The New York Asbstos Debacle; T. Brown

The day before, special investigators from the City's School Construction Authority Inspector General's office called the State Department of Education in Albany to ask if they could see the asbestos management plans for each of the 1,069 New York City public schools. Without warning, investiga tors showed up 20 minutes later armed with service revolvers and search warrants. What they found, as they pored over thou sands of documents, was that the school reports: "in addition to being incomplete and inaccurate, are so confusing and poorly organized that even an expert would have difficulty in determining specifically where asbestos is pr~sent in a particular school. For the ordinary concerned parent or teacher, the reports are incomprehensible. " The next day New York Mayor David Dinkins held a press conference and ordered every New York City public school closed Tim Brown, a freelance writer, is a former Warren T. Brookes Fellow at the Cato Institute.

91 pending a reinspection for asbestos contam ination. Operation Clean House had begun. The New York asbestos saga really began in 1986 with the passage of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA) which mandated that local gov ernments survey all schools to inventory and identify asbestos-containing material. New York's original inspection process be gan in 1988 and was conducted by a 53 member Asbestos Task Force, under the School Construction Authority. The inspec tions were originally to be completed in October 1988,but the task force asked for an extension until May 1989. As of February 1989, only 630 inspections had been com pleted; at least 300 inspection reports were filedwithin the last few days of the deadline. Task force inspectors allegedly fabricated reports to indicate that inspections had taken place when in fact they had not. By 1990 construction workers and build ing inspectors were reporting the discovery of damaged, exposed asbestos during school renovations in places that had been declared free of asbestos. Only in 1993 was the Inspector General's office asked to investi gate, however, after which city officials panicked.

Then they mismanaged the ensuing public communications effort. In fact, the actual risk of asbestos exposure to children was extremely low. The city's acting Health Commissioner, Dr. Benjamin Chu, said that there was no evidence that students and staff 92 THE FREEMAN • FEBRUARY 1994 had been exposed or harmed, and there "is really no basis for alarm now." Even the Inspector General's report that set the stage for Operation Clean House admitted that "Although the AHERA reports may be completely unreliable, it does, not neces sarily follow that every school is unsafe or must be closed." But the mayor's precipi tous school closings left parents convinced that their children had been at risk. And the government would not release any specific information on which schools_had been found to contain damaged asbestos, until after the particular school had been cleaned up, further reducing the city's credibility: John C. Fager, co-chairman of the Parents Coalition for 'Education, said that "Parents are totally in the dark. . . not informingthem is just inviting more fear and hysteria."

However, city officials, too, were obvi ously in the dark. Contrary to popular as sumptions, neither AHERA, nor Environ mental Protection Agency regulations, nor state environmental laws required closure of all the schools. After all, the schools re mained open during the original AHERA inspections. Rather, like so many environ mental issues, asbestos in schools is a po litical rather than scientific issue. Mugged by Reality But even the politicians eventually had to give in to reality. With only a handful of trained and certified' asbestos inspectors, their original Herculean goal of visiting 35 schools a day was never realistic. As the deadline neared, and the pressure to open the schools on time increased, inspectors facrd the same deadline pressures as the first asbestos task force. With 18 days to go only 197 schools had been inspected, leav ing 743 to go. Something had to give. The new Schools Chancellor, Ramon C. Cort ines, declared that all schools would open on September 20 except for a handful in which asbestos would be sealed or removed. As Cortines admitted, "If we had known what we know now on the 9th of September we might have made a decision to open [the schools on time]."

Obviously, the actual risk posed by as bestos did not change throughout this pro cess, but rather, remained somewhere be tween hundreds and thousands of times lower that other everyday hazards facing schoolchildren. Scientists agree that the mere presence of asbestos does not pose a hazard if the asbestos is encapsulated-in , wall plaster, for instance. Only if asbestos is damaged so that the fibers are exposed to the air is a person likely to inhale asbestos particles, and even then, a very large con centration of airborne asbestos is necessary to pose a health risk. Yet, the city never attempted to measure airborne asbestos con tamination,the only empiricalevidence upon which to base a decision. In mid-September, a group of 17 scientists criticized city offi ciais for not taking into account the wealth of scientific data available on asbestos. As it turns out, samples taken after the school closings revealed particle levels be low the Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, much lower than safe limits, and even lower than ambient outside levels. The latter should come as no surprise. A $4 millionEPA review of asbes tos data, including a survey of 170 schools published in 1991 by the Health Effects Institute-Asbestos Research, found indoor asbestos levels to be lower than that outside buildings.

Unfortunately, the asbestos scare reflects a larger pattern: the routine politicization of the environment in areas ranging from Alar to globalwarming. Offthe record, even New York city officialsadmitted that closing the schools was less a scientific necessity and more a political remedy to mollify irate parents who had lost confidence in the school system. In the end, the schools reopened. Along the way asbestos contractors made some money, parents were frightened, politicians postured, and scientists struggled to be heard. But while the New York schools seemed to get back to normal, the public remains as vulnerable as ever to new attacks of environmental hysteria-perhaps involv ing lead poisoning, perhaps ozone deple tion, or perhaps something else. 0 BOOKS The Rise and Fall of Leftist Radicalism in America by Edward Walter Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut 1992 • 194 pages. $45.00 Reviewed by David Osterfeld E dward Walter's The Rise and Fall of Leftist Radicalism in America is, in the author's words, "a defense of liberal de mocracy and the United States as its fore most practitioner" from the onslaught of the leftist radicals, whose attacks he views as "devious, unfair, and unprincipled."