Seemingly underreported, but what made front-page news on Friday’s (May 2, 2008) Chicago Tribune is a story about an EPA official who was told to resign or be fired. Read the entire story here.

The story begins:

SAGINAW, Mich. – The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up.

Now, she has been asked to leave, and has complied.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade’s interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

Gade contends she was forced out of her job because of her work to hold Dow Chemical to the laws governing cleanup of dioxin.

Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. The company dumped the highly toxic and persistent chemical into local rivers for most of the last century.

What levels of dioxin were found?

She demanded more dredging in November, when it was revealed that dioxin levels along a park in Saginaw were 1.6 million parts per trillion, the highest amount ever found in the U.S.

Also:

In February Dow told federal regulators they had found dioxin levels of 5,900 parts per trillion in the Collins’ neighborhood, above the federal cleanup standard of 1,000 parts per trillion. Michigan’s far more stringent limit is 90 parts per trillion.

Compare the 5,900 ppt found in a neighborhood and the 1.6 million ppt found in a park to the cleanup standard of 1,000 ppt (Federal) and 90 ppt (Michigan) and its clear that the law says that Dow should have to clean up its mess. Easy calculations show that by standing law, levels measured exceed both the state and federal cleanup levels.

Why is it important?

Dioxin, measured in trillionths of a gram because it is so toxic, was a manufacturing byproduct of the herbicide Agent Orange and other chlorinated chemicals. Company documents show Dow knew by the mid-1960s that it could make people sick or even kill them. Citing years of independent studies, the EPA says dioxin causes cancer and disrupts the immune and reproductive systems, even at very low levels.

How ridiculous is Dow acting?

The company and environmental regulators spent the rest of the decade arguing about dioxin’s health effects. Dow insisted the chemical caused only a severe skin rash known as chloracne, even as a growing number of studies found it could cause cancer and other diseases.

Hold on! “Only a severe skin rash known as chloracne(?)” Severe. Skin rash. Yeah, that seems fine. Chloracne is a disease that is usually permanent.  A “rash,” tends to refer to something that is temporary or at worst, recurring.

Look, the law says you have to clean it up, so what’s the claim to not having to? So Dow admits that it causes, according to Wikipedia, “an acne-like eruption of blackheads, cysts, and pustules associated with over-exposure to certain halogenated aromatic compounds, such as chlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans. The lesions are most frequently found on the cheeks, behind the ears, in the armpits and groin region.”

Do a quick Google Image Search of chloracne to see what Dow refers to as, “only a severe skin rash.” See how ridiculous?

As a quote found above says, ” Company documents show Dow knew by the mid-1960s that it could make people sick or even kill them.”

Paying for research to supports its claims:

More recently, Dow financed a University of Michigan study that the company and its supporters say shows dioxin in soil and sediment has little to do with levels of the chemical in people. The EPA cautions the study hasn’t been peer-reviewed and appears to underestimate health risks.

No, but the levels of dioxin in fish and animals eaten by humans does. Contaminations of water supplies and aquifers leads to contaminated food supplies. Who eats soil and sediment? Talk about oversimplification.

EnviroHumanImpact Commentary:

Free-marketers may look at the science on this issue and say, “let’s wait until we’re more certain that dioxin is indeed dangerous before regulating it.” It’s the same argument used against regulating greenhouse gases. But we have to conclude that anyone who might say that is a little late. It has already been regulated with limits set which Dow has exceeded by choosing to dump the chemical.

Because they are responsible for those high levels of dioxin, they should have to pay for cleaning it up. No one seems to deny that the high levels are because of Dow’s activities. The denial is found in whether or not or how they should tend to the problem.

Mary Gade has been forced to resign, according to her and according to the article, because of this issue and her approach to it. Essentially, she was fired (or forced to resign) because she was enforcing the law and someone in the Bush Administration did not like the way in which she was doing so (Mr. Bush appointed Ms. Gade and the EPA is an agency within the Executive Branch of the Government). Sure, that is somewhat speculative, but Ms. Gade tells us this is the reason for her departure:

On Thursday, Gade said of her resignation: “There’s no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I’m proud of what we did.”

This harks back to the U.S. Attorneys scandal, in which U.S. Attorneys across the country were fired because of refusal to indict politicians on drummed up charges. On the surface, this firing looks to have happened because Mary Gade was doing her job the right way, that is, enforcing those laws that are in place with the tools at her disposal, something that they apparently wished she had not done.

One has to ask, was it somehow understood (or misunderstood) that she was supposed to stand there and look the other way? Was her previous work to defend companies misunderstood as a sign that she might be easy on regulating and friendly to corporate interests?

At the center of the latest dispute was Gade, who as a corporate attorney had represented big companies like Dow against environmental regulators. Her aggressive action against Dow surprised the company, local activists and her Washington bosses. But she still won high marks from EPA officials during her last performance evaluation.

Sure, I hope it comes out that that is not the case, and kudos to the Tribune for this reporting. Hopefully, they follow up and get to the bottom of why Ms. Gade was asked to leave and it would be nice to see other major papers turn up the heat on the EPA to see why someone who just months before received an excellent employee review is now unemployed.

All too often, money, corruption, and politics trump science, diligence, adherence to law, and the environment itself. Thank you, Mary Gade, for your work to push Dow to clean up dioxin.

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