish, people who boat, people who row.”

The Anacostia River was called “one of the most polluted waterways in the nation” in a May report by the advocacy group DC Appleseed.

With its low flows, the Anacostia cannot easily flush pollutants, many of which come from combined sewage runoff and from chemical waste from the Navy Yard, according to the report. It called on the federal government, as one of the river’s biggest polluters, to take a larger role in the cleanup.

Despite of a 2006 federal decision that called for a cleanup amid hiking trails, yacht clubs and a fishery, work was never completed, Bolin said. AWS filed a suit in August to compel the utility and federal government to act. “You couldn’t get the federal government to care about this issue until the Obama administration,” Bolin said.

The city has been acquiring land nearby with an eye on its Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, a vision for recreational, residential and commercial development along the river.

“This settlement is a major step forward in restoring this vibrant river . . . [and] protecting habitat and wildlife,” Salazar said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/washington-gas-to-clean-anacostia-riverbank-under-new-agreement/2011/12/12/gIQAc0ihqO_story.html

Curb Alert: Illegal Dumping of Toxic Waste

Somebody left a TV in the tree box of a house near mine. I left the following note on it:

TO WHOEVER LEFT THIS TV HERE:

PLEASE REMOVE IT!!! It is illegal dumping – littering.

Take responsibility for your own garbage! If it works there are countless ways to get it to someone who wants an old tv. This TV has 5+ lbs of lead in it – before someone breaks it and spreads toxic waste, REMOVE IT!!!!

And be glad you didn’t get a ticket for illegal dumping!!!!!!!!

Called DC 311, #237552 is the number they gave me - we will see who gets it first - the Public Works Department crew or someone who breaks it.

Paper Trail Missing

Maryland lab destroys documention on lead poisoning of children

By Timothy B. Wheeler, Sunday, March 13, 6:37 PM

Maryland’s health secretary said Friday that his department’s laboratory has destroyed test results dating to the 1980s documenting lead poisoning of Maryland children — potentially thousands of records that plaintiffs’ lawyers say are crucial to pursuing lawsuits seeking damages on behalf of poisoned children and their families.

Joshua Sharfstein said he has asked for an investigation of how the destruction of records happened, replaced the lab’s director and ordered that efforts be made to recover whatever test results might have been deleted from state computer files.

“We regret this, and we’re going to do everything possible to make it right,” Sharfstein said in a phone interview.

Doctors and health clinics have been required since the 1980s to report to the state health department results of tests showing that children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can cause lasting learning and behavioral problems in even tiny doses.

The department has maintained those test results for years and provided them on request to people who had been tested, their parents or their attorneys. Scott E. Nevin, a lawyer with the firm Peter T. Nicholl, called the records “critical” to the hundreds of lead-poisoning cases that his office and other firms have pending or are preparing.

“If in fact the records are permanently gone,” Nevin said, “it will just make it impossible for some citizens in Baltimore to pursue cases.”

The revelation comes more than a week after the Baltimore Sun had reported that the Baltimore City Health Department had lost federal lead abatement money for failing to meet treatment targets.

Sharfstein, who took over leadership of the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in January, said he learned of the destruction of records recently and has acted promptly to halt the practice and restore any results that can be restored.

“We are not destroying any more records. We are preserving records. We are going back and reconstructing databases,” he said, and “doing everything possible” to find and replace the lost test results.

John DeBoy, the lab director for the past 7¹ / ₂ years, has been removed from his position and placed on “administrative status,” Sharfstein said, pending the outcome of an investigation the secretary has requested of the health department’s inspector general. DeBoy did not reply to an e-mail or phone messages left at his home.

DeBoy, who has been with the state health department for 27 years, received the Gold Standard Award for Public Health Laboratory Excellence in 2007 from the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

The lab’s deputy director, Robert A. Myers, was named acting director Tuesday, Sharfstein said.

Sharfstein said he found out about the practice after being told that lawyers specializing in lead-poisoning lawsuits had filed a petition in Baltimore Circuit Court seeking a restraining order barring his department from destroying any more children’s test results. He said he had met with some of those lawyers and pledged to do what he can to remedy the loss of records.

“Regardless of whether the department has a legal obligation to maintain these records, we intend to do so,” the health secretary wrote in a letter to lawyers handling lead-poisoning cases.

The petition for a restraining order was filed by Brian Brown, a lawyer with Saul E. Kerpelman & Associates, a firm that specializes in lead-poisoning cases. Since then, Nevin’s firm and another handling lead-poisoning cases have filed to join in the request for a restraining order. A hearing is scheduled Monday.

— Baltimore Sun

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/maryland-lab-destroys-documentation-on-lead-poisoning-of-children/2011/03/13/ABaFo8T_story.html

Why I Buy Drinking Water In 5 Gallon Bottles

People have asked me why I do not always subscribe to the CDC's version of things - here is an example -



CDC misled District residents about lead levels in water, House probe finds

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 20, 2010; A01

The nation's premier public health agency knowingly used flawed data to claim that high lead levels in the District's drinking water did not pose a health risk to the public, a congressional investigation has found. And, investigators determined, the agency has not publicized more thorough internal research showing that the problem harmed children across the city and continues to endanger thousands of D.C. residents.

A House investigative subcommittee concludes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made "scientifically indefensible" claims in 2004 that high lead in the water was not causing noticeable harm to the health of city residents. As terrified District parents demanded explanations for the spike in lead in their water, the CDC hurriedly published its calming analysis, knowing that it relied on incomplete, misleading blood-test results that played down the potential health impact, the investigation found.

The city utility says lead levels have been in the safe range in D.C. water since 2006, after a chemical change to reduce lead leaching. But the House report raises concerns about children in 9,100 residences throughout the city with partial lead-pipe replacements. Their parents may not know CDC research has found that children in such homes are four times as likely to have elevated lead in their blood.

The House science and technology subcommittee investigation, scheduled to be released Thursday, was spurred last year by one scientist's research and Washington Post reporting suggesting that the 2004 CDC analysis was missing many test results for children who might have lead poisoning. With its final report, the committee reveals that the missing data showed clear harm to children from the water -- and that CDC authors knew the data was flawed. It finds that CDC officials "failed in their public health duty."

Pediatric lead experts advise concerned parents to monitor their children's behavior to determine whether they have noticed coordination, hearing or mental-focus problems or changes. Parents who witness such changes should have their children's blood tested for lead.

Late Wednesday, the CDC declined to directly rebut the House investigators' findings. Instead, it released a brief re-analysis based on the missing tests, which it said confirms the original 2004 findings that residents did not suffer significant harm.

The agency acknowledged, however, that its 2004 claim that no children had been found with lead poisoning was "misleading," because it referred to only one part of its study. Another part showed that children living in homes serviced by a lead pipes were more than twice as likely as other D.C. children to have unsafe lead in their blood.

Yanna Lambrinidou, head of a parents' activist group that formed in the lead crisis, said the CDC, the city water utility, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the D.C. Health Department knew that lead was spiking in the water but did little to fix it or warn the public.

"CDC gave the perpetrators of D.C.'s lead crisis a 'get out of jail free' card," Lambrinidou said. "They will finally have to answer for what they did."

When nearly 1 million residents throughout the District and in small parts of Falls Church and Arlington learned from a Post article in January 2004 that they had been exposed to unsafe lead in water for at least a year, the CDC analysis was largely used to quiet public anger. The study has since been cited as evidence that even astronomically high lead levels are not cause for concern.

Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the subcommittee chairman, said the CDC report "left the public health community with the dangerous and wrong impression that lead-contaminated water is safe for children to drink."

Lead is a toxic metal long known to cause brain damage and developmental delays in fetuses and children when they or their pregnant mothers ingest significant amounts.

Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech scientist who early on questioned the paper, said it's time for the CDC to retract its findings and for the senior author of the 2004 report, Mary Jean Brown, to resign.

The House subcommittee's investigation also chides the CDC for not alerting the public to its subsequent research that contradicted its earlier claims. This 2007 research determined a clear link between the water problem and lead poisoning in D.C. children. For example, it showed that city children with high levels of lead in their blood were significantly more likely to live in homes with lead pipes, and after the city fixed its water treatment problem, the CDC saw a "dramatic reduction" in lead poisoning.

The committee also urged release of this research to alert residents to a continuing, lurking threat in the estimated 9,100 D.C. homes where water utility crews replaced part of the lead service pipe bringing water to the house. The CDC study concluded that the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority's $93 million effort to reduce lead risks after the 2004 lead crisis had largely backfired: Children living in homes with partial lead pipe replacements were four times as likely to suffer from unsafe levels of lead as those in homes without lead pipes.

The House science subcommittee reserves its strongest criticisms for Brown, the CDC's director of lead poisoning prevention. She worked with D.C. health officials to review blood-test results and frame the CDC's response. Brown led a team in publishing the conclusion that the lead problem wasn't having a serious health impact.

But the committee said it found evidence that Brown knew that the D.C. Health Department data was missing thousands of blood-test results in a critical period of the lead crisis. She told investigators that she believed all the missing data was for low blood-lead levels, but she never tried to obtain the original results to check.

The committee did go back to the labs for the original test results for 2002-03 and learned that three times as many children had elevated lead levels as reported, 954 instead of 315. This means child lead poisoning was rising, not falling or staying the same, as the CDC had claimed.

In one part of the 2004 report, the CDC paper analyzed the blood of children and adults living with lead levels in their tap water 20 times the amount raising concern -- and said not one was suffering from elevated lead. Brown and her co-authors knew, however, that most of those tested had been drinking bottled or filtered water before their blood was analyzed.

A public health expert and co-author suggested to Brown in an e-mail that the report mention this factor because "this may help to explain why currently none of the persons have blood lead levels above the level of concern." It was never mentioned.

Brown acknowledged to investigators that she "didn't have a lot of confidence" in the results but didn't delay the report's release because many federal agencies were pushing the CDC to publish.

In internal e-mails at the time, Brown expressed pleasure that the drumbeat of media reports was easing. "Today has been the first day in over a month that there wasn't a story on lead in water in the Washington Post and also the first that I haven't been interviewed by at least one news outlet," Brown wrote to her boss. "I guess that means it worked!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/19/AR2010051902599.html?hpid=moreheads

More D.C. Kids Had Elevated Lead Than Stated

Unacceptable Science & Anecdotal Evidence



Following is a report on inaccuracies in reports by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the DC Department of Health about elevated lead levels in DC children.
The following quote from John Rosen, a pediatric expert on lead and the head of the lead-poisoning prevention program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, is of particular interest to me - "This is unacceptable science, and it's unacceptable public health, and the losers are the children who may suffer a lifetime from elevated lead exposure". I appreciate his use of the phrase "unacceptable science", a very serious charge against the preeminent government health agency.
I don't totally ignore what I am told by the CDC but the examples in this article are among other examples of why I am slightly skeptical of much of what the CDC says. I note that this year in an information packet about lice distributed by our daughter's public school, for the first time in my eight years involvement with the school, information was included about lice treatment beyond the previously standard reference to the CDC web page which directs parents to put some fairly hazardous pesticides on the child's head. I have spoken to the school nurse a number of times about our successful use of mayonnaise and oil instead of the over the counter and prescription pesticides that are recommended by the CDC. The reference to mayo and oil use is prefaced by something like "some people report that they have used the following.....", "...but cannot substantiate results......". Not the first time someone has told me that my science wasn't "top notch" but at least I have never been of accused of "unacceptable science"! And glad to see the school finally acknowledge other methods than heavy chem.

More D.C. Kids Had Elevated Lead Than Stated By Carol D. Leonnig Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 4, 2009 More than twice as many D.C. children as previously reported by federal and local health officials had high levels of lead in their blood amid the city's drinking water crisis, according to congressional investigators, throwing into doubt assurances by those officials that the lead in tap water did not seriously harm city children. The new information was uncovered by a House subcommittee investigating the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's performance and has raised congressional concern about whether the agency properly alerted District residents to a health risk from unprecedented levels of lead in the water. Local officials could not say Monday whether some children with unsafe lead exposure have gone without intervention to reduce health risks. The CDC and city health department had reported dangerously high lead levels in 193 children in 2003, the worst year for high concentrations of lead in city tap water. But lab data gathered by congressional investigators this year show that the actual number was 486 children. The subcommittee's investigators uncovered the higher figures by seeking the data directly from all D.C. labs that analyze local test results. After the lead problem became public in 2004, blood tests from thousands of city children taken in 2003 were inexplicably missing from D.C. government files. Using the partial data, the CDC, the nation's leading public health agency, and the D.C. Department of Health published a paper reporting that they were not finding a significant increase in children with dangerous lead levels. "There is no indication that DC residents have blood lead levels above the CDC levels of concern," Mary Jean Brown, the CDC's top lead poisoning prevention official, wrote in a summary of her paper. She wrote the report with the Department of Health in March 2004 after residents and Congress learned about the lead problem. Brown stressed at the time that from 2001 to 2004, blood lead levels among the city's children and adults were generally dropping as levels in the city's water were rising. The 2003 data on blood tests for children were considered critical in measuring whether a widespread spike in lead in the city's drinking water had harmed children's health. That year, the city found tens of thousands of city homes with elevated lead in the water. It was not until 2004 that the public was alerted to the problem and many residents began protecting themselves and their children by switching to filtered or bottled water. Since then, the city has changed its water treatment. Lead levels have fallen and are at historical lows. Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), chairman of the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, which is conducting the inquiry, said the new findings raise questions about the CDC's performance. "Parents thought that they didn't have to worry about lead in their children's drinking water because they trusted CDC," Miller said. "The CDC can't lend their credibility simply to assure the public that there is nothing to worry about. If they say everything is fine, then everything better really be fine." In letters sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on Monday evening, Miller requested more agency documents. He said the CDC should have known it had "wildly incomplete" data when it published research that "suggested there was no danger to children and the public from elevated lead levels in the water." "The disparity in the numbers reported by the CDC and the data obtained by the subcommittee is extraordinarily disturbing," Miller wrote, adding that the missing data "should have set off warning bells that the CDC could not rely on the numbers being provided for public health statements." In a written statement, CDC officials declined to comment on the new data, saying they had not seen it. Fenty's office released a statement saying: "The Administration looks forward to receiving the findings of the congressional investigation related to the 2003 lead reporting between DOH and the CDC and, once reviewed, we will use its findings to better serve D.C. residents." Recent research at Children's National Medical Center indicates that children who lived in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of lead in the water -- Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights and northern sections of Ward 4 -- were much more likely to have elevated lead in their bloodstream. Blood test results are collected when doctors and labs report the results to the city health department, which monitors children to try to reduce their exposure to lead. Fetuses and children younger than 6 are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure, and high levels can cause a permanent loss in IQ, motor coordination and the ability to communicate. In 2001 and 2002, the health department had collected results from 16,042 children and 15,755 children, respectively. But in 2003, results from only 9,229 children were on file with the department. After the lead problem was reported in January 2004, Brown and her deputies from the CDC questioned city health officials about why they had fewer tests. They responded that some labs did not report test results of low lead levels. Brown told The Washington Post this year that she believed that the missing data would probably not affect the findings in her paper because they did not involve high lead readings. On Monday, CDC officials said that Brown did not ask for the data because labs are required to report to the District. "CDC has no authority to require that laboratories report directly to it," according to the CDC statement. John Rosen, a pediatric expert on lead and the head of the lead-poisoning prevention program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, expressed surprise that officials drew conclusions based on data they knew was incomplete and did not seek the missing data from the labs. "This is unacceptable science, and it's unacceptable public health, and the losers are the children who may suffer a lifetime from elevated lead exposure," he said. The 2003 test results suggested that the incidence of dangerous lead exposure was falling in the District, a decline cited in a George Washington University paper. William Walker, the chairman of the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority board, said that he could not comment about data he had not seen or how health agencies performed in 2003 but that he is eager to learn more about the House panel's findings. "If this is true -- that there are a lot more kids with elevated lead -- it's of great concern to us," Walker said. "We're going to look at the data and see what the committee comes out with in their investigation and respond accordingly."