St. Louis Federal Judge Orders EPA to Review Lead Standards
Sep. 20–A federal judge in St. Louis has chastised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to review its health standard for lead pollution in the air, and he ordered the agency to do so.
U.S. District Judge Richard Webber ruled that the agency had “blatantly disregarded Congress’ mandate” that the national standard for airborne lead be reviewed every five years.
The judge’s order is likely to force the EPA to adopt the first major revision of the lead standard since 1978, and that change could have an impact on lead smelters and recyclers around the country, said Maxine Lipeles, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the case.
The ruling is a victory for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment and Jack and Leslie Warden, a couple who for 15 years lived near the Doe Run lead smelter in Herculaneum.
They filed a suit in U.S. District Court in St. Louis last year claiming that the EPA had failed to review the air safety standard as required by law.
Herculaneum may be the only place in the country that is in violation of the current standard, Lipeles said. After years of being substantially out of compliance, Herculaneum met the standard at the end of 2002 but was found in violation again earlier this year, she said.
Webber gave the agency until Dec. 1 to complete a first draft of a document that reviews and assesses scientific studies relevant to airborne lead pollution. The judge gave the agency until Nov. 1, 2007, to finalize a document that presents the staff’s recommendations on whether to revise the standard, and until Sept. 1, 2008, to prepare a public notice of any revision of the standards.
Webber wrote that the EPA did not contest the fact that it had failed to perform the review of the lead standard. In response to the suit, the EPA started a review last year.
Jack Warden, who says his son suffered lead poisoning, said he believed the EPA failed to act earlier because it was concerned about the cost that both Doe Run and the agency would face to bring the air into compliance.
“They looked at the economics of it, as opposed to the health of the children in the communities,” he said.
EPA issued a statement Monday stating that the agency was still evaluating the order but that “we will do our best to comply. If circumstances warrant it, we may seek extensions in the future.”
Bob Patrick, a lawyer in the EPA’s regional office in Kansas City, said that rather than conducting a review of the lead standard, the agency had chosen to concentrate its efforts on imposing rules for lead emissions from specific sources, primarily lead smelters.
“We didn’t decide to blow it off; we just decided there were other ways to protect the public from exposure to lead,” Patrick said.
State officials reported in 2002 that more than half of the children living within half a mile of the Doe Run smelter in Herculaneum had elevated levels of lead in their blood.
Lipeles said the serious impact on the children of Herculaneum underscored why the EPA’s strategy of controlling specific points of emission — and ignoring air quality — failed.
“I think it has terrible consequences for the children of Herculaneum and possibly other locations,” she said.
“All the children who suffered over the years — there’s no way to reclaim that,” she added.
Doe Run officials could not be reached late Monday for comment.
The 1978 standard states that the air is unhealthy if, over a period of three months, it is measured to have an average of more than 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air.
Lipeles said scientists in recent decades increasingly viewed lead as dangerous in smaller doses. When the EPA adopted the lead standard in 1978, it based the standard in part on a finding by the Centers for Disease Control that children had lead poisoning if they had 30 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, she said. By 1991, the federal health agency had reduced that amount by 67 percent, to just 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood, she said.
Despite that sharp drop, the EPA failed to conduct a review of the standard for more than a decade after that, Lipeles said.
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