It’s never the problem, it’s the coverup…
In September, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner withheld documents from Democratic State Attorney General Lisa Madigan in order to thwart her from taking legal action. She was considering going to court to seek the immediate shutdown of the Willowbrook Sterigenics plant.
Rauner, whom the Chicago Tribunesays had and may still have a financial interest in Sterigenics, sought to let the company get away with declaring that its own emissions tests were proprietary secrets. Both he and the federal EPA delayed action other than meeting with Sterigenics until the company could install pollution controls to trap the emissions from its more than two dozen EtO sterilizers.
“In sum, IPA (the Illinois EPA) has left the decision on whether to provide emissions reports to the attorney general’s office about a company that has been and continues to release toxic chemicals into a populated community in DuPage County,” Ann Spillane, Madigan’s chief of staff, wrote in a letter to three local Republican officials in September.
Rauner relented and began cooperating with Madigan after those fellow Republican politicians began barking at him in the news media over the EPA air samples. Willowbrook is in Republican-dominated DuPage County.
On November 28, the two senators and the two Democratic congressmen, Bill Foster and Brad Schneider, joined by Democratic Representative Dan Lipinski, introduced S. 3671 and HR 7179, bills which would require EPA to tighten ethylene oxide (EtO) emissions standards for medical sterilization and chemical facilities nationwide.
In addition to the congressional action, several lawsuits have been filed from by some of the nearly 20,000 residents living within wind-drift range of Sterigenics’ emissions.
On November 30, Lipinski released a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report saying that back in the 1990s, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board recommended safety equipment to prevent explosions. Instead, however, companies using EtO persuaded the George W. Bush Administration to allow them to vent the carcinogenic chemical to the atmosphere to prevent explosions. Some states then required EtO users to install pollution controls.
Not Illinois.
Illinois left in place the old Sterigenics EPA permit to discharge into the atmosphere. The plant is right across the street from a local police station and within a quarter-mile of two schools.
That CRS report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5317190-2018-10-12-Congressional-Research-Service-Memo.html
The facts became muddied in October when the federal EPA admitted that its emissions tests through August were flawed, saying the monitors had also counted emissions of another toxic pollutant, trans-2 butene.
Sterigenics seized on this announcement, saying November 29, “The system has failed the citizens of Willowbrook by allowing flawed data measured against an illogical standard to be accepted as fact. The real travesty has been the needless fear and worry about safety that good people of Willowbrook have had to wrongly endure.”
EPA then sharply disputed Sterigenics on December 7, saying new tests in mid-November, using correct protocols and equipment, showed that some 24-hour measurements of EtO emissions around the Sterigenics plant were at levels three times higher than the supposed levels in the prior, faulty measurements which caused all the alarm in the first place.
Sterigenics says at its website that it’s the world leader in ethylene oxide and radiation sterilization with 46 plants worldwide (11 in the U.S.), and is one of the leading providers of off-site sterilization for orthopedic trays, instruments and implants.
