California May Drop Its Rock, And Geologists Feel the Pain

LOS ANGELES -- Empirically speaking, geologists are not a particularly irascible group. But those who make their living studying rocks, minerals and gems in California -- and increasingly those scientists beyond the state's borders -- are enraged over a bill in Sacramento that would knock serpentine, the official state rock, off its mantle.

The lawmaker and others who would like to see serpentine stripped of its title say the olive green rock found all over the state is a grim symbol of the deadly cancers associated with asbestos, which can be found in the rock. Geologists, who have taken to Twitter on behalf of the rock, assert that serpentine is harmless and is being demonized by advocates for people with asbestos-related diseases and possibly their trial lawyers, too.

The bill to defrock the rock -- which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly -- is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine ''has known health effects,'' the bill would leave California -- one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral -- without an official rock. (According to the bill, California was the first state, in 1965, to name an official rock.) Asbestos occurs naturally in many minerals, and indeed some serpentine rocks do serve as a host for chrysotile, a form of asbestos. But geologists say chrysotile is less harmful than some other forms of asbestos, and would be a danger -- like scores of other rocks -- only if a person were to breathe its dust repeatedly.

''There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock,'' said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. ''Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.''

Dr. Ross and other opponents of the bill are concerned that removing serpentine, which is occasionally used in jewelry, as the state's rock would demonize it and thus inspire litigation against museums, property owners and other sites where the rocks sit; they cite the inclusion of a letter of support from the Consumer Attorneys of California with the bill as evidence.

''If they keep the asbestos issue bubbling,'' Dr. Ross said, ''it means money for politicians, more money for lawyers and money for scientists to investigate.''

J. D. Preston, a spokesman from the consumer lawyers group, said the group had nothing to do with drafting the legislation and was just responding to a request from the awareness organization for a support letter. ''We just thought this was a good fit in our mission of consumer safety,'' Mr. Preston said. ''It is certainly not the intent, and we don't even see where it opens the avenue for litigation.''

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated no position.

Linda Reinstein, president of the awareness organization, whose husband died of lung cancer, pointed out that the bill had numerous letters of support, including ones from the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and groups that represent people with mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of many internal organs associated with asbestos.

''It doesn't do anything legally,'' Ms. Reinstein said of the proposed legislation. ''This bill is all about education and awareness. We never expected such a stir.''

Under the hashtag -- a Twitter identifying phrase that allows easy searching of similarly themed messages -- #CASerpentine, scientists and other opponents of the bill are debating the bill's merits and offering fighting words. One read, ''Dear gloria romero, you have picked the wrong nerds to mess with!''

PHOTOS: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A1); State Senator Gloria Romero proposed the serpentine bill. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICH PEDRONCELLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (A16)

View the original article here

New York Increases Monitoring of Asbestos Inspectors

Three months after a safety inspector admitted to falsifying hundreds of reports concluding that buildings were free of cancer-causing asbestos, the city agency that licensed him — and still licenses nearly 550 others — says it has taken steps to ensure better oversight.

The agency, the Department of Environmental Protection, which certifies the private inspectors who test buildings and construction sites, says the measures include sharing information with federal, state and city agencies, computerizing its filing system and substantially increasing audits and spot checks of inspectors in the field.

The changes, the result of a two-month internal review, were outlined in a June 28 memorandum to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg from the environmental agency’s commissioner, Cas Holloway. The agency provided a copy of the five-page memorandum to The New York Times.

The review, an agency official said, was prompted by an article in The Times in late April about the inspector, Saverio F. Todaro, 68, who had admitted in federal court a month earlier that he falsified the reports. Mr. Todaro pleaded guilty to federal environmental crimes, fraud and making false statements; he faces as long as five years in prison when he appears next month before a judge for sentencing.

Mr. Todaro, who operated an environmental inspection and testing company, acknowledged that he had submitted clean asbestos and lead test results for at least a decade without performing any tests.

The scope and audacity of his crimes and the apparent ease with which he got away with them suggested that the agency’s oversight was weak and raised questions about the integrity of the work of other inspectors.

A spokesman for the environmental agency, Farrell Sklerov, however, said that the two-month review, and a substantial increase in office audits and field visits since it began, found no indications that such conduct was widespread.

But the investigation that led to the charges against Mr. Todaro, by the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, the city Department of Investigation and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, is not over, and the authorities have suggested that more charges may be brought, though it is unclear whether they would focus on more inspectors.

The city environmental agency regulates private asbestos inspectors, who play an important role in what has long been viewed as one of the more corrupt sectors of the construction industry. The agency sets the procedures and establishes requirements for training and certification.

The inspectors, formally known as certified asbestos investigators, are hired by building owners and developers to assess apartments and buildings set to undergo renovation or demolition, because inhaling asbestos can cause lung disease and cancer. The assessments can have a major impact on the cost and duration of a project, since cleanup or abatement can be expensive and time consuming.

A surprising aspect of Mr. Todaro’s case was that his certification was suspended in 2004 by the environmental agency, which cited poor building surveys and improper record keeping.

But because of a lack of communication between city agencies, he was able to keep performing asbestos assessments and avoid scrutiny. He continued to file assessments with the city’s Buildings Department, enabling developers to obtain permits to demolish or renovate, because the Department of Environmental Protection had not notified the Buildings Department of his suspension.

“The fact that Mr. Todaro continued to conduct asbestos-related investigations following the suspension of his license raised concerns about whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to ensure that only properly licensed C.A.I.’s conduct asbestos investigations in New York City,” Mr. Holloway wrote in the memo.

The environmental agency also failed to notify the State Department of Labor, which licenses asbestos abatement companies, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Mr. Holloway said that partly because of this lapse, his agency had instituted a data-sharing and notification system with the federal E.P.A., the New York State Departments of Environmental Conservation, Labor and Health and several city agencies, including the Departments of Buildings, Design and Construction, Transportation, Housing Preservation and Development, Health and Mental Hygiene.

The new protocols, he wrote in the memo, also include an Internet-based filing system for asbestos, which will automatically reject reports by any asbestos investigator whose certification has been suspended or revoked.

The agency, Mr. Holloway said in the memo, will nearly double the number of office audits it conducts each year, to 75, up from 40; the agency will check the records and activities of nearly 15 percent of the 543 asbestos investigators it certifies.

Also, the agency hired two additional inspection monitors in February, Mr. Sklerov said, bringing to 15 the number of staff members who, among other responsibilities, monitor asbestos investigators. In addition to the office audits, the monitors will conduct 500 spot-check field inspections each year to verify the accuracy of the information asbestos investigators provided about the planned scope of work and to check for any evidence of asbestos, the memo said.

Despite the changes detailed in the memo, however, experts and law enforcement officials said that many questions remained about the case of Mr. Todaro, including how he was able to get away with what he did for so long, and how the agency’s oversight practices had developed over the years.

Not the least of the questions center on the potential lingering effects of both Mr. Todaro’s crimes and of the city’s lapses in oversight.

Indeed, because Mr. Todaro falsified so many tests, it is impossible in most instances to determine if proper assessments would have revealed levels of asbestos that were potentially dangerous — not only to workers, but also to neighbors and passers-by — because the buildings have been torn down and replaced with new ones, or gutted and renovated.

View the original article here

CITY ROOM; On a Midtown Block, the Big Yellow-Toothed Face of Labor, Times Two

Tourists shuffling out of Grand Central Terminal would be forgiven for wondering what the heck kind of low-rent horror movie about giant rats is being filmed on East 42nd Street. Immobile, fat and grinning with big yellow teeth - yikes!

New Yorkers, of course, will recognize the big inflated pests, familiar sights all over town, wherever a labor union has taken umbrage with the goings-on at the location. The rat may stay an hour or a day or longer, with handy fliers explaining the nature of the dispute. Indeed, the rats are almost counterproductive among natives, who barely bother to look up and notice anymore, as with panhandlers and police sirens and smiling people who want you to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and sign something.

But rarer, far rarer, is the double rat sighting on a single block, as is the case on 42nd Street. Two rats face two different buildings as if they'd planned it that way and carpooled in together, which was not quite the case. The union that owns the rats, Asbestos, Lead and Hazardous Waste Laborers' Local 78, is protesting the means of asbestos abatement at 60 East 42nd Street and 315 Madison Avenue, which faces 42nd. The rats will be there all week.One of them is 15 feet tall and, like many real rats, nude, his long tail turned up between his legs. The other rat is three feet shorter but nattier, wearing a suit and tie and clutching two big bags of money. They are the whiskered face of labor in New York, like rodent Tom Joads, perched wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, Ma

This week's rat double-billing requires two union men to stand watch all day.

''It's fun,'' said one, Juan Severino, 25, of the South Bronx, who has hauled the rats around for two years. ''You see the reactions of people. Some people hate us because we are disturbing the public. Some people love us. Tourists take pictures.''

Each rat's work day begins at 7 a.m., when 42nd Street is still relatively quiet. Mr. Severino parks his pickup on the curb and hauls out the deflated, folded-up rat, which rises only about knee high. He hooks it up to a fan, which in turn is hooked to a generator, into which he pours gasoline and yanks the start cord. The rat springs to life remarkably quickly, in seconds, and Mr. Severino ties it down to the subway grate on the sidewalk.

For a building's owners, the rat outside is just about as unwelcome as one running around inside.

''They always call the cops,'' Mr. Severino said. ''The first couple days are like that. It's intense.'' Then everybody gets used to one another, sort of like New Yorkers' resignation with, and even affection for, real rats. The big rats are street legal if they stay out of the road and they're not blocking the sidewalk. Mr. Severino said he and his partner pack the rats up around 3:30 p.m. A gallon of gas keeps one inflated for eight hours.

City Room left voice mail messages for the chief executives targeted by the Midtown rats.

The two rats are part of a stable for Local 78. There are two more rats that were perched at addresses in New Jersey on Wednesday, Mr. Severino said. And for those narrow sidewalks where the rats won't fit, the union mounts a coffin with a dummy inside.

Now, to be fair to those who think the rats are in a movie shoot, they might be on to something. A movie about inflated union rats that come to life and lead real rats in a siege of the city and chomp on people with their yellow teeth and wear nice suits and talk like Henry Fonda - yes, we would see that.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Two inflated rats from Local 78 of the Asbestos, Lead and Hazardous Waste Laborers near Grand Central Terminal this week. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SUZANNE DeCHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

View the original article here