Los Alamos Monitor, Roger Snodgrass
Published January 23, 2006
A row between a national environmental group and the parent company
of an environmental assessment team working at Los Alamos National
Laboratory has cast an unusual sidelight on the recent discovery of
excessive levels of chromium in the deep aquifer beneath the lab.
For those who follow environmental battles, mention of chromium pollution raises the specter of Erin Brockovich, the legal researcher whose crusade against a giant utility company in the early '90s in California was made into a Hollywood movie in 2000.
"She brought a small town to its feet and a huge company to its knees," as the tagline for the film starring Julia Roberts put it.
The role won Roberts an Oscar for best actress. The movie relates the true story of a heroic single-mom whose discovery of suspicious medical records led to a $333 million settlement against the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) for leaking chromium into the aquifer under the town of Hinkley over a period of years.
The subject came up again recently because PG&E is involved in another suit over chromium, and the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessments is about to issue a public health goal for chromium-6, the form of the element thought to be most harmful to humans.
As the first precedent in the nation for maximum acceptable standards for chromium-6, the outcome in the two battles raises the stakes for not only for the environment, but also for environmentalists and industrial interests and the legal counsels representing the two sides.
After the Hinkley trial, according to an archive of material dug up
by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and a largely corroborative story in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 23, EP&G continued efforts to refute the health threats of chromium-6 imputed in the case, hiring a consultant to reexamine some of the scientific claims that connected the chemical to higher risks of stomach cancer.
This led, among other avenues, to an aging physician in China, Dr. Zhang JianDong, who had studied several villages in Liao-Ning province and concluded in a paper published in 1987 that high rates of cancer mortality could be associated with chromium-6 releases in the groundwater from a smeltering operation.
In 1997, another study appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine under the name of Dr. Zhang, this time repudiating the earlier conclusion.
Court documents, obtained under the California's public information law by the EWG, tell a more complex story.
EWG has urged the journal's editors to review the circumstances and set the record straight.
The environmental group's interpretation, summed up in the Wall Street Journal headline, "Pollutant Tied to Cancer: Then Consultants Got Hold of It," charges that employees of a San Francisco-based environmental consulting firm, ChemRisk, interfered with Dr. Zhang and distorted his conclusion, while disguising their involvement in his scientific reversal.
EWG spokesman Bill Walker said in a recent interview that it was very difficult to point to one document that proved the case, but that the series of documents is evidence of a fraudulent manipulation of scientific information, paid for by the utility company.
"In the actual manuscripts, you see that the article was written by, typed up by, and early versions were sent with a ChemRisk return address," he said. "But finally, there is no mention that they had been paid by PG&E, as if Dr. Zhang actually wrote it."
In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, one of the ChemRisk researchers, Brent D. Kerger, denied the allegations of unethical behavior and suggested that the charges had been drummed up by "plaintiffs' attorneys seeking windfall profits in upcoming litigation.
A copy of the letter was provided to the Monitor, in which Kerger wrote that Zhang's earlier conclusions were expressed in five sentences and that the goal in collaborating with him was to clarify and expand on his research, "while we only translated and helped assure completeness and clarity in the 1997 report."
"To the contrary, our goal in collaborating with Dr. Zhang was to put forward a complete and accurate account of his mortality findings relevant to the potential cancer hazards of chromium in drinking water," he wrote, adding that Dr. Zhang's decision not to cite them as collaborators was his prerogative as lead author.
Walker said the second study enlarged the study area to dilute the findings.
"They jiggered the data to make it come out with no association to chromium and then wrote the article," he said.
Kerger claimed authorship of 11 original research papers on chromium-6 and said that Zhang's mortality study was only a fraction of more than 100 studies on the chemical that, "USEPA, World Health Organization and others have concluded provides insufficient evidence of an ingestion cancer hazard."
Last year, in an unrelated transaction by a large company with multiple projects, the same ChemRisk consulting firm renewed its multi-year contract with the Centers for Disease Control to conduct the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment program, a comprehensive review of the laboratory's 60-year record of radiological and hazardous chemical releases into the environment.
But EWG has seized on the elevated chromium detections in a LANL test well to demand that CDC yank ChemRisk's contract.
The chromium reported from several tests in Mortandad Canyon has not so far distinguished that portion which is chromium-6, although that reading should be forthcoming soon from new tests. New Mexico and federal drinking standards are based on total chromium content.
"To put it bluntly," Richard Wiles of EWG wrote to Dr. Julie Gerberding, CDC Director, on Jan. 9, "as if ChemRisk's unethical work for chromium polluters wasn't enough reason to disqualify them from any taxpayer paid contract, now it comes out that at Los Alamos they have direct responsibility for investigating a chemical they're known to have been dishonest about."
A call to the CDC contract administrators was returned by a public affairs spokesperson, but there was no reply to a returned call on Friday.
ChemRisk's LAHDRA project has won guarded respect from local environmentalists, who have credited the project for fighting informational roadblocks at the lab and for at least one surprising discovery.
In an interim report, the project claimed to have found evidence in soil measurements of between 10 and 100 times more plutonium released than in the laboratory's own historical accounts.
Last year, it was reported that laboratory officials objected to the analysis and called for additional study and that ChemRisk has agreed to review their interim finding.
Tom Widener, ChemRisk's project director, said the project would look at the chromium issue very closely, despite the charges.
"If it's an issue of public importance, we'll make a point of saying as much as we can," he said in a recent telephone interview.
He said ChemRisk is one of the largest risk assessment concerns in the country, with thousands of studies.
"We have studied every material out there, some to support environmental cleanup or to support litigation, but we don't act differently. We apply good science," he said. "We let the documents guide us, not the lab or the University of California or the CDC."
"We're not directly saying ChemRisk is doing anything untoward in the Los Alamos project," said Walker. "But ChemRisk has a reputation as a hired gun for polluters."
Widener called the controversy a distraction.
"But if you look at our record, I don't think our integrity has been questioned," he said. "A lot of people make good money in class action suits, sometimes they like to discredit the messenger."
Erin Brockovich-Ellis, as she is now known, has not yet been positively identified in Los Alamos, even though Julia Roberts lives part-time in nearby Taos. But there may be reason to expect the real thing any day now.
