Trump officials thwarted EPA action on cancer-causing gas, report says
On August 22, 2018, the citizens of Willowbrook, Illinois, had just one hour to learn that local EPA officials were investigating high levels of a toxic gas in the neighborhoods near their homes.
Then those officials, who were staffers in the EPA’s Region 5 office, got a call from their bosses in D.C. with an order: Take down the webpage on the investigation.
When the page was eventually reposted, key parts had been removed, including important context about a facility run by the company Sterigenics that used the chemical ethylene oxide to sterilize disposable medical equipment and other goods.
Also removed were details about the extent of the EPA’s involvement in the investigation, and crucially, a statement that the EPA had determined that ethylene oxide could cause cancer.
Top officials in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation in Washington, D.C., further directed all regional offices not to test the outdoor air around facilities that use ethylene oxide anywhere else in the country.
“The instruction to limit ambient air monitoring for ethylene oxide to the Sterigenics facility in Willowbrook, Illinois, applied to all EPA regions,” said Jennifer Kaplan, deputy assistant inspector general in the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General, by email. “No other ambient air monitoring of ethylene oxideemitting facilities was permitted,” she said.
Last week, a report by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector
General, an independent watchdog that oversees the actions of the federal agency, said “political appointees” hindered the efforts of agency staff to investigate the scope of ethylene oxide contamination.
In the new report, the OIG details for the first time the extent of senior officials’ role in the environmental crisis in Willowbrook and touches on how policies triggered by that investigation affected other areas, including metro Atlanta.
An EPA office in a pollution hotspot
The Sterigenics facility was centrally located in Willowbrook, a suburb of Chicago. The facility sat one block north of the Village Hall and the police station and within half a mile of the nearest homes and three schools.
It also happened to be just down the street from an EPA warehouse that stored equipment used at Superfund sites.
After staffers working in the warehouse saw an early draft of an EPA air report showing elevated cancer risks from ethylene oxide, they probed further, first modeling the risk and then testing the outdoor air over two days in May 2018.
The ethylene oxide levels they found were alarming. In some canisters placed closest to Sterigenics, air testing revealed amounts that ranged from .1 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The highest amount detected was 450 times higher than a federal threshold of concern for the chemical, which is .02 micrograms per cubic meter of air, and about 10 times higher than Region 5’s initial modeling had predicted they should be.
They sent their modeling and air test results to another federal agency that often works in close collaboration with the EPA, a specialized division of the CDC that evaluates health risks from known chemical exposures.
When the air test results
came back, EPA employees showed them to their bosses in Region 5, and were directed to prepare a press release and background materials for the public “to avoid another public health emergency like the Flint, Michigan drinking water crisis.”