Smoke & Mirrors

Wayne got there before most of the fire crews, so he was able to pull up right where the ChemCentral workers were standing. One had a burn on his leg. The workers told Wayne and other bystanders about how they had fled the explosions. "He was just saying that a tank erupted, and if they hadn't gotten out of there, they all would've died," Wayne recalls.

Cops finally kicked Wayne and the other bystanders out of the area, so he went back to his Columbus Park home. "I'm walking around back in my yard," he says, "and shit's just falling from the sky. It was this Styrofoam-type stuff that was all charred." They were shaped like cow patties and light as air. Bits of them fell in a nine-acre vacant field near his home.

At 9:29 p.m., Wayne fired off an e-mail to the EPA, telling the agency about what he had found in his yard. "I have no plan to touch them, but would be glad to help," he wrote. He gave directions to the property and added his phone number.

Wayne never heard back from the EPA. The only record of communication about his note is contained in an e-mail written by one EPA employee, Ina Square, who forwarded it to a co-worker with this comment: "Here's a good one for you."

The EPA's failure to respond to Wayne's request is one of several questionable decisions the agency made during its response to the ChemCentral fire.

The EPA defends its handling of the fire's aftermath, pointing to a series of reports the agency published that claim there was little or no environmental impact from the debris or the smoke.

The day after the fire, the EPA took wipe samples from several schools near the ChemCentral plant. The wipe samples, akin to rubbing a wet paper towel across a surface, are used to detect whether smoke or debris have left behind chemical residues. None of the samples turned up dangerous levels of chemicals.

But all of the schools tested were upwind of either the fire or the smoke — the cloud hadn't passed directly over them. No wipe samples were taken on property that was directly under the smoke.

EPA officials say they took wipe samples only because the Kansas City, Missouri, School District asked them to take extra measures to be certain that schools near the fire were safe. "The only reason we took the wipe samples," Buchholz says, "was at the request of the school district."

Howard Dunn, professor emeritus at the University of Southern Indiana and a retired chemist, became interested in the fire because his daughter was working in Kansas City at the time. Dunn studied the EPA documents. He says he was appalled that no one took wipe samples from areas the cloud passed over. "The long-term health effects — I don't think they can say anything with any certainty," Dunn says.

But Buchholz says wipe samples aren't the best indicator of whether the ash or smoke was harmful. A better gauge, he says, would be four ash samples from the neighborhood west of the plant.

Those ash samples have limited results. They cannot detect harmful levels of several chemicals that were stored at ChemCentral. In the EPA's June 10 final report, scientists acknowledged that the tests showed levels that "slightly exceeded the health-based benchmarks" for chemicals, including the pesticide dibromoethane and a fungicide called trichlorophenol. Both can be harmful, and dibromoethane can be fatal if ingested.

EPA toxicologist Mike Beringer cautions that the test results didn't show that the chemicals were present — only that the tests were inconclusive. Still, Beringer says, if the chemicals were present, they would have been at levels low enough so as not to be harmful.

"It's not just about exceeding the benchmarks," Beringer says. "When we do these analyses, we have to ask ourselves, How nasty are these chemicals and how are people being exposed?" Because residents could have ingested only small amounts of the ash, the EPA determined that the ash did not require widespread cleanup.

Whether the ash was harmful became irrelevant a couple of days after the fire. It rained and snowed, and Wayne recalls watching the debris run into the sewers. After fire investigators determined the explosion began when ChemCentral employees were handling the chemical Indopol, the EPA went back through the plant's records. EPA officials found that ChemCentral had failed to notify the agency that Indopol was stored at the Prospect Avenue plant.

So on July 23, the EPA filed a federal lawsuit against ChemCentral for violating the Clean Air Act.

It had already been a bad month for ChemCentral. The lawsuit followed a July 19 citation filed by OSHA, claiming that ChemCentral had ignored a litany of safety regulations at its plant.