FW: [riskanal] Flogging a hobby horse

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@PNL.GOV>]

Radsafer's:



There is a lot of misinformation floating among the public, the technical

community, and, now, RADSAFE, regarding the role of asbestos insulation in the

collapse of the WTC towers.  I am posting to RADSAFE as message I sent a few

days ago to RISKANAL that presents two sides of the issue in somewhat gruesome

detail.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine (and Steve Milloy's) and have not been reviewed and/or

approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.



-----Original Message-----

From: Dukelow, James S Jr 

Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 3:24 PM

To: Mailing List for Risk Professionals

Subject: [riskanal] Flogging a hobby horse







It is very human for people to respond to something like the September 11th

tragedy by "riding their hobby horse", that is, by viewing it as the conclusive

evidence for things they already believed.  I certainly reacted that way,

viewing the events as supporting views that I and my alter ego, Cassandra, had

believed for some time.



An egregious example of this (although far from being the most egregious) is a

collection of op-ed pieces written by Steve Milloy for FoxNews.com and his Junk

Science Home Page <www.junkscience.com>.



I have appended these and will add some comments about the engineering issues

raised by Milloy in these pieces.



==================================



A 14 Sept 2001 FoxNews.com op-ed piece by Steve Milloy



Asbestos fibers in the air and rubble following the collapse of the World

Trade Center is adding to fears in the aftermath of Tuesday's terrorist

attack. The true tragedy in the asbestos story, though, is the lives that

might have been saved but for 1970s-era hysteria about asbestos.



Until 30 years ago, asbestos was added to flame-retardant sprays used to

insulate steel building materials, particularly floor supports. The insulation

was intended to delay the steel from melting in the case of fire by up to four

hours.



In the case of the World Trade Center, emergency plans called for this

four-hour window to be used to evacuate the building while helicopters

sprayed to put out the fire and evacuated persons from the roof.



The use of asbestos ceased in the 1970s following reports of asbestos

workers becoming ill from high exposures to asbestos fibers. The Mt. Sinai

School of Medicine's Irving Selikoff had reported that asbestos workers had

higher rates of lung cancer and other diseases. Selikoff then played a key

role in the campaign to halt the use of asbestos in construction.



In 1971, New York City banned the use of asbestos in spray fireproofing. At

that time, asbestos insulating material had only been sprayed up to the 64th

floor of the World Trade Center towers.



Other materials were substituted for asbestos. Though the substitute sprays

passed Underwriters Laboratories' tests, not everyone was convinced they

would work as well.



One skeptic was the late-Herbert Levine who invented spray fireproofing with

wet asbestos in the late-1940s. Levine's invention involved a combination of

asbestos with mineral wool and made commonplace the construction of

large steel framed buildings. 



Previously, buildings such as the Empire State Building had to have their

steel framework insulated with concrete, a much more expensive insulator

that was more difficult to use.



Levine's company, Asbestospray, was familiar with the World Trade Center

construction, but failed to get the contract for spraying insulation in the

World

Trade Center. Levine frequently would say that "if a fire breaks out above the

64th floor, that building will fall down." 



That appears to be what happened Tuesday, according to Richard Wilson, a

risk expert and physics professor at Harvard University.



The two hijacked airliners crashed into floors 96 to 103 of One World Trade

Center and floors 87 to 93 of Two World Trade Center. Instead of the steel

girders of the towers lasting up to four hours before melting, the steel frames

of One World Trade Center lasted only one hour and forty minutes, while the

steel frames of Two World Trade Center lasted just 56 minutes before

collapsing.



Though many were able to escape during those times, thousands apparently

were not, including the hundreds of firefighters and police killed when the

buildings suddenly and prematurely collapsed.



Selikoff was certainly right to point out that some workers heavily exposed to

certain types of asbestos fibers were at increased risk of disease. But

Selikoff was wrong to press the panic button about any use of or exposure to

asbestos. For example, no adverse health effect has ever been attributed to

Levine's technique of spraying wet asbestos, according to Harvard's Wilson. 



We may now be paying a horrible price for junk science-fueled asbestos

hysteria.



Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the

Cato Institute and the author of the upcoming book Junk Science Judo:

Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001). 



=================================



A Steve Milloy commentary posted to Junk Science Home Page on 15-16 September



Poor timing? - This week's FoxNews.com commentary, "Asbestos Could Have Saved

WTC Lives", brought a

lot of e-mail. Some readers were critical of the timing, questioning the "taste"

of such an article so soon after

the tragedy of September 11. 



What spurred the article was the media's scaremongering about the "deadly"

asbestos arising from the rubble

of the World Trade Center. None who were critical of my commentary's timing were

critical of the timing of the

scaremongering. It's doubtful that dangerous exposures to asbestos are

occurring. High-level exposures to

certain types of asbestos fibers for lengthy periods (typically years, not

days), particularly among smokers,

are what significantly increase the risk of asbestos-related diseases. This is

not the situation in New York

City. 



The e-mail also brought more facts to light. 



Apparently, One World Trade Center was completely insulated with asbestos. But

Two World Trade Center

was insulated with asbestos only up to the 64th floor. One World Trade Center

lasted almost 45 minutes

longer than Two World Trade Center. It's possible -- no guarantees -- that more

people might have gotten out of

Two World Trade Center had it been fully asbestos-insulated. Nothing would have

prevented the buildings from

collapsing eventually given the heat generated by the combustion of jet fuel. 



===============================



And posted to the Junk Science Home Page on 21 Sept 2001 with a link to a

FoxNews.com op-ed by Milloy.



Last week's column, "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives," produced

tremendous and polarized reader response.



Most readers appreciated the article for pointing out that overreaction to the

health risks of asbestos may have hastened the collapse of the World Trade

Center towers thereby preventing many from escape. Other readers offered a

variety of criticisms ranging in theme from manners to myths. 



Timing



Some readers criticized the timing of the article. "Now is not the time to talk

about 'shoulda, coulda, woulda.' Your piece provides no comfort to any of the

victims or the families. It does nothing more than point a finger. Perhaps at

some point, that finger will need to be pointed. Today is not that day."



While this criticism certainly has merit, it was outweighed by other

considerations. 



There is little, if anything, that the media can do to provide genuine comfort

to

those who lost family and friends in the tragedy. That is not the news media's

job anyway. The news media's job is to report on current events and provide

relevant opinion through its commentators. This column falls in the latter

category.



On the day of the tragedy, the news media was already peppering

government officials with absurd questions, and unnecessarily alarming the

public about the possibility of an asbestos hazard caused by the dust from

the World Trade Center rubble. My column merely raised the flip side of this

false alarm - the potentially steep price paid for incorporating health scares

into public policy and building design. 



Unfortunately, the best time to make this point is when the public is paying

attention - as it was last week. Even the New York Times, which rarely

questions the orthodoxy of health scares, perceived value in addressing the

issue - although not until five days after this column.



Inevitability of collapse



Other critics noted that, regardless of the type of insulation used in the World

Trade Center, the steel girders would have melted anyway given the high

temperatures from burning jet fuel and insulation damaged by airplane

impact.



There is no dispute that the towers would have collapsed no matter what.

The issue, though, is time. Since asbestos insulation was superior to the

substitute used in the World Trade Center towers, it is possible that better

insulation would have slowed down girder melting and the collapse of the

towers, thereby allowing more people to escape. Even minutes would have

made a difference for many.



Since no health benefits were realized by foregoing asbestos insulation in

the World Trade Center towers, even the possibility of a few extra minutes of

time easily justifies the use of the material.



Asbestos hysteria



Many readers, especially personal injury lawyers representing asbestos

plaintiffs, pelted me with asbestos lore, particularly that asbestos has

caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. 



This claim, however, is not based in fact. It originated from a prediction made

by asbestos hysterics in the late-1970s that asbestos exposure in the U.S.

would cause between 10,000 to 67,000 deaths per year until about 2010. 



But data from the National Center for Health Statistics indicate these

predictions were way off-base. Asbestos-related deaths in the U.S. appear to

have peaked in the late-1990s at about a few thousand per year.



Yes, long-term exposures to high levels of certain types of asbestos have

increased the rates of disease among former asbestos workers, particularly

among those who smoked. But this is not the situation at the World Trade

Center site.



Though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that asbestos was

identified in some airborne dust samples collected following the collapse of

the towers, the levels are low and contain the least hazardous type of

asbestos (chrysotile). 



Data, including a 1998 study published in the New England Journal of

Medicine, indicate that non-occupational exposures to chrysotile asbestos

don't increase cancer risk.



More evidence?



An interesting bit of information came from a reader who was hired in 1983

by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to make a film about the

construction of the World Trade Center. 



The engineers responsible for overseeing construction supposedly told him

that One World Trade Center was completely insulated with asbestos, but

only two-thirds of Two World Trade Center had been insulated with asbestos

when New York City banned the material in 1971. One World Trade Center

lasted 45 minutes longer than Two World Trade Center.



Almost literally adding fuel to the fire is that more than half of the original

asbestos was eventually removed from the twin towers, a Port Authority

spokesman told the New York Times. Experts say that the replacement

insulation was inferior to asbestos.



We'll never know for sure whether asbestos insulation might have provided a

few extra minutes of escape from the doomed towers. But this is an issue

worth raising and debating, not to point fingers but to inform an attentive

public that bogus health scares may have consequences.



Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the

Cato Institute and the author of the upcoming book Junk Science Judo:

Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001). 



========================



I considered Milloy's initial piece in bad taste, but you probably shouldn't put

too much stock in my opinion on that point, since I have an antipathy to

Milloy's general approach to the world that some RISKANAL readers may be aware

of.



Milloy was set off by media speculation about danger to rescue workers and city

residents from asbestos in the air.  I share his disdain for that particular

exercise in homeopathic epidemiology.



That area of agreement aside, I focus my comments on his engineering assertions,

which, as close as I can tell, are uniformly wrong.



The critical assertion in the 14 Sept op-ed was that if asbestos insulation had

been used in the towers, they would have survived the fire and thousands of

lives would have been saved.  He cited Richard Wilson, an acknowledged expert on

risk issues, and the late Harry Levine, owner of a company [now bankrupt] that

manufactured spray-on insulation containing asbestos.  He also cites "not

everyone" as believing that the structural steel insulation that replaced

Asbestospray was as good.  In his 21 Sept piece, he says that "Experts say that

the replacement insulation was inferior to asbestos."  The conclusion he draws

is that "junk science-fueled asbestos hysteria" was responsible for the loss of

thousands of lives in the WTC.



I sent Richard Wilson an email, asking if he had been correctly qouted by

Milloy.  He replied that he was "NOT responsible for Milloy with whom I disagree

on many occasions."  He said that "Unlike most responsible reporters he did not

check his writing with me for accuracy of fact."  Wilson goes on to say,

however, that he had "looked at the website ... www.junkscience.com, and the

facts seem about right, although I disagree with some of the opinions based upon

the facts."  Further along, Wilson indicated that Milloy qouting him regarding

no adverse health effects ever having been attributed to Asbestospray was

accurate.



I would note that cause-effect attribution is difficult in both epidemiology and

law [has anybody yet "proved" that cigarettes cause cancer] and state my own

belief that Milloy did not get the facts "about right", for reasons I will

explain.



First, Milloy himself, in his 15-16 and 21 September postings, agrees that the

WTC towers would not have survived the fires, even with asbestos insulation.  By

21 September he had tumbled to the fact that the impact of the aircraft would

have severly damaged the insulation on the floors subject to the fire.



A couple of places, citing unnamed "not everyone" and "experts", Milloy asserts

that asbestos insulation was better than its replacements.  That sent me to my

reference books.  I can find no evidence to support that assertion.  The only

way spray-on asbestos seems to have been superior to the alternatives is

economically.  The spray-on asbestos was replaced at the WTC and elsewhere,

mainly by spray-on "mineral wool" insulation, which appears to have insulating

properties as good or better than spray-on asbestos.  The mineral wool sprays

share with asbestos sprays the low cost of installation, don't share the

carcinogenicity, but probably cost more, since rather than being mined, the

mineral wool is "spun" from molten rock.  Section 7-4 of the Fire Protection

Handbook, Structural Integrity During Fire, indentifies several insulation

treatments with insulating properties equivalent or better than spray-on

asbestos.  Marks' Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, 8th Ed., gives 650 deg C as

the "useful temperature limit for asbestos insulation.  Most expert commentary I

have read since the events, suggests fire temperatures of 1500-2000 deg F, which

are 200-400 deg C hotter that 650 deg C.



Milloy's histories of asbestos use, replacement, and removal appear to be

incorrect.  James Glantz and Andrew Bevkin, writing in the 18 September NYTimes,

say that the builders stopped using asbestos by the time they reached the 40th

floor of the north tower, the first one built.  They quote Guy Tozzoli, director

of the world trade department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

during the construction of the towers, as saying that the Port Authority decided

in 1969 to switch to non-asbestos insulation.  The NY City decision to ban

asbestos in all construction in the city did not come until 1971.  The Port

Authority's decision was apparently based on research into the carcinogenicity

of asbestos by Dr. Irving Selikoff and air monitoring by Dr. Arnold Langer that

showed asbestos in air samples taken in neighborhoods around the construction

site.  Glantz and Bevkin quote James Verhalen, President of United States

Mineral Products at the time of construction, and supplier of Blaze-Shield, the

insulation used on the towers [not, apparently, Asbestospray], to the effect

that the non-asbestos spray-on replacement that they developed, also call

Blaze-Shield, was the full equivalent of the asbestos version.  They quote Allen

Morrison, a spokesperson for the Port Authority, as saying that more than half

of the original, asbestos-containing insulation was later replaced.



Milloy's 14 September piece refers to WTC emergency plans using the "four-hour

window" to deploy helicopters to spray foam on the fire and to evacuated people

from the roof of the towers.  Professor Wilson raised the same issue in his

email to me.  I can only speculate, but I doubt there was any effective way to

get foam on the fires, which were burning inside the building on several floors

and no way to evacuate more than a few people from the roof in the hour to hour

and a half available.  My guess is that the people trapped on the high floors

didn't even have access to the roof.  The sprinkler system was useless against a

jet fuel fire and may have made evacuation down the stairwells much more

difficult.



It appears that very few people who were on floors above the impacts were able

to evacuate safely down the stairwells.  The lower impact point on the south

tower seems to fully explain the much shorter time to collapse of the tower.

The affected columns were carrying more weight and could be expected to fail at

lower temperature and a smaller loss of strength.



What outraged me about Milloy's 14 September piece was his immediate progression

from non-existent evidence about the history of the towers and the engineering

issues to flogging his anti-regulatory hobby horse.



There are important risk-related issues here.  Millions of people continue to

work and live in high-rise buildings.  Existing insulation treatments have

performed very well is a couple of very severe, but "normal", high-rise fires in

the last 15 or so years.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my

management or by the U.S. Department of Energy



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