Source: http://www.oregonlive.com, September 25, 2015
by: Fedor Zarkhin
Heather Dickinson watched in alarm last year as a man in a backhoe tore down the one-story Southeast Portland house next door, sending a plume of grayish-brown dust above neighboring rooftops.
The dust spread everywhere, creeping into Dickinson’s house, caking her home’s exterior walls, and billowing into the sky, she said. Three men, in addition to the man in the backhoe, were in the thick of the demolition wearing no respirator masks. Dickinson told her 8- and 6-year-old boys, who were mesmerized by the destruction, to come inside.
What she didn’t know and environmental regulators later learned: The contractor demolished the house with hundreds of square feet of asbestos-laden flooring and insulation inside.
With few exceptions, Oregon regulations require licensed contractors to remove asbestos before any demolition. Federal regulations says workers who might inhale cancer-causing asbestos fibers must wear protective gear such as hooded polyethylene coveralls and respirators.
The men working by hand at the Southeast Portland demolition site were likely exposed to asbestos fibers, a state workplace safety official said.
The case is unique only in that regulators found out about it.
Weak regulatory oversight has allowed contractors to tear down hundreds of homes in Portland without properly removing asbestos inside, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.
The agency responsible for protecting the public from asbestos, the Department of Environmental Quality, set the stage for many of these hazardous demolitions. The department has known for years that its rules aren’t strong enough to keep people safe during home demolitions. Yet the state backed away from imposing even modest measures to strengthen the rules in 2002 after the construction industry complained.
Potentially thousands of homes have come down with asbestos inside since then. The department estimates the number is 650 homes annually statewide.
Washington agencies have maintained substantially stricter rules than Oregon for almost two decades despite industry grumbling.
“It’s appalling. Most people think of DEQ, they think of it as a green organization,” said Kimberly Koehler, an activist with the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association. “But as a matter of fact they’re not looking out for our interests.”
The agency, in a written statement, said it’s up to building owners to remove asbestos before demolishing a home.
The asbestos issue is pressing in Portland, where an infill boom is prompting developers to raze hundreds of old houses likely to contain the cancer-causing substance. The number of demolition permits issued in 2014 was higher than at any time during the past decade.
State oversight has been particularly toothless in the region that needs it most. Oregon has for most of the last three years left vacant its only asbestos inspector position in the region that includes Portland.
In 2012 and 2013, the office that oversees Portland issued zero asbestos-related fines. The Oregonian/OregonLive estimates 200 homes were demolished with asbestos inside in that time.
An exceedingly popular material for much of the 20th Century because of its durability and fire resistance, asbestos was used in thousands of products. Today, it’s often found in tiles, vinyl flooring, ceilings, cement shingles and pipe insulation of homes built or remodeled before the 1970s.
Industry experts and state environmental regulators say because almost every home facing demolition is at least that old, 80 to 90 percent can be expected to have asbestos.
Yet contractors reported removing asbestos in only 33 percent of the homes demolished in Portland from 2011 to 2014, according to an analysis of city and state data.
That would mean about 350 Portland homes were likely torn down with asbestos inside, a violation of state rules.
New state legislation prompted by community action will require contractors or owners to look for asbestos before demolishing a house, starting in 2016. But it creates no system for the state to check whether contractors perform such inspections or remove what they find. Portland recently started asking contractors to certify they’ve removed asbestos, but the city says it has no enforcement authority.
By contrast, southwest Washington’s air pollution agency requires contractors to notify them at least 10 days before they demolish a house, and to produce documentary proof that they’ve looked for asbestos beforehand. Agency inspectors scour the documentation to ensure everything was done right.
The system works in the five-county region it covers. An analysis of data from southwest Washington shows that contractors remove asbestos in at least 56 percent of demolitions, 23 percentage points above the rate in Portland.
Through a spokeswoman, The Department of Environmental Quality’s director, Dick Pedersen, declined to be interviewed. Instead, agency officials provided partial answers to a list of written questions about The Oregonian/OregonLive’s findings.
Asked whether environmental regulators have adequately protected the public from asbestos released during home demolitions, they wrote:
“Public health is protected when asbestos removal and disposal are done properly and in accordance with DEQ requirements. When people violate these rules it can lead to increased risk of exposure for workers and the general public. DEQ works to ensure compliance with our regulations through complaint response, inspections, and by licensing abatement contractors.”
Officials said the agency plans to “evaluate and update” its asbestos rules next year.
Dickinson, the Southeast Portland homeowner who witnessed and photographed last year’s demolition, said the incident made her feel naive about how businesses are regulated in Oregon.
“The only reason they got caught in this situation was because a neighbor made a phone call,” she said.
Even after state regulators establish that contractors have torn down a house with asbestos inside, neither the Department of Environmental Quality nor the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration warns every employee and neighbor who may have inhaled asbestos about health risks they face.
“One would like to think that we’re all OK,” Dickinson said of her family. “But you know, who knows?”
The six workers from W. L. Thomas Environmental hustle from room to room of an empty Corvallis house, draping each wall and floor with polyurethane sheets. The workers use a machine-powered sprayer to mist each room with a mixture of soap and water.
Four hours into the process, the men strip to their underwear and put on disposable purple coveralls, cloth gloves and respirators that fit snugly to the lower half of their faces. They slip into the house through a containment area, and the real work begins.
The workers aren’t taking these precautions to remove the remains of a meth lab but, instead, something more mundane: a popcorn ceiling.
The fact that it contains asbestos triggers a laundry list of state and federal regulations that W. L. Thomas must follow to get it out of the house. Although the material is considered safe if undisturbed, airborne asbestos fibers can cause a range of cancers.
Only a licensed abatement contractor can remove asbestos before a demolition if it is in a form that can easily crumble and become airborne. If asbestos is found in solid form but breaks during removal, an asbestos contractor must be called in.
There are 43 such contractors operating in Oregon. Every worker who comes in contact with asbestos that could become airborne receives at least four days of training, followed by one-day annual refresher courses.
The W. L. Thomas workers set up a machine inside the house that fully renews the air supply every 15 minutes. Anything that could have asbestos is double-bagged and taken to a landfill licensed to accept it. Afterward, a separate company places fans at the job site to stir up any unseen asbestos fibers that might remain, then tests the air.
The work cost the owner of the Corvallis home more than $4,500.
Researchers have definitively linked asbestos to three lung diseases, all of which can take decades to produce symptoms: mesothelioma, asbestosis and lung cancer. Mesothelioma, almost exclusively associated with breathing asbestos, usually kills its victims within a year of diagnosis.
People with mesothelioma can become “pulmonary cripples” as they lose their ability to breathe, said Jeremy Cetnar, a cancer specialist at Oregon Health & Science University. Patients lose weight and their appetite. In rare cases, they can barely finish a sentence before needing to catch their breath.
“For lack of a better term, they wither away,” Cetnar said.
Normally it takes regular inhalation of asbestos fibers to get an asbestos-related disease, but at least one academic study identified a case of mesothelioma contracted following a few days of exposure.
Although 1924 was the first time medical researchers attributed a death to asbestos in the workplace, it wasn’t until 1971 that the federal safety regulators limited how much airborne asbestos workers could be exposed to. The popularity of asbestos plummeted, and production and installation virtually ceased by the 1980s.
Today, according to OSHA, building renovation, demolition and the removal of asbestos pose the gravest risks to workers.
OSHA requires workers to don full protective gear if they’re going to work extended periods in air with even small amounts of asbestos. The legal threshold equates to 50 microscopic fibers carried in as much air as a typical human breath. Even at the allowable level, OSHA estimates 3.4 out of every 1,000 workers would die if exposed continuously.
Demolitions can expose workers to far more than the OSHA threshold: three times the allowable amount, according to a study from Iran; six times the allowable amount, according to one from Australia.
Researchers found signs of asbestos damage in the lungs of 19 out of 88 New York demolition workers tested during a 1990s study.
The New York study concluded that despite rules requiring asbestos to be removed before a demolition, “exposures to asbestos dust continue, because removal of such materials is not always done or is often incomplete, at best.”
For proof of that assertion, the authors might have looked to Oregon.
Relying on neighbors
The company that demolished the house next door to Heather Dickinson would’ve flown under the radar if it hadn’t been for Kimberly Koehler.
The Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association board member received a phone call Aug. 21, 2014 from a worried neighbor. A construction crew had shown up at a home on Southeast Rural Street and was tearing it down.
Koehler didn’t wait. She said she went immediately to the site and confronted a worker, asking for proof there wasn’t asbestos in the house. He didn’t have it, she said, so she got on the phone with the state agency responsible for worker safety.
Inspectors had the house taped off within two hours. After samples tested positive for asbestos, environmental regulators settled on a fine of $20,800 for Crescent Custom Homes and $10,400 for the construction company, Triple Star Construction. Oregon OSHA fined Crescent $840 and Triple Star owner Ken Dempsey $400.
Calvin Baty, owner of Crescent Custom Homes, said in an interview that the project was the firm’s first demolition. He said the company gave the city a report showing the house had asbestos, but he said that city officials told him they didn’t need it. They mentioned nothing about checking with state regulators, he said.
“There’s no clear posting, like, ‘Hey, when you’re doing this, be aware that you need to do X, Y and Z,'” Baty said.
Dempsey, the demolition contractor, blamed Crescent Custom Homes. Dempsey said Baty told him the asbestos had been removed before the demolition, and Dempsey didn’t feel he could question the company that hired Triple Star for the job.
Whether or not there’s asbestos inside, contractors are supposed to keep dust down during a demolition, which Dempsey said he did.
Dempsey said he demolished about 100 homes in 35 years, never asking property owners for documentary proof that asbestos had been removed. But after the demolition on Southeast Rural, he said that now he does.
“I don’t do nothing until I have papers in hand and everything’s approved,” Dempsey said. “I have to see it with my own eyes.”
Since the demolition on Southeast Rural, Portland has started requiring applicants for a demolition permit to sign a form indicating they’ve checked for asbestos and will remove any that they’ve found.
Separately, Oregon lawmakers passed a bill that will require contractors to check all buildings for asbestos before they’re torn down.
But the new legislation does nothing to increase the state’s capacity to verify that developers have done what they are supposed to do when demolishing a home.
The regional environmental quality office covering Portland performed a total of 25 asbestos inspections from 2011 through last year, a period in which developers demolished about 750 Portland homes.
Through most of that period, the Portland office was allotted one position for a full-time asbestos inspector but left it vacant.
By contrast, the state environmental office that covers other parts of western Oregon performed 624 asbestos inspections in the same timeframe. That’s 25 times more inspections, in a region with 30 percent fewer residents.
“It’s the Wild West, and it shows,” Wally Thomas, owner of a company that removes asbestos, said of the state’s oversight in the Portland area.
The Oregonian/OregonLive’s analysis estimates that developers and other property owners last year alone tore down 110 homes in Portland with asbestos inside. Yet the only one that resulted in a state fine was the demolition on Southeast Rural Street, discovered thanks to Koehler’s tip.
“We’re just trying to protect ourselves,” said Koehler. “This is where we live.”
Koehler said that if the system worked, “then we wouldn’t have to send old ladies to accost large developers.”
Penny Wolf-McCormick, an asbestos expert with Oregon OSHA, said her agency also relies heavily on complaints to learn about improper demolitions. But responding to complaints is often fruitless, she said, because demolitions happen so fast that the evidence vanishes.
“We get out there and there’s just a big hole in the ground, and no one knows who it was,” she said.
A tougher system
Washington regulators have a far more expansive system than Oregon’s for ensuring asbestos is removed from every home that’s demolished. Just ask Gerry Strawn, an asbestos inspector with the Southwest Clean Air Agency in Washington.
Strawn is someone who has seen what asbestos does to a person.
“It’s an ugly way to die,” he said.
His friend contracted mesothelioma after working in an aluminum mill and has been told he has six months to a year to live. His great-uncle died of asbestosis after working in shipyards in the Puget Sound. And an X-ray of Strawn’s father’s lungs recently revealed a spot consistent with asbestos exposure.
“I don’t want to see anybody else in that position because of poor work practices,” said Strawn, who has been an inspector at the agency for 12 years.
For as long as he can remember, developers in Washington have had to submit all the information Strawn needs to scrutinize the demolition process from beginning to end.
As with Oregon’s newly expanded asbestos rules, southwest Washington requires developers, other property owners and contractors to hire an inspector to check a home for asbestos before demolishing it. But southwest Washington doesn’t stop there.
The developer must send Strawn’s agency a copy of the inspector’s report before any demolition in the five-county area he oversees, whether or not the inspector found asbestos. The agency also must be notified of any demolition at least 10 days before it happens. Any member of the public can check the records online.
Oregon environmental quality regulators require no records of demolitions. While the agency takes reports about abatement projects from companies it licenses to remove asbestos, it hears nothing from developers who decide no removal is needed.
“When I heard that Oregon didn’t have that, I was rather surprised,” Strawn said.
The documentation is key for Strawn because it allows him to check on whether developers or other property owners looked for asbestos, whether they looked closely enough, and whether they removed any material they found — in every single demolition project in the region.
Strawn said southwest Washington’s notification requirements for builders have kept the number of asbestos-removal projects high and the number of penalties low.
That’s especially true of Clark County, where asbestos was removed from 64 percent of homes demolished from 2011 to 2014. Portland homes were half as likely to have asbestos removed prior to demolition.
Officials with Oregon’s environmental quality agency, when asked if a system like Washington’s would be more effective, responded by reciting Oregon’s existing asbestos rules.
Without Washington’s added layers of regulation, Strawn said, he’d probably have to rely on complaints and start driving around in search of demolitions.
“The level of protection to the public and the environment without it,” he said, “would be minimal.”