A recent complaint has shed light on Iowa’s inefficient method of ensuring safe asbestos handling. After the state’s EPA asbestos inspector, Tom Wuehr, claimed that unsafe asbestos removal had occurred at the former Younkers building, the contracting company in charge of overseeing the project refuted the claim. Now, environmental safety advocates are questioning Iowa’s inspection process, which employs only two inspectors for the entire state: one to monitor asbestos handling procedures on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, the other on behalf of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Wuehr is personally responsible for the oversight of as many as 4,500 projects each year, making it impossible for him to physically address each complaint. “I suspect that we respond to most complaints,” he said. “You have to also qualify the complaints just a little bit to see if they’re credible.”
The overload of complaints may explain why Wuehr did not find asbestos during an initial inspection of the former Younkers building on February 17. Lack of oversight is a common problem across the country, according to Brent Kynoch of the Environmental Information Association, a Maryland-based group that focuses on health hazards in buildings, especially asbestos. “It’s safe to say that enforcement of asbestos regulations nationwide is abysmal,” he said. “There are no budgets with either the state or federal governments to put the kind of inspection staff out there that we really would require to enforce the regulations.”
Ideally, Iowa would have five or ten inspectors (Minnesota, for example, has fifteen OSHA inspectors). In the meantime, projects like the renovation of the former Younkers building will be under greater scrutiny. “This is unlike some projects that have happened throughout the state where people knock a two-story building down and nobody ever knows anything,” said Wuehr, who is continuing to investigate the removal of asbestos from the building’s fifth floor.
Unfortunately, many contractors do not take it upon themselves to properly remove and dispose of asbestos. Instead, they cut corners and take advantage of the fact that overworked inspectors will most likely not visit the worksite. As a result, the public is put at greater risk of exposure to asbestos, which can lead to numerous respiratory health problems, including mesothelioma.