The Center for Public Integrity

In the space of a minute, federal prison worker Jason Unwin was twice attacked by a furious, muscle-bound inmate on Dec. 21, 2010.

Agitated after a disciplinary hearing, the inmate first punched one of Unwin’s colleagues in the face, knocking him unconscious. He then turned to Unwin, a correctional counselor at the United States Penitentiary in Florence, Colo. “I was hit square in the face,” said Unwin, 51.

With a bloodied Unwin in pursuit, the inmate walked off. Seconds later, with Unwin briefly distracted, the inmate “blindsided me. He hit me with a closed fist, very hard, on the left side of the head. I was knocked unconscious.”

Unwin, a Federal Bureau of Prisons employee for 16 years, hasn’t worked since. He doesn’t have a full range of motion in his right shoulder, he said, and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He has short-term memory problems, sleeps irregularly and faces seizure risks.

The saving grace: He is covered by a 96-year-old compensation program for injured federal workers. Under the Federal Employees Compensation Act of 1916 (FECA), he receives 75 percent of his former salary, tax-free; his monthly income is within a few hundred dollars of his previous salary.

Legislation pending in the U.S. Senate, however, ultimately would cut Unwin’s benefits and could affect many other government workers — especially those with modest incomes — in the future.

The measure, championed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is included in a postal reform bill that may come up for a vote this month. Collins said it would stamp out abuses while saving money.

Yet officials with federal employees’ unions say the legislation would unfairly punish victims of workplace violence and other traumatic injuries — and their families.

Again drawn by a leak of toxic hydrofluoric acid, federal investigators are back at a Texas oil refinery they examined three years ago.

Some nearby residents were told to shelter in place after the release, said Daniel Horowitz, managing director of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which has sent a team of investigators to the Citgo refinery in Corpus Christi. It’s not yet clear how much of the acid, known as HF, got out.

“Any incident involving the release of HF is something we take very seriously,” Horowitz said.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation last year found that 50 refineries use the acid despite the availability of safer alternatives. At least 16 million Americans live in the path of a toxic cloud in the event of an accident.

A close call at the Citgo refinery was one of three major accidents involving HF in 2009. The CSB investigated that accident and issued urgent recommendations to Citgo. The board doesn’t have authority to issue citations or impose penalties.

A Citgo spokesman said the company had followed all of the board’s recommendations and that the accident on Monday “is not related to the 2009 incident.”

At about 7:15 p.m. on Monday, a leaking flange released materials including HF from a pipe, triggering water cannons meant to control the release, the Citgo spokesman said. The company’s monitoring data indicated that no chemicals escaped the unit where the leak occurred, he said.

After the 2009 accident, Citgo reported that about 30 pounds of the acid had gotten past its control systems, but the CSB later determined the real amount was likely about 4,000 pounds.

When Deidre Ramos moved with her infant son to the Parker Street section of New Bedford, Mass., little did she know that her new neighborhood was toxic.

Today, a decade later, Ramos is worried about the health of her two sons growing up in a community contaminated by an old burn dump containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

“What will be the long-term effects on my children?” asked Ramos.

Now new research conducted in New Bedford suggests that these industrial chemicals, which were first linked to learning problems in children more than two decades ago, may play a role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), too.

Boys who were exposed to higher levels of PCBs in the womb scored lower on focus and concentration tests, which indicates that they are more likely to have attention problems often related to ADHD, according to a newly published study of New Bedford area children.

All of the children studied were born to mothers who lived near the contaminated harbor and dumpsites in these low-income communities, where twice as many people live below the poverty line than the Massachusetts average. But experts say that their exposure levels were fairly low, comparable to people's levels throughout much of the United States, which means that a connection between PCBs and attention problems in boys could exist in other communities, too.

Banned in the United States more than 30 years ago, PCBs are long-lived industrial chemicals that accumulate in food chains. Nearly every U.S. resident still has detectable levels in his or her blood. PCBs have the ability to disrupt hormones, which can alter how the brain develops.

A much-anticipated government study of more than 12,000 miners — whose publication was delayed by litigation from a group of mining companies — has found that exposure to diesel engine exhaust significantly increases the risk of lung cancer.

For the most heavily exposed miners, the risk of dying from lung cancer was three times higher than it was for those exposed to low doses. For non-smokers, the risk was seven times higher.

“[T]he findings suggest that the risks may extend to other workers exposed to diesel exhaust in the United States and abroad, and to people living in urban areas where diesel exhaust levels are elevated,” Joseph Fraumeni Jr., director of the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, said in a press release Friday morning.

Two papers detailing the study’s results were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. One of them concluded that diesel-induced lung cancer “may represent a potential public health burden.”

In an editorial in the journal, Lesley Rushton, an epidemiologist at Imperial College in London, wrote, “These results indicate that stringent occupational and particu­larly environmental standards for [diesel exhaust] should be set and compli­ance ensured to have an impact on health outcomes.” The setting of stricter standards could have broad implications given the ubiquity of diesel engines in trucks, buses, ships, trains and construction equipment.

The Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General will examine a federal program that recognizes “model workplaces” and exempts them from regular inspections, the office’s audit plan for the coming fiscal year shows.

The assessment comes as an Occupational Safety and Health Administration task force is conducting its own review of the agency’s Voluntary Protection Programs — the subject of a recent Center for Public Integrity investigation.

The Center found that, since 2000, more than 80 workers have died at sites OSHA deemed the nation’s safest. But even when investigators found serious safety violations related to the fatal accidents, OSHA rarely used its authority to remove sites from the program.

About 21 months ago, a proposed list of widely used chemicals that may pose health risks landed at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for review.

It’s still there.

An attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to create a “chemicals of concern” list — part of the agency’s larger plans to improve what administrator Lisa Jackson has called an outdated and dysfunctional system for regulating toxic substances — remains stuck in the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

The proposal has sparked heavy resistance among industry groups, some of which have met with White House officials and argued that releasing the list could harm the economy. By executive order, OIRA should finish such reviews within 90 days — or, in some cases, 120. Instead, it’s had the EPA list for 638 days — and counting.

“The reason is political pandering,” said Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the Center for Progressive Reform. “OIRA is a politicized place where rules go to die.”

OMB spokeswoman Meg Reilly said in an emailed statement that the office doesn’t comment on regulations under review, but “it’s not uncommon for review periods to be extended for regulatory actions that require additional time for consideration of public comment and analysis by OMB and all the affected agencies.”

Since OIRA received the proposal on May 12, 2010, it has hosted eight meetings about the list — six of them with companies and industry groups. By comparison, OIRA officials have met once with public health and environmental groups and once with staffers for Democratic Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Sheldon Whitehouse, sponsors of legislation to reform regulation of toxic chemicals.

Publication of a landmark government study probing whether diesel engine exhaust causes lung cancer in miners — already 20 years in the making — has been delayed by industry and congressional insistence on seeing study data and documents before the public does.

A federal judge has affirmed the right of an industry group and a House committee to review the materials and has held the Department of Health and Human Services in contempt for not producing all of them.

The much-anticipated study of 12,000 miners exposed to diesel fumes carries broad implications. If the research suggests a strong link between the fumes and cancer, regulation and litigation could ramp up — with consequences not only for underground mining, but also for industries such as trucking, rail and shipping.

Exposure isn't limited to workers; people who live near ports, rail yards and highways also are subjected to diesel exhaust laced with carcinogens such as benzene, arsenic and formaldehyde.

But for the time being, at least, the results of an $11.5 million investigation by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are under lock and key.

Richard Clapp, emeritus professor of environmental health at Boston University, is among several public health experts who called the situation unusual.

"I've never heard of an industry group demanding manuscripts from a government agency before a study has been accepted for publication," Clapp said. “My guess is it would give the industry a chance to prepare their rejoinder early. They want to delay anything that’s going to implicate them in liability for lung cancer.”

A federal task force is conducting a “top-to-bottom review” of a controversial program that exempts “model workplaces” from regular safety inspections, a Department of Labor official confirmed this week.

The review is focusing in part on “legitimate concerns” raised earlier this year in a Center for Public Integrity investigation, said Jordan Barab, the No. 2 official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which runs the program.

The Center’s investigation found that, since 2000, more than 80 workers have died at workplaces in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, known as VPP – a club of more than 2,400 sites that are supposed to be the nation’s safest. In more than half of these cases, the mandatory inspection triggered by the fatal accident found serious safety violations.  Yet these deaths rarely led to serious consequences for the company, and OSHA has seldom used its authority to boot a site from the program.

Among the questions the agency will have to address: What should happen when a worker is killed at one of these OSHA-recognized sites?

OSHA’s policy on responding to fatal accidents at VPP sites is one of “the first things we are looking at,” Barab said. The task force, which has six members pulled from OSHA’s local, regional and national offices, has submitted its report, which is being reviewed and will have to go through the agency’s lawyers, he said.

The document includes recommendations on how to improve the program, but Barab would not provide details. “I’m not saying we’re going to change everything, but we are looking at [the recommendations],” he said.