March 19, 2008 - Last year, the Federal Aviation Administration demolished an old guard shack that had been located on the grounds of the Leesburg Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center. The shack had been known to contain asbestos since the substance had been located there in 1993. FAA Managers involved in organizing the project put a crew of mentally disabled people to work at the site.

Now, the FAA’s inspector general, as well as Alexandria federal prosecutors and a grand jury, are investigating the intent behind the decision to put people with severe disabilities to work on a potentially hazardous task. The investigators are concerned that the decision to use these workers was a deliberate attempt to by-pass required safety procedures.

FFA spokesperson Diane Spitaliere says federal investigators will determine whether the FAA managers knowingly put the groundskeeping crew to work on a task that could endanger their health.

The tiny two-room guard shack was demolished after the FAA extended their security perimeter following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The perimeter extension meant the guard shack was no longer needed.

Following the July, 2007 demolition of the shack, a security guard at the traffic control center told superiors that asbestos materials were being disposed of by mentally-challenged employees. This was confirmed by an FAA white paper on the incident that had been obtained by The Washington Post.

A month after the work was completed, FAA managers checked results of the survey that was carried out in 1993, and determined that asbestos had been contained in the shack’s floor tiles.

An initial FAA report on the incident quoted a manager who said the mentally disabled workers were not involved in the site clean-up. However, Spitaliere claims this is not true, saying that the FAA did not follow its own required procedures for asbestos clean-up.

According to Spitaliere, the FAA’s procedures involve obtaining permits for handling asbestos materials, as well as carrying out pre-demolition asbestos tests. Neither of thee requirements were followed, according to the FAA spokesperson. In addition, the FAA could not trace the final location of the asbestos materials, despite federal regulations that that require such materials to be disposed of in labeled containers at an approved landfill.

The work had been carried out by workers from Leesburg-based group Every Citizen Has Opportunities. The group trains and finds work for mentally and physically disabled people. Workers from ECHO have provided groundskeeping services for the FAA for around thirty years, according to the group’s executive director William Haney.

Haney says he asked the FAA for a written report on the role his workers had played in the asbestos incident, but never received a response apart from being told the workers had an “incidental” role.

National Air Traffic Controllers Association union representative Rich Santa says FAA employees had determined that the ECHO workers had been ordered to handle asbestos materials, but were not provided with protective gear.

Santa also says that an FAA employee who had reported the incident to managers was told to mind his own business. In addition, says Santa, managers should have known better on this project because asbestos had been found in other FAA buildings.

FAA spokesperson Diane Spitaliere says the manager who had ordered the ECHO crew to handle the guard shack debris is “no longer in that position”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Asbestos Exposure, Jobsite Exposure, Washington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.