Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

At unknown risk: The asbestos memos reveal an uncaring attitude in a clueless utilities department
Department now finds itself in the bizarre quandary of not being able to legally repair its own sewer and water lines
-- John Patten, 07/26/04, revised 07/27/04
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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RELATED:
The asbestos memos -- Adobe Acrobat file
-- Full text of internal documents from the utilities department
City hits regulatory wall in dealing with asbestos concrete
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 07/13/04
Asbestos concerns cancel pipe cutting
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 07/14/04

Uhhhhh, John: that's a big oooops.

In the days and weeks following the web revelations, gravel and dirt was brought in to cover the ground where the AC pipe had been left out in the open over the years. Within a few weeks, utils workers , without wearing any protective gear, were using bulldozers to scrape the top layers of soil, about two inches worth. I still don't know how the soil was disposed of. Soil samples were reportedly taken of the newly-scraped area to determine any leftover contamination, but no samples were ever taken of the scraped soil before or after the topsoil was removed.

I showed up at the disposal site to take photos on the day the soil was being scraped. As soon as I showed up, workers shut down the job and fled into adjacent buildings. Work did not resume until after I left. I ended up with photos of the equipment being used, the half-completed job, and one worker's back as he left the job site.

Clueless and seemingly uncaring
The memos released after the July 12 incident, most of which were written in the weeks prior to the canceled job, show a department unwillingly coming to grips with federal regulations, worker safety and public scrutiny. What is never of any seeming concern is worker or public safety. Rather, there is a constant search for minimal standards, a sort of "What is the least we can do in order to make this all go away?"

Oh sure, there's recommendations that workers be medically tested, but within the context of the department's behavior, these recommendations appear to based on lawful compliance rather that any sense of genuine worry.

In a memo dated June 29 of this year, Assistant Utilities Director Chris Sharek documents for John Lane a summary of one the first-ever asbestos training sessions in the utilities department. In the memo, Sharek notes the following:

Reading between the lines in that statement is frightening at best: up until that training session, the utils department was apparently under the mistaken impression that there were no federal or state guidelines applicable to their handling of asbestos concrete, that they were free to draw up their own safety guidelines, which they apparently never did anyway. If they did have any guidelines, they were buried in a filing cabinet somewhere as the employees doing the actual work had no clue of the existence of any guidelines.

In the same memo, Sharek describes the classes of risks faced by city workers, classes that are defined by OSHA:

(Sound of game show buzzer) WRONG!!!

If Sharek didn't know what he was writing was untrue, he should have.

Over the last two years, the interior of the Union Missionary Baptist Church was flooded several times with backed up sewage, a situation that has been well documented in the press. Each time, city workers were brought in to clean up the sewage. Currently the church is being rebuilt from the ground up.

On the floor of the church during the floods: damaged asbestos floor tile, tile that city workers repeatedly cleaned. Some damaged tiles may have been removed and discarded by city workers prior to a contracted removal of the tile that took place some time after the final flood. Even if city workers never threw out a single damaged tile, the plain fact is that all of the city employees who worked on the church cleanup were exposed to damaged asbestos tiles, and that's a Class I situation.

Did we mention uncaring?
The memos go on to document a series of federally mandated safety procedures, procedures that the city has by and large never followed. For example: fitted masks (filtered breathing masks that are custom fitted to the wearer) have never been available to the workers and still aren't to this day, yet their use is a basic minimal mandatory OSHA requirement.

What is truly frightening in all of these memos is the utilities department's managerial mindset, set in place by Lane and echoed by Sharek. Nowhere in the memos is a sense that workers' and the public's safety is a real humane concern. Somewhere in the documentation should be a policy directive along the lines of, "At no time will we ever place the public or our workers at risk for injury or illness." Instead, the education process, as interpreted by Sharek, seems to be a constant search for the minimal amount of compliance, whatever needs to be done so that the department can get by, even if those minimal standards are met only on paper and not in reality.

As an example of that mentality, take a look at the last memo in the packet, dated July 13, 2004. This was written the day after the canceled Gibbs Road dig as an explanation of what had gone wrong and why the utilities department had pulled the plug on the job. In the second paragraph, Sharek writes:

(Sound of game show buzzer) WRONG!!!

The Gondolier noted that there was no visible signage warning the public to stay away, which the Gondo stated was a requirement. The city never denied the allegation. There may have been HazMat suits (hazardous material protective suits ) at the scene, although neither I nor the Gondo ever saw their presence -- both I and the Gondo arrived at the scene during the digging portion and we both left prior to the time of the actual scheduled pipe cutting.

Here's the kicker: remember those fitted breathing masks I mentioned earlier? Workers assigned to do the cutting at Gibbs Road had never been given the fitted breathing masks, a legally required safety equipment issuance for such a job.

So, for Sharek to state that the city was in full compliance as to PPE equipment at the Gibbs Road dig is an entirely untrue statement. I know for a fact that when Sharek typed that statement, he knew it to be untrue -- I had already previously discussed the issue of fitted masks with Sharek only days before.

A strong sense of irony -- comparing the utilities department to the police department
There is, to me anyway, a strong sense of historic irony and inherent unfairness in this whole mess. For the past two decades, the utilities department, under Lane's guidance, has made no attempt to comply or even learn about some key federal and state guidelines that govern their industry. Not even lip service. This goes on until earlier this year, when they were caught with their pants down on the asbestos issue.

Bear in mind, the asbestos that was being stored all this time at the drinking water plant was only a hundred yards or so from Lane's office. It's not like he would have had to go way out of his way to see it, it was right out back in plain sight, sitting in the open air -- all he had to do was take a walk around the outside of his own work area.

A few months back, Police Chief Jim Hanks was given a royal public drubbing in the press and was in fear of losing his job over a couple of issues, most notably over the department's failure to retain their accreditation with a private accrediting firm. This is different from certification, so let me explain this carefully and then I'll get to the point of why this is relevant to the utils department's current woes.

All police officers and departments have to be 'certified.' This has to do with training and testing, with compliance to state and federal rules regarding the number of hours of training required each year for every officer. In Florida, certification administration is done through the FDLE. Cops go through a hell of a lot of mandatory training and annual retraining and it can be a major logistical nightmare to rotate cops in and out of the training calendar while trying to keep a full roster on the streets doing the work that they are constantly in training for. According to Chief Hanks, each officer receives approximately 120 hours of minimum mandated in-service training each year. That's at a minimum, and that's all basically designed so that an officer can wear the badge and drive around in a squad car legally. If I recall correctly, there's like a 15-hour required course just on getting certified to carry a police baton, that big black stick with a handle sticking out of the side. There's an obvious joke there -- 15 hours to learn how to knock someone upside the head with a stick, which is pretty funny even though it's a wildly inaccurate statement.

Some cops think that one of the coolest things about their job is that there's always something new to be learned, there's a sense that you never leave school, that education is a lifelong process. Others could easily live without the perceived headache of having to put in another block of mandated hours to receive training in something that may or may not be applicable to their day-to-day job.

Be that as it may, the certification education has to be done, and it is up to the department and the officers to learn the educational requirements and to comply. This has never been an issue -- the department has always complied with the requirements and has always maintained their certifications. As to accreditation -- whole different ball game. This is all stuff that is above and beyond the legally required certification, and this is where a lot of folks got confused, including a local TV news reporter. The accreditation process is an attempt to go above and beyond that which is merely required by law. The police department had accreditation, lost it and is now in the process of trying to regain it. It's a big plus, a huge feather in the cap, but it is by no means required or mandatory.

Chief Hanks was trashed royally in the press over the accreditation issue, to the point where Mayor Dean Calamaras, former Police Chief Joe Slapp and former City Manager George Hunt all stated in televised press interviews that it was time for Hanks to go (as more info came out in the following days, Calamaras retracted his statement while Hunt and Slapp quickly disappeared into the woods). At no time was the police department's certification ever brought into question, yet by some press accounts, you'd have thought that the department's legal status was in jeopardy.

Now try to translate what happened at the police department into the context of John Lane's management of the utilities department. Here's a department that for years has been handling asbestos concrete, a substance that any layman intuitively knows has a heck of a lot of federal rules and regs surrounding it. Not once in the past two decades did Lane look out into his own back yard and think, "Hey, that's asbestos in those pipes. I wonder -- are there any rules and guidelines that we should maybe be following? Has anyone on my staff ever called up the EPA and asked them what we are supposed to be doing with this stuff?"

Again: not only was there never any attempt at complying with federally mandated safety regulations, there was never any attempt at even finding out what it was that the regulations required.

To me, this goes way beyond gross incompetence.

This smacks of criminal negligence.

Lane's blind eye not the only one turned (we're Venice, we do things different)
Nobody else of authority in the city was asking those questions either. No council member, not the city manager, nobody in the union, no county inspector, nada. It's as though the asbestos didn't exist, as though the federal and state government didn't exist, as though the city's own workers didn't exist. We're Venice, we do things different. And we get away with it.

Meanwhile workers have been placed at serious risk. For the past two decades, workers have routinely cut, transported and replaced asbestos concrete pipe without once ever having been given the benefit of mandatory education or proper equipment. Not even the proper masks.

It is incredible beyond belief that not once did ANYONE ever raise the issue outside of the utilities department. Inside the department, there were a few who tried to raise the issue of asbestos compliance, but they were ignored.

Presently, the utilities department lacks the legally required minimal training and equipment to handle any repairs to sewage pipes if they are asbestos concrete pipes.  At any asbestos concrete repair job, there is a legal requirement for a supervisory "competent person" -- that's the EPA's and OSHA's legal designation for someone who has gone through and passed a mandatory 40-hour training program. Additionally, everyone else at the site has to have completed a minimal set of required training standards. Sharek explains the legal requirements in his memos.

This is all new knowledge for the utilities department -- this is the first time anyone has asked these questions. So now the push is on to get the required training and, hopefully, the required equipment, which may take a few months.

This new knowledge couldn't have possibly come at a worse time, because the department doesn't have the luxury of waiting those few months to do AC pipe repairs. We are entering into the rainy season 2004, a season that I and a number of others predicted a year ago would be marked with an outrageous number of sewage spills -- the sewage spills and the massive amount of rainwater infiltration into the sewage system during heavy rains last year were a strong indicator of a system getting ready to fail.

All of that, along with anecdotal information from employees and the fact that there was (and still is) no plan in place to phase out older sewer lines spelled out only one possibility: a sewage meltdown in the streets was a matter of when, not if.

With some 75 sewage spills documented recently in the press so far this year, including the recent AC pipe breaks that caused sewage spills into Roberts Bay, that 'when' is plainly happening now.

Until the training and equipment requirements are met, the utils department cannot legally repair any broken AC pipes, which puts the department in an agonizing dilemma: if an AC sewage pipe breaks, they can't legally let the sewage continue to spill and they can't legally fix the pipe either. No matter whether they do something or nothing, they will be unable to comply with minimal legal standards for their industry.

Might as well pack up, go home and sub the work out to the county. If this were the police department, it would be the equivalent of losing their certification -- they wouldn't even be legally allowed to put a cop in a squad car.

Within the utilities department, this web site is no doubt being blamed for the impossible legal quandary that John Lane now finds himself in. Sorry about that, folks, but the plain fact is that this is a corner that Lane painted himself into when he never bothered to wander out into his own back yard to see what was going on. It was an existing, ongoing situation that was only waiting to be noticed.

Lane started working for the city as utils head in 1981, he's had since then to get an asbestos compliance program started. He never did.

EPA starts a second investigation (you have the right to cable TV, you have the right to sing the blues)
After I had discovered all of this, I turned my findings and photos over to City Manager Marty Black and to the EPA (and Black would have been legally obligated to inform them anyway). The EPA sent down an inspector, Scott Halyard. Halyard's job was merely a fact-finding mission about the city's handling of asbestos. This, in turn, started a second investigation into Venice's utilities by the EPA (for more on the first and even bigger investigation, just peruse this page).

Lane has repeatedly stated that Halyard gave a thumbs up to the city's asbestos handling procedures and has stated that as vindication against accusations levied at him by myself. Tommy McIntyre of the Gondo took Lane's word as gospel and printed it as such, the end result leading to a misled public that thought this was just a muck-raking job.

What Lane is selling about Halyard's unfinished report and what I am hearing are two entirely different things. According to John Hund of the EPA's Atlanta office (who is Halyard's supervisor), Halyard's report has not been released yet as it is still being modified as new information is continuing to roll in. Last week, Hund read to me over the phone an excerpt of a non-finalized draft of the report. In that section, Halyard cited four serious violations of federal rules regarding worker safety and proper repair and disposal procedures.

Assistant Utils Director Chris Sharek gave me an interesting quote in the one phone conversation that I had with him about the asbestos issue. Sharek stated that the city had been handling asbestos wrong all along and that a few more times wouldn't hurt anything, "We'll just pay the fines," Sharek generously stated. Which is crap -- Sharek won't pay squat, I and every other Venice resident will pay the fines, we will all be punished for the utils department's lawlessness. Exposed workers will pay the costs with their health.

Yo guys, wanna have some fun? Take a look at this page from the EPA's web site. In the search bar, just type in the word "asbestos" without the quotation marks, then hit the button marked "Search."

Fines? You're thinking you'll just have to worry about the city having to pay fines?

(Sound of game show buzzer) WRONG!!!

Nobody knows the trouble I seen... nobody knows but Jesus...

Addendum: On July 13, this web site reported that a city utilities worker had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. The employee, a non-smoker, had reportedly been cutting asbestos pipe for the city over a 17-year period without ever being given a proper breathing mask.

It has recently been learned that the cancer involved was not of a type normally associated with exposure to asbestos. This does not entirely rule out asbestos as a cause or a contributing factor, but it also doesn't mean that asbestos was absolutely a cause.

Due to the early and almost accidental diagnosis and intervention (the cancer had been discovered as a result of x-rays for a back injury sustained in an automobile accident), the prognosis for the employee is surprisingly good. The employee underwent surgery to remove the early growth and has just started a chemotherapy regimen.

Out of respect for the employee's privacy, the name of the employee is not being published.

Venice Florida! dot com and its many friends and readers send out a hearty get well soon and express an extreme thankfulness that all is going so well for the employee.

Good thoughts go out to you. Now quit slacking and hurry back to work, the city needs you.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.