Industry-connected political appointees in the Trump administration blocked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from investigating ethylene oxide polluters and prevented career staff from warning thousands of Americans who live near sources of the cancer-causing gas, according to a scathing new report from the agency’s inspector general.
The latest findings by the independent watchdog add more details to reporting by the Chicago Tribune since August 2018, when the Trump EPA released the latest National Air Toxics Assessment without notice and left it up to state and local officials to decide for themselves whether to draw attention to elevated cancer risks in their communities.
On multiple occasions, the inspector general found, Trump political appointees in Washington ordered staff in the EPA’s Chicago office to dramatically scale back efforts to understand the dangers of ethylene oxide in the Midwest, most notably in west suburban Willowbrook and two north suburbs, Gurnee and Waukegan in Lake County.
Repeated political interference and a woeful lack of public education about the dangerous gas ran counter to the EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment, the report concluded.
“They prevented the agency from protecting these communities,” said Nicole Cantello, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, which represents unionized employees at the agency’s Chicago office.
More than a half-million Americans exposed to toxic air pollution face unacceptable cancer risks, according to EPA data mapped by the Tribune in 2019. Ethylene oxide is the chief chemical of concern.
Considering what the inspector general’s investigators found, there is a good chance the data could have remained buried in the federal bureaucracy.
A handful of career staffers at the Chicago office helped bring local impacts to light by deploying air monitoring equipment outside an agency warehouse that happened to be next door to Sterigenics, one of the nation’s largest sources of ethylene oxide.
They gave their May 2018 findings to another federal health agency, which determined that cancer risks in neighborhoods near the company’s Willowbrook sterilization plant could be orders of magnitude higher than initially estimated: up to 6,400 per million, or more than six cases of cancer for every 1,000 people exposed to the toxic gas during their lifetimes.
To put that alarming rate in perspective, the EPA considers it unacceptable if 100 cases of cancer are diagnosed for every million people who inhale air pollution.
A report on the preliminary tests prompted Willowbrook residents and elected officials to organize bipartisan coalitions that successfully pressured the EPA to conduct more extensive monitoring of air quality in the community. Even after Sterigenics improved its pollution-control equipment, an EPA study found, ethylene oxide from the Willowbrook facility increased the risk of developing cancer for people living as far as 25 miles away.
Sterigenics ended up closing the plant in September 2019, citing an unstable regulatory landscape and a failure to broker a new deal on its lease amid opposition from community groups and local politicians.
During several public meetings in the Willowbrook area, the EPA’s top representative was Bill Wehrum, an industry lawyer who led the agency’s air office at the time and repeatedly promised the Trump administration was moving aggressively to protect the community.
Behind the scenes, the inspector general found, Wehrum banned staff in the agency’s regional office from inspecting other ethylene oxide polluters unless asked to do so by state officials.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth noted the lack of inspections during the January 2019 confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler to become Trump’s second EPA administrator.
“That’s news to me,” Wheeler told the Illinois Democrat.
The inspector general also found that Wehrum and other senior political aides ordered the EPA’s regional office to take down a website outlining health risks from ethylene oxide in Willowbrook.
An official in the Chicago office told investigators the regional administrator had directed her staff to create the website, saying she wanted to avoid “another public health emergency like the Flint, Michigan, drinking water crisis,” a reference to one of her predecessors who was ousted for downplaying the hazards.
Though the Willowbrook-focused website was restored two months later, the inspector general noted, it had been altered to remove references to the fact that ethylene oxide is a potent carcinogen.
“While the findings in this audit should come as no surprise to those of us who fought the Sterigenics battle in 2018, they are nonetheless alarming,” said state Sen. John Curran, a Downers Grove Republican. “The U.S. EPA … failed at every turn, and instead placed thousands of area residents in danger.”
Another report by the agency’s inspector general, released a year ago, condemned Trump appointees for failing to schedule public meetings about ethylene oxide in 16 of the 25 communities across the nation where the lifetime risk of developing cancer exceeds agency guidelines, including two in Lake County.
The Tribune first reported in November 2018 about the health risks of ethylene oxide pollution from Medline Industries in Waukegan and Vantage Specialty Chemicals in Gurnee.
Trump EPA officials refused to conduct the same type of in-depth air quality testing in Lake County that they did in Willowbrook. Local officials did the work on their own and detected ethylene oxide concentrations in the air that were just as concerning, but community activists say regulators have backed down since Medline and Vantage took steps to reduce the pollution.
“We have continued to be exposed to unsafe levels of a known carcinogen for far too long,” the group Stop EtO in Lake County said in a statement. “It is time our leaders set aside their self-interests and protect the people of Lake County.”
Asked what the Biden administration plans to do to address the inspector general’s findings, the EPA emailed a statement pledging “a renewed commitment to protecting human health and the environment by following science, enforcing environmental laws and engaging with communities as we do our work.”
Duckworth, who requested the investigation along with Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Tom Carper of Delaware, said she will make sure the administration follows through on that promise.
“I’m glad these communities finally have the answers they deserve,” Duckworth said. “But the fact remains that they should never have had to experience this.”
