Whistleblowers expose corruption in EPA Chemical Safety Office | Hacker News Reader

Whistleblowers expose corruption in EPA Chemical Safety Office

theintercept.com

253 pointsvoisin62 comments

My little girl was born with really rare heart disease and a genetic condition, a boy a few streets behind us developed a really rare cancer.

- https://kingsley.sh/posts/2021/staggering-cost-of-surviving-...

- https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/18/us/ben-watkins-masterchef/ind...

This comes a year or so after a ArcelorMittal spilled ammonia and cyanide into Lake Michigan, and didn't sound the alarm for a few days. My wife and I were swimming in it during those days, and not to mention we live down wind from many other steel processing plants, oil refineries, mills of other descriptions, etc. https://elpc.org/projects/suing-lake-michigan-polluter-arcel...

I think during the early pandemic, EPA reporting restrictions were lowered? Given the shoddy response from the 2019 spill, I lost hope that any future spill would be reported, unless many fish/wildlife were also killed and spotted. https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation...

I run an air quality sensor: https://millerbeach.community and hoping to upgrade the sensor to track more pollutants. I'd love to test water quality of Lake Michigan, too. It's stuff like this that make me realise I'm doing a community service running my sensor.

I am sorry to hear about the personal impact to your family.

I think things like the air quality sensor you run are the actual solution here. In the absence of government officials doing their job properly, it is up to individuals to do it for themselves.

I wonder if there would be an open source solution for water quality testing and air quality testing, and if enough could be built by citizen hackers to create a distributed screen and alert system for pollutants.

Thank you, I appreciate it. I can only bring awareness to it, one man vs mega polluters is an impossible fight.

I live a stone's throw from the Lake Michigan shoreline, and would happily go out there daily to get a water sample, before my normal 9-5. If anyone is interested in hacking something together.

The air sensor I run is open source, for anyone interested.

The air sensor you use is PurpleAir, right? I found a sensor evaluation kit ZMOD4510-EVK-HC that has nitrogen dioxide and ozone sensors in it for around $112.

I like PurpleAir's crowdsourced air quality map[1]. Their sensors are one of the few that get down to the .3 micrometer level.

[1]https://www.purpleair.com/map

I agree! I love their open API, too!

I'm in the process of creating a 501c, and as part of my mission to raise awareness, I'm going to purchase 5-10 PurpleAir II and have them across Lake Michigan's entire shoreline. Or, that's part of my plan.

Ideally I'd run a more extensive sensor that tracks more than just PM, but I have a feeling pollution varies a lot in a small distance, we get lake effect weather, but what about people 5-10 miles south of me, do they have it better/worse, etc. I'd love to know those questions, and PurpleAir makes it semi affordable

The Purple Air network and their map is great. Each has two Plantower PMS5003 sensors for redundancy or accuracy. However, you can purchase the Plantower sensors yourself at about $15/unit, which could help with the costs when you're trying to roll out a lot of them.

If you used the Plantower PMS5003 sensor by itself how would you be able to distribute the data? PurpleAir has arrangement with government to have their data added to official measurements and can be seen on https://fire.airnow.gov

Purple Air already has pretty good coverage of Lake Michigan[1].

They also have good coverage in my area, but when wildfire smoke was bad in CA last year I spread out four PM2.5 sensors outside and two inside using Home Assistant/ESPHome. They respond to conditions very quickly, and I could see waves of smoke pass through.

Why does that matter? Keeping everything closed up and using an air purifier really improves the indoor air quality, but it also gets oppressive when you never exchange any fresh air. The nearest Purple Air sensor is 2000ft away on the other side of a hill. At times it might be an equivalent 80 AQI here and 200 AQI there or vice versa. It was convenient to know when opening a window to let out some stale air brought in less new smoke to have to filter.

A DIY approach isn't just cheaper, it allows the addition of other types of sensors like NO2, SO2 and ozone, and it makes fine-grained data collection affordable. Kingsloi expressed an interest in monitoring other pollutants in addition to PM2.5/PM10. In my particular case it is adding NDIR CO2 sensor inside.

All of these sensors have a limited life span. The $250 PurpleAir PA-II has a 1 year warranty. Even though it is likely to last a lot longer than that, it is a pretty large markup over $40 per setup, especially if Kingsloi's needs include other pollutant sensors. The Purple Air network is an advantage, but a nonprofit started by Kingsloi could partner with air quality organizations in Michigan or Illinois, too.

[1] https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/m/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#6.34/43...

Is there something similar where you buy the separate parts yourself and put it together? 280 usd is quite steep.

> In the absence of government officials doing their job properly, it is up to individuals to do it for themselves.

I agree, I just wish the government would also not take my money to not do the job. Worse still is the false sense of safety instilled in the populace.

>"In the absence of government officials doing their job properly, it is up to individuals to do it for themselves."

Does 'it' include seizing the means of pollution and dismantling them brick by brick? Otherwise you'll be in same situation as my town in Russia, where everyone knowns about a polluting zink refunery upwind, and it's still giving thousands of people cancer.

I feel like in the US, public pressure can result in action against corporations that are killing people. The government has the legal framework to bring these types of cases, but may not always find every case on its own. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.

It's not the case. Dupont poisoned thousands in WV and it took decades to punish them. Currently thousands of people are poisoned by pig feces, and there are no repercussions.

In Japan after 3/11 there was a citizen movement to track radiation because the govenment data, and collection was questionable. Im not.sure of the details, but the govt hit back pretty hard, and even introduced new official secrets legislation.

How did you set up that air quality sensor? Can you post a link to it?

Why are the various 'manager' names carefully avoided in this sort of reporting? Many other names, including the whistleblowers, are prominently offered. What rule is the Intercept complying with that has them bleep out (thus we known these names are known) the name of a manager in the audio and assiduously omit any manager names in the writing?

Names would reveal relationships. Doubtless these managers are former or prospective Dow employees, or related or have some other pedigree of corruption. That's how all of this works. Failure to name names contributes to the problem.

But if you steal a tin of catfood your name will be in the newspapers for the whole world to read and google three decades later.

Same thing applies for dumping ammonia and cyanide in say Lake Michigan, you or I would get charged with water supply terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_terrorism, but do it as part of the steel process and it's a magical loop hole

Typically only once you’ve been arrested.

Well that wasn't the case with cops in last year's protest. Sometimes the names need to come first so the public can insist on the crimes being acknowledged.

Probably trying to avoid libel since nothing has been proven in court.

Truth is an absolute defense to libel in the US. Furthermore because this is the sort of reporting on a matter of public concern that society benefits from the standard gets tighter: it's not enough to show something was false, you have to show the publication should have known or acted maliciously in publishing. Incredibly high bar.

Truth or (as you point out) ignorance. Which is different from the UK and a lot of other countries.

But the practical question is: can The Intercept afford a legal fight against Dow?

They likely have insurance for that sort of thing. I produce content for Youtube and even I have a media liability policy.

How much does that cost and how is it priced?

Yeah, but you still have to defend it in court, and that's an expensive distraction.

There is currently a bit of a rash of high-profile, low-probability-of-success libels suits going on. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if publishers are being especially cautious.

Cowardice then.

The super strong libel immunity only kicks in for public figures. These random managers probably aren't. So negligence is the bar for liability, not the Actual Malice of NYT v. Sullivan.

I don’t know my jurisprudence very well, but as I recall a government employee acting in an official capacity is a public figure by default.

> Why are the various 'manager' names carefully avoided in this sort of reporting? Many other names, including the whistleblowers, are prominently offered.

I assume that the whistleblowers quoted spoke directly with the reporter while the managers did not.

Usually a paper will say “we asked the manager for comment but they did not respond”. Who knows if the Intercept even did that?

I agree 100%. If I were one of these scientists, my manager's name would be leaked onto social media by some anonymous account and that internet angst would be put to good use. Crimes of corruption that lead to birth defects in babies for the sake of corporate profits are so outrageous that having to answer in the public square for it is befitting.

I try not to get emotional, but part of me thinks if death penalty were applicable to such crimes it would be an extraordinarily pragmatic decision. The history of chemicals damaging American lives due to corruption is long and sordid. Many of these chemicals, if improperly classified, can ruin an order of magnitude more lives than any serial killer.

It can be rather shocking and disturbing to remind oneself exactly how fragile our bodies are to even the tiniest amounts of certain chemicals, particularly in vitro.

I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty and to punitive prison sentences in general, but I do feel like there needs to be some kind of extra harsh treatment for people who do things like this. I'm honestly at a loss for what it might be. Maybe public humiliation, or exile?

mass poisoning is psychopath territory. Take the people responsible and throw them in mental hospitals to be evaluated and hopefully treated. It's that or prison. In any case they need to be kept away from the rest of society because they've already demonstrated that they'll hurt large numbers of people in monstrous ways just to satisfy their own greed. I'm not at all interested in vengeance. I think it's tragic to have to keep some people locked up, but the public needs to be protected from people like that.

I agree with most of your comment around harsher punishments for corruption, especially when it involves public health in this manner. Not sure a death penalty will solve anything though.

> The history of chemicals damaging American lives due to corruption is long and sordid.

Is there a reason you specifically called out “American” lives here? Is it that you believe the perpetrators aren’t American somehow? Or that, when American companies harm the public in other countries, it doesn’t matter? Would really like to know more.

It won't be a vaccine that makes you sterile. It will be one of the chemicals that end up everywhere because of corruption at the only agency that would protect us.

This is also why those people for a unregulated free market are insane. Sure the company pedaling the dangerous chemical will eventual go out of business. But how many people will die and suffer and does anyone think that the people responsible will still around the decades later until the crime is found out?

All new chemicals should be assumed dangerous and require rigorous safety studies and we need to make absolutely sure these studies are independent.

Pumping millions of gallons of corexit into an oil spill should not be permitted if the ingredients are a trade secret. We need to know what goes where, same goes for chemicals used in fracking.

New chemicals save lives as well, they may be safer than existing alternatives or enable safer processes to be used or they may enable some new technology that saves lives (there is almost unlimited potential here, few areas of technological advancement are as wide impacting as improvements to materials).

It sounds like you are advocating for the precautionary principle, but what do you think about the counterargument that by blocking technological improvements before actually investigating their risk you could be doing more harm than you prevent.

> Strong formulations of the precautionary principle... when applied to the principle itself as a policy decision, beats its own purpose of reducing risk. The reason suggested is that preventing innovation from coming to market means that only current technology may be used, and current technology itself may cause harm or leave needs unmet; there is a risk of causing harm by blocking innovation. As Michael Crichton wrote in his novel State of Fear: "The 'precautionary principle', properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle."

> For example, forbidding nuclear power plants based on concerns about low-probability high-impact risks means continuing to rely on power plants that burn fossil fuels, which continue to release greenhouse gases and thousands of certain deaths from air pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#Intern...

I'd never heard of the precautionary principle before, but the way you explain it is just circular reasoning used to straw man it as nefarious. Arguing for validation is not arguing to ban innovation - we just need some actual accountability (and ideally transparency) included in the process. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, whereas the article points out we are straight-up falsifying documents in order to push sales for chemical corporations.

What's the harm in actually knowing scientific data about the chemicals we're buying?

The harm that parent alludes to is that in toxicity studies you only know it doesn't cause cancer after 30 years of exposure... after 30 years.

Those studies are incredibly expensive, and are the reason so many chemical companies merged.

>by blocking technological improvements before actually investigating their risk

How is not doing this not an obvious recipe for doom. The only ridiculous thing here is you have stated this as a binary instead of a continuum.

If you allow the sale & use of new chemicals before they are proven to be safe, you don’t just run the risk of them eventually turning out to be unsafe. You also remove all incentives to actually investigate their safety.

We’ve also found most of the low-hanging fruits of material science. Can you think of a single new chemical that came out in the last decade or two that is worth the risk of something like, say, Teflon seeing widespread use and then being shown to be carcinogenic?

…and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is his pseudoscientific turn to the dark side, a wild recounting of dozens of superficial arguments trying to proof that climate change isn’t real, years after they had been disproven.

Yes and:

The Andromeda Strain [1969] predates State of Fear [2004].

Jill Lepore's sympathetic take is the Vietnam War, MKULTRA, and other US Govt scandals broke Crichton.

https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr...

My opinion of Crichton is much harsher. Probably the nicest thing I could say about him is he made a lot of money sowing fear and mistrust.

Do you release products without testing them? That's the precautionary principle.

>New chemicals save lives as well [...] what do you think about the counterargument that by blocking technological improvements before actually investigating their risk you could be doing more harm than you prevent.

What about chemicals that are relentlessly studied, but for some reason can't seem to be regulated at all? Try reading a little about PFAS, darling wonderchemical of DuPont, which is in everything from takeout containers to furniture to dental floss, will never break down in the environment, and causes everything from low birth weight to decreased penis size to cancer. [0]

This is preventable harm, but note how this awful chemical is regulated by no one, and can barely be tested for. Oh, wait, they're going to regula--

"Amid growing public concern, the EPA announced in February it would begin the process of regulating PFOA and PFAS in the next two years (these regulations, if issued, would not apply to other PFAS chemicals)." [0]

Look at how incredibly difficult it is to prevent the blanketing of the world with PFAS, and how toothless the too-late regulation of it -- and not its structural analogues -- will be. The only entities seemingly capable of new chemistry are utterly disinterested with the consequences, and the impotent regulators won't force them to care: it's insane to support new chemical development. It's going to be poison.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/pfas-everyda...

> This is also why those people for a unregulated free market are insane.

Unfair tangent, because if it was a truly free market, the government wouldn't hold a monopoly on violence.

People and their arguments pushing for less regulation still surprise me. It's a bad idea yet someone will rise from the depths to argue why it isn't.

What doesn't surprise me is there's always someone with a counter argument no matter how illogical it is. The world's a big place.

I’m willing to bet it will be one of the chemicals introduced to public water by your local utility company.

I don’t understand what’s in it for the people pushing for these approvals. Are they getting kickbacks?

Jobs, google "Regulatory capture"

There is intense pressure to please big corporate interests. I see it in my field often. I have no idea where it comes from. I think maybe fear of the power big corporates have? Fear that their higher ups won’t protect them?

At the highest level, the revolving door and cushy "retirement jobs" in industry.

And once you have the bosses in your pocket, they exert pressure down the chain.

Middle management isn't getting the real pressure, but their bosses are breathing fire down their necks, telling them expectations.

I always assumed it was the dark corollary of trickle down economics, and one of the few places it works. You throw a bunch of money at a higher up, and the pressure flows downhill. Just like something else that flows downhill that we're all aware of.

Eventually you end up with a system where there's a buffer of a few layers between the people benefitting and the people actually signing off on something, and after a while it's not explicit as much as "a feeling I got that my managers expected this to go through."

> I have no idea where it comes from.

One reason could be that company provides jobs so a politician can say he/she brought jobs to the area.

This is so tragic, and just wrong. Actively changing scientist's recommendations and assessments because a company "balked" at the very standards and methods that are designed to keep it and its environment safe? This is the very reason the EPA was created to begin with, so this kind of stuff does not happen. That's so fucking sad that it's not only happening on their watch, but from inside the EPA itself. Such a tragedy...And to the commenter who said it had to do with Trump, no this had nothing to do with Trump. While Trump did make many unusual, business-focused appointees for department heads, the issue of corruption is as old as human institutions themselves. I'd only hoped the robust institutions in the states wouldn't so blatantly fall prey to this kind of bogus horseshit. Trying to shift the convo to Trump or suggest this is actually orange man bad's fault is actively harmful to a fruitful discussion about this, because it provides active cover for the real perpetrators. But sure, keeping pointing the finger of blame at Trump for everything while the real perps slip right through your other fingers, chump.

Do they mention which chemicals were involved?

There should be manslaughter charges here.

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