Ambushed!

Let's talk about the connections between people's lives and the decisions made by the federal government. Some concept, eh? Policy matters--stop the presses. There was a time when explaining how the government affects "ordinary people" was considered political reporting. But the press became fixated on the polls, the consultants, the horse race and the partisan bickering, and ordinary people pretty much fell off the screen.

Government no longer works for most people in this country. It works for big corporations, it works for big campaign donors, but it works less and less for average Americans. While talk of Christian compassion wafts through Washington, people are not only getting screwed--losing their life savings, pensions, health insurance, jobs, unemployment comp, home heating help--they're also getting sick, being hurt and even dying because the people's interest now takes second place to big-money contributors.

In Texas we have been dealing with postpartum blues since George W. left the governor's mansion in Austin. He left us tax breaks for the rich that make it impossible for government to provide a decent education or basic services for working people, bills written by energy lobbyists working the cash-and-carry model of government perfected here in Texas and the elimination of the most basic workplace protections. Those of us who knew the president when he was governor of our low-tax, low-service, no-regulation state are seriously not amazed by what he's done in Washington.

The good news is, we're trying not to be a Third World state anymore. The bad news for you is, to borrow a line from a Texas boogie band, "We bad, we're nationwide." The worst public policy Dubya created here has gone national. "We can show Washington how to handle a budget surplus," Bush said in his 1999 State of the State address. And has he ever.

Dubya was our governor. Now he's your president, and every one of us sooner or later will be affected by his decisions (including his appointments, his predilections, his beliefs, his whims and those of his cronies), many of which are never even reported in the national press. Here, then, are three never-before-told stories of how the Bush administration has affected the lives of average Americans.

Home Alone on the Range

Men like Ed Swartz are the heroes of the modern Republican Party's creation mythology. He is the man Ronald Reagan pretended to be when Reagan rode his horse around Rancho del Cielo in Santa Barbara, California. Swartz is a Western rancher who pays his own way. He believes in property rights, an individual's constitutional right to own a gun and a work ethic that can turn 5,000 acres of semi-arid range land into a working ranch. He brands his own cattle, mends his own fences and waters his own ranch. He was chairman of the Campbell County Republican Party and is a member of the National Rifle Association. He even smokes Marlboros--with an evident pleasure that seems almost sinful.

Swartz has lived for years with the open-pit coal mines--Eagle Butte Mine, Caballo Mine, Buckskin Mine--he uses as points of reference when he gives directions to his 5,000-acre ranch north of Gillette, Wyoming. The state he lives in produces one fourth of the nation's coal, and the county he lives in produces 97 percent of the state's coal. The Swartz ranch sits in the middle of Campbell County, so Swartz understands full well what fuels the economy on the northern border of Vice President Cheney's home state. He doesn't have a problem with exploitation of the region's mineral wealth.

Like other ranchers in northern Wyoming and southern Montana, Swartz is caught up in the biggest minerals-extraction boom ever to hit a state that lives by the boom-and-bust cycle. There's nothing like a minerals-extraction boom to bring out the worst in the people doing the extracting.

It's not coal that has Swartz suing his own government and returning to a regional environmental group he helped found 30 years ago. It's coal-bed methane, locally called CBM. Methane is a clean-burning natural gas found in most coal formations; it is produced by waterborne bacteria interacting with coal. In the 1980s a simple technology was developed to release the gas. Wells are drilled into coal seams, and sections of casing pipe are strung together and inserted into the coal formation. When water is pulled out of the formation by a submersible pump, the gas flows up the pipe. CBM wells cost about $50,000 to drill and can be completed in two or three days.

An estimated 12.5 trillion cubic feet of methane is trapped in coal "cleats," or seams, in northern Wyoming--enough to supply the nation with natural gas for about a year. Cheap, quick access to it started a CBM gold rush in Wyoming's Powder River basin. Land men show up unannounced, lay contracts on kitchen tables and tell ranchers, "I'm going to make you a rich man." One northern Wyoming land man drove a huge SUV with a plastic dorsal fin attached to the top and signs on the doors that read LAND SHARK. Others persuaded owners of private mineral rights to sign $4-an-acre leases, then flipped the contract within days for $6, $8, $10 or $20 an acre. (For a point of reference, some federal leases sold for $400 an acre.) Small drilling companies cut roads, drill wells and lay pipelines, only to be gobbled up by big players like Marathon Oil, now the number one CBM producer in northern Wyoming. Eighteen thousand wells were drilled. Five thousand miles of new roads were carved out of Wyoming ranch land, and a web of pipelines was buried in the ground to move the gas to high-pressure arterial lines that carry it out of the region. Production goals in the national energy policy report, released by Vice President Cheney in May 2001, are fueling a second boom. Its size and scope make the first one look like a small increase in production.

Sitting at the kitchen table of his modest frame house, Swartz slowly draws on a Marlboro and uses the index finger of his free hand to trace the Wildcat Creek drainage basin. "If it wasn't for cigarettes, coffee and nervous energy, I couldn't keep working," he says. The Bureau of Land Management map is two years old, but the land in the watershed above Swartz's ranch is covered with dots marking existing CBM wells. And the CBM boom hasn't yet begun.

Ranchers who homesteaded the rugged hills and breaks of northern Wyoming had large tracts of land but little water. Annual rainfall averages 11 inches, but it's been a while since rainfall has been average. For five years the region has been in the grip of a drought that has ranchers caught between cloudless skies and the cattle market. All over the region, ranchers are selling off cattle in an effort to survive the drought.

Swartz depends on natural irrigation of the rich alluvial creek beds on his ranch to provide grazing and hay for his cattle. He and his father built 13 spreader dikes--staggered berms that extend two thirds of the way across the streams at right angles, reaching out like fingers from alternating sides of the bank. They force the snowmelt or rainwater to meander from bank to bank rather than flow down the channel. By the time the creek dries up in summer, grasses in its bed are thoroughly watered. Two irrigation dams allow Swartz to flood the hay meadows beyond the creek bed, then return the water to the stream. "For years, if a flood came down that crick, hell, we'd just kick it out onto the meadows," Swartz says. "All these years, we've never killed any vegetation. My father never soured a meadow. I've never soured a meadow. The cricks are the heart of this ranch. Kill the cricks, and we can't make a living here."

Coal-bed methane wells produce far more water than gas. In 2001, the 250 million metric cubic feet of gas produced in Wyoming produced 513 million barrels of water. Hitting the coal-bed methane targets set by the Bush energy planners for the Powder River basin will require enough pumping to cover the state of Rhode Island with one foot of water.

Since 1999 some of that water has been flowing down Wildcat Creek and through Ed Swartz's ranch. It was pumped out of wells upstream from the Swartz ranch and impounded by Redstone Resources. When the company's in-stream reservoirs are filled, the water flows down the Wildcat. Swartz calls it "killer water." It's so high in saline content that when it interacts with soils, it kills plant life. "The grass along this creek was belly high. Look at it. It's all dead," says Swartz.

Swartz had gone to court years earlier to defend his water rights and prevailed, winning on appeal in the Wyoming Supreme Court. "I thought I'd cut a fat hog on the ass when we won that lawsuit," he says. And he probably had. That was before the CBM boom.

"We get no help from the state of Wyoming," Swartz says. "They love the money too much." The limited CBM program that started while Bill Clinton was president, mostly on land where mineral rights were in private hands, helped turn a $700 million state deficit into a small surplus, and everyone from the governor to the county commissioners in Gillette is promoting unrestricted development. "We love gas," Governor Jim Geringer gushed in 2001. The local county commissioners are such avid CBM boosters that they rejected the report of an industry Ph.D. they'd hired to look at the effects of development. It contained "too many negative comments," a commissioner said.

When your state government is controlled by an industry that threatens your livelihood (and the environment of an entire region), where do you get help? Wyoming ranchers banded together under the banner of the Powder River Resource Council and looked to Washington, hoping the EPA would at least require some environmental safeguards. Bill Clinton and Al "Save the Earth" Gore were not exactly Earth Firsters, but they put actual environmentalists and conservationists at the EPA and Interior.

At the Bush--Cheney Interior Department, Swartz had to plead his case before a man who had worked as a lobbyist for the very company Swartz claims is destroying grazing along Wildcat Creek: Redstone Resources was one of Steve Griles's clients. In addition to lobbying for Redstone, Griles lobbied for five other big companies drilling coal-bed methane wells in northern Wyoming. He organized the Coal Bed Methane Ad Hoc Committee, an industry group working to sweep away restrictions on CBM production. On Capitol Hill he lobbied for Western Gas Resources, which describes itself as the largest acreage holder, gatherer, transporter and producer of gas in the Powder River basin.

"Hell, he's one of them," Swartz says.

At the Bush--Cheney Interior Department, they're all "one of them." If Deputy Secretary Griles steps aside because of his conflicts of interest (which he has yet to do), Swartz will be kicked along to Rebecca Watson, the Montana lawyer Bush appointed as assistant Interior secretary for land and minerals management. Watson has a CBM history of her own. She was legal counsel for Fidelity Energy, another big methane operator in Wyoming, and was also a staff attorney for the Mountain States Legal Foundation. The Denver-based nonprofit law firm, founded by James Watt in 1977, is the most notorious anti-environmental operation in the West. Watt laid out Mountain States' agenda in brief when he said, "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber."

The whole CBM bunch is so inbred they might have walked right out of a Faulkner novel. When Dick Cheney was still CEO of Halliburton, its oil-service division was already tapping into the new revenue stream in Wyoming's methane beds. And Secretary of Interior Gale Norton is an alumna of the same Mountain States Legal Foundation founded by Watt.

Swartz, as they say in Midland, is shit outta luck.

When no one at Redstone answered Swartz's letters and phone calls, and after state regulators assured him the water in his creek was just fine, he hired a lawyer. He's suing two state regulators and Redstone Resources. His suit presents the dizzying possibility that Griles and Watson will appear as witnesses for both Redstone and the Department of the Interior.

"I'm paying for lawyers on both ends of this lawsuit," Swartz says. "As a taxpayer, I'm paying the salaries of the lawyers at the state agencies. Now I've got to pay my own lawyers to sue them. I'm getting shit full of it. If I don't win this lawsuit and get the state of Wyoming to restore my resources, I don't know what I'll do." While Swartz was paying lawyers, Griles continued to be paid $248,000 a year from his former lobbying firm, National Environmental Strategies.

But Swartz will need more than a win in court to clean up the crick. He points to yellow sections of the Land Management map on his kitchen table. They represent federal ownership of mineral rights and account for two thirds of the land in the Wildcat Creek drainage above the Swartz ranch. Each section is virgin yellow, without a single dot representing a CBM well.

When Swartz filed his lawsuit in spring 2002, there were fewer than 15,000 CBM wells in the Powder River basin--all on land where mineral rights are privately held. If the Bushies at Interior have their way, in 10 years the yellow sections on Swartz's map will look like a Seurat landscape.

It's all in the plan. After the Senate in 2002 blocked Bush and Cheney's plan to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve in the first ANWR showdown, Norton, Griles and Watson pushed Interior into every energy reserve in the West. The "CBM play" in Wyoming is the largest natural-gas drilling project ever pursued by the federal government. It might even save us from terrorists, according to Watson. At a Denver coal-bed methane conference in April 2002, Watson said that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, increased natural gas production is essential to "our way of life, our economy and our national security."

If we don't drill, Bin Laden wins.

Ready to Eat, Prepare to Die

In August 2002, Dr. Frank Niemtzow was admitted to Presbyterian Medical Center at the University of Pennsylvania with a liver infection. For a man two years this side of 100, he was remarkably resilient. "Eat lots of protein," his doctor told him as he was being sent home to recover. This was sound advice, but it plunged Dr. Niemtzow into a medical nightmare as bad as anything he had ever confronted in his small family practice in New Jersey.

Listeria is a common bacterium, so common it is found in the soil under Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, across the street from Niemtzow's elegant condo. It is carried by the dogs that walk through the park and by the cats that graze the trash barrels behind the upscale restaurants just off the square. For the most part, Listeria is as harmless as it is commonplace. But Listeria monocytogenes is a nasty bug--that's the strain you want to avoid. It is psychrophilic: It thrives in cold. In your refrigerator, Listeria is as robust as the green-black mold growing on that chunk of Parmesan you bought two years ago. Once you eat it, it's like a time bomb; it can live up to two months in your body before it makes you sick. If your immune system is suppressed, if you are pregnant, if you are very old or very young or just unlucky, even a small amount of it can kill you.

Niemtzow was careful about what he ate. He was Jewish and avoided pork; he did not eat the fatty foods that have turned us into a high-cholesterol nation. When the doctor at Presbyterian told him to eats lots of protein in order to rebuild the strength the liver infection had cost him, the old family practitioner doubled up on ready-to-eat deli turkey. What could be safer? Soon, he was back in the hospital. When a doctor specializing in infectious diseases told him he had listeriosis, Niemtzow, who knew a good deal about public health, was shocked. He couldn't imagine how he had been exposed to it. When he learned he had contracted the disease by eating ready-to-eat turkey, most likely from one of two regional meat-processing plants infested with Listeria, he thought it was bad luck.

No. Much worse than that.

The industry doesn't want you to know it, but ready-to-eat meat is not ready to eat. A USDA website warns that ready-to-eat meats, such as lunch meats and hot dogs, if not thoroughly cooked, are a risk to pregnant women, the young, the old, cancer patients--anyone whose immune system is suppressed. The industry has successfully fought to keep that warning off packaging labels and grocery coolers. Do you know anyone who cooks ready-to-eat deli meals? Almost all of it is perfectly safe, but every now and then a Listeria-tainted batch of luncheon meat or hot dogs makes it into supermarkets and restaurants. Some of the people who eat it die: 500 a year in the United States.

Later in his second term, Bill Clinton responded to a deadly outbreak of listeriosis in the Midwest by starting the slow process of writing rules to require USDA testing in all plants that process ready-to-eat deli meats. By that time, Clinton had turned the USDA and its Food Safety Inspection Service into something that was beginning to look like a public health agency. Clinton's Listeria regs were ready to be printed in the Federal Register--which is to say, put on the books--when George W. Bush moved into the White House in January 2001. The Listeria regs were immediately put on hold by Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card.

They were on hold when Niemtzow ate his ready-to-go deli turkey.

They were on hold when he checked out of Presbyterian Hospital for the second time, terribly weakened by his devastating bout with listeriosis.

And they were on hold when the Niemtzow family was sitting shiva to mourn the death of its patriarch.

Frank Niemtzow was a very old man. He would have died of something before long, even if he hadn't gotten listeriosis. But Clinton's USDA rules were written to catch the very food-borne bacterium that led to Niemtzow's death.

Unfortunately for Niemtzow--and for the six others who died in the same outbreak and for the 46 other people who were sickened and for the three women who miscarried--the Republican Party is the party of unregulated meat and poultry. That is not a partisan charge; it is a statement of fact. The Republicans win elections in the "red states" in the center of the country, where cattle and chickens are produced and slaughtered. Democrats win their elections in the "blue states" on the coasts. Republicans use the USDA to pay off their contributors from the red states. The result of the crude electoral calculus is laissez-faire food-safety policy whenever a Republican is in the White House. In the 2000 election, the corporate food-production combines donated $59 million in hard and soft money, 73 percent of it to Republicans.

Neither Bush, his chief of staff Andrew Card, his political strategist Karl Rove, nor Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman can plead ignorance. They were warned. Former Agriculture under-secretary Carol Tucker Foreman was utterly dismayed that the Listeria regs she had lobbied Clinton to enact weren't safely on the books before the Bushies moved into the West Wing. She started to work the Bush Cabinet even before it met. Tucker Foreman knew that food-poisoning victims had planned a protest for the day Veneman was scheduled to take the oath of office. She got word to Veneman that the Listeria regs could save lives and suggested the protesters might stay home if the regulations were pulled off Bush's kill list. No agricultural secretary wants to begin her term surrounded by mothers holding unseemly, poster-size photos of children killed by Listeria monocytogenes and E. coli 0157:H7. It makes a special event so much less fun. The back-channel deal worked. Veneman got the White House to remove the Listeria rules from a long list of killed Clinton policies. The food-safety protesters stayed home.

Then the Listeria rules disappeared. The political appointees at the USDA used every bureaucratic mechanism available to them. Just because you didn't read about this food fight in your daily newspaper doesn't mean it wasn't an epic battle. One confrontation at a May 2002 conference brought the life-and-death nature of the debate into focus. Rosemary Mucklow of the National Meat Association stood up and said the Centers for Disease Control's statistics on deaths by food-borne pathogens were way too high. "I want to know where the bodies are buried," she demanded. When Nancy Donley stood up to respond, it was as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. "I can tell you where one body is buried," said Donley. Donley's six-year-old son died an agonizing death in 1993 after eating a burger tainted with E. coli 0157:H7.

Still, the story remained below the media's radar screen until a Pennsylvania Wampler processing plant had to recall 27 million pounds of lunch meat because (continued on page 156)Ambushed! (continued from page 90) of Listeria contamination. Unfortunately, they--or another company processing ready-to-eat meat in the region--missed the deli turkey that led to Niemtzow's death. Most of the meat had already been eaten, however, much of it by children who ate meat sold to the nation's school lunch program--a fact kept very quiet by the USDA.

The Wampler processing plant in Franconia, Pennsylvania is a squat building that sits close to a state highway 50 miles south of Philadelphia. Tall vent pipes atop the building fill the air with the scent of roast turkey and smoked chicken. Trucks and forklifts move in and out of the parking lot. At the side entrance, workers wearing standard-issue hair nets gather at a doorway to talk on cell phones, smoke, drink coffee, and joke (in Spanish) about their bosses. Management let us know, in English, that reporters are not welcome.

Two-thousand-pound bins of raw turkey and chicken meat arrive daily from the South in refrigerated trucks. The meat is ground, seasoned, tumbled, injected, emulsified, smoked, heated, cooled and pressed into large turkey roasts. It is squeezed into casings to make turkey franks, which are then shipped all over the country.

For almost two years Vincent Erthal was the USDA inspector on the second shift at Wampler's Franconia plant. Erthal describes the plant as one of the dirtiest he had seen in 20 years with USDA. Leaked internal documents obtained from another source support his claims. They describe meat residue from the previous day stuck on equipment; old meat on the times of forks used to mix meat products; liquid filled with "unknown black foreign particles (possibly from the overhead cooling units)" dripping on 600 pounds of meat; water splashing from the floor onto food products; workers washing their boots and allowing water to splash onto food and food-preparation surfaces; condensation on ducts and pipes above the food-processing area. One hundred sixteen pages of USDA inspectors' reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act include many similar violations during the year before the recall. In his report, Erthal repeatedly warns of condensate that is contaminating food and food-processing equipment.

Documents covering a period before Wampler's October 2002 recall refer to dozens of earlier violations of USDA guidelines. Water from the floor splashing onto the food products was a red flag. Erthal said he worried about the backed-up drains and standing water in the plant. When the USDA finally got around to taking samples for Listeria, the strain of bacteria that cost Niemtzow his life was found in the drains. It was a little late. Tons of ready-to-eat chicken and turkey had already been processed and shipped, and most of it had been eaten.

It didn't have to happen. The rules the Bush administration killed during its first week in office would have required regular testing for Listeria--and quick action if it was detected.

Toxic Avenger

"He fired the best and most decent man who ever worked at the EPA."--Marie Flickinger, April 2002

"I had run out of hope."

That's how Marie Flickinger felt in 1992 after she learned an EPA contractor was fixing to incinerate toxic sludge on the site of the abandoned Brio Refinery, right in the heart of her Houston neighborhood. Flickinger, who had studied the cleanup plan up one side and down the other, was desperately worried about the threat to the elementary school, the hospital and the junior-college campus nearby. The toxic sludge in the neighborhood was bad enough, she thought; how the hell could the EPA think about making it worse?

Flickinger had researched the birth defects, the miscarriages and the spontaneous abortions that seemed like an epidemic in the residential subdivision near Brio. She had watched the Little Leaguers walk off the baseball diamond near the site with their cleats covered in chemical tar. She smelled the malodorous black substance seeping from the driveways.

Now the EPA was prepared to incinerate 245,000 tons of toxic sludge left by Monsanto, Atlantic Richfield and other corporate citizens in the soil of a 58-acre site 20 miles south of downtown Houston.

Flickinger is the maverick publisher of a community weekly newspaper. She used the South Belt-Ellington Leader to report on the problems with the EPA's plan. The agency, she argued, hadn't done a proper site characterization. They didn't know what was in the soil and sludge they were preparing to burn. They didn't know where the sludge pits were. They hadn't tested for metals. And they hadn't looked carefully at the birth defects and miscarriages in the neighborhoods near the abandoned refinery.

According to the EPA, the site was used for "by-product recycling, copper catalyst regeneration and petrochemical recovery." Sediment was cleaned out of industrial and refinery tank bottoms; anything that was reusable was extracted. Styrene and vinyl chloride tars were stored in open, unlined ponds waiting for processing. It was done in one of the state's environmental hot zones, where the Great State's Bermuda triangle of Superfund sites overlaps Houston's Bubba Belt. As they'd say in Texas, "A lot of dangerous chemical shit was boiled, baked, buried and slopped across 58 acres of black gumbo swamp on the edge of Mud Gully. Then the bakers and sloppers upped and hauled ass." Five thousand families lived very close to the site they left behind.

The experts at the EPA had figured out the problem, said Flickinger, but their solution was all wrong. Their plan to dig up the sludge and burn it was a greater public health threat than leaving it all in the ground. "The EPA wouldn't listen to us," Flickinger said. "They treated us like hysterical housewives." By 1992, all Flickinger had to show for her five-year fight over the Brio Superfund site were warnings from local advertisers that the South Belt-Ellington Leader was the problem. It was causing "bad publicity" for the south Houston community.

"Bad publicity! The EPA was getting ready to burn toxic material in a residential neighborhood, and they didn't even know what they were burning," Flickinger said.

When a botched EPA cleanup plan threatens your life and the lives of your neighbors, who you gonna call?

Flickinger called the EPA National Ombudsman's office.

Bob Martin answered the phone.

Martin is a Makah Indian from Washington state. He spent the 1980s directing an association of Indian tribes that own mineral-rich lands. He represented Indians in environmental fights in court and before administrative agencies. He ran his own environmental cleanup company. Working as an environmental lawyer for Native Americans, Martin learned not only a good deal about environmental advocacy but also about the nature of the federal bureaucracy. Martin applied for the ombudsman's job, which was established and empowered by Congress to be an independent watchdog over the EPA. He was hired at the end of George H.W. Bush's presidency.

By the time Flickinger called, Martin already had some sense of how the agency worked. After two weeks on the job, he went to Pennsylvania to look into complaints about an EPA cleanup. He went to meetings. He listened to the concerns of the people living near a Super-fund site, and he was appalled by the agency's contempt for the community. "I used to think that the government mistreated only the Indians," he said at one public meeting. "I now know they mistreat all Americans." That quote made the newspapers. The next day an EPA administrator walked into Martin's office and handed him a letter of retraction to sign. "I told him that was exactly what I said. I can't retract it," Martin said. His refusal to sign was a small gesture, but it affirmed the independence of the office.

The office wasn't much. Martin had a staff of four, an annual budget of $100,000 and a toll-free phone line. Yet the ombudsman fielded more than 4,000 complaints a year. His is--or was--an office whose sole authority lay in issuing reports in response to complaints from people who believe the EPA is not responding, or is responding on the cheap and not properly cleaning up a site, or is responding with a cleanup that puts a community at risk. By the time George W. Bush took the oath of office, Martin had more than 100 active cases.

He listened as Marie Flickinger told him about the 13 neighborhood pregnancies that had ended in horrible birth defects, about children born with genitalia that were neither male nor female. She told him the EPA's Brio report didn't mention mercury, but she had found a Monsanto document that asked what had happened to the mercury.

Martin surprised her.

He told her he was coming down to have a look at the site. When he called back to tell her the EPA wouldn't pay for a plane ticket, Flickinger offered to buy him one. Martin suggested instead that they meet at an EPA conference in Dallas. Flickinger showed up in Dallas with a book of documents that convinced Martin the agency had failed.

"They were going to do this in the middle of a community of 70,000 people, near a hospital, near schools. We were going to have to close down San Jacinto Junior College," Flickinger said. "Waste Management had built an incinerator. When Bob issued his report, that sucker was 10 days from starting to burn waste. And they didn't even know what was in the waste they were going to burn."

Today, thanks to Martin's efforts, the Brio site is sealed off behind a 50-foot-deep concrete wall, covered with a gas-containment layer and studded with air-monitoring devices and vents that capture toxic gas eruptions. Standing water and groundwater are pumped and treated, lowering the level of toxins in the bodies of fish caught in Clear Creek. The creek had the highest trace amounts of volatile substances ever detected in fish tested in the U.S. An elementary school and 677 homes that were also contaminated have been abandoned.

Brio was Martin's first big case, and he used it to expand and define the powers of an office that was almost an experiment when he drew his first paycheck.

By the time George W. Bush appointed New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman as EPA administrator, Martin had worked with EPA directors appointed by the elder George Bush and by Bill Clinton. He had been at odds with all of them--most recently with Democrat Carol Browner over a controversial incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. It was all part of the job. As the Bush administration began to take shape, it was obvious that Whitman wasn't a real player. Early on, she was so often blown away at Cabinet meetings that Secretary of State Colin Powell began to call her "the wind dummy" (a wind dummy is a life-size dummy thrown out of an airplane to help judge wind currents so paratroopers can hit a landing zone). Eleven months after Whitman was appointed, she finally got her feet on the ground and made a decision.

She got rid of Bob Martin.

In November 2001 she ordered her deputy administrator to inform Martin that she was folding the ombudsman's office into the agency, where it would be under the control of the inspector general.

Martin took Whitman to court and won. At least, he got to win for a while. Federal judge Richard Roberts handed down a temporary restraining order barring Whitman from closing the independent ombudsman's office and moving it into the agency's Office of the Inspector General. The inspector general, it should be noted, answers to Whitman.

The restraining order was shorter than the leash Whitman wanted to put on Martin. In April 2002, Judge Roberts concluded that Martin had not exhausted his administrative remedies. Until he did, the federal courts were not the appropriate forum to hear his case. Martin would have to appeal first to the merit review board, then return to court. Whitman was in no mood to wait. Martin was out of town on EPA business when Whitman seized not only the moment but also 140 file boxes from Martin's office containing information about cases Martin was working on.

"They came in like storm troopers," said Hugh Kaufman, the chief investigator in the ombudsman's office. In addition to taking case files, agents from the inspector general's office removed all computers and telephones. In order to keep Martin from soldiering on with his cell phone and laptop, the raiders changed the locks on the office door.

Who says Ms. Whitman wasn't capable of making decisions at the EPA?

After the raid, Martin was ordered to report to work in the inspector general's office. He could have continued to draw his $118,000 salary by answering a hotline, but he chose to resign. Under the inspector general, the ombudsman no longer has any independence, or control of budget or staff. Martin said he could not surrender the ombudsman's independence. In fact, he was slightly emphatic: "Never, never, never, never."

He resigned because the office can work only if it is independent. In the inspector general's office, the ombudsman would be working for the agency he is supposed to be watchdogging.

"I would not accede to that," he said. "I would never destroy the office we worked to build. So they had to resort to a bold power move."

Busting the EPA's ombudsman was a small part of a Republican plan that began with Ronald Reagan, continued with Newt Gingrich and now is in the hands of Bush and Cheney. The dirty secret is that the Superfund isn't super anymore. What was once a $3.8 billion trust, built up since 1980 with a special tax on chemical companies, bottomed out at $28 million in 2003--not even enough to clean up one of the hundreds of abandoned sites in the country. The money's gone. In 1995 Newt Gingrich killed the tax. Bill Clinton couldn't persuade a Republican Congress to reinstate it. And they'll be serving beer in Lubbock (which has been dry since Prohibition) before Dubya proposes a tax on chemical companies.

Superfund cleanups are now paid for by general revenue--that is, by you and me, rather than by the chemical and oil companies that made the mess. Martin was sent packing because an independent ombudsman could force the EPA to work on sites it is required to by law--to clean them up and to find the money to do so.

"I can tell you where one body is buried," said Donley. Her son had died an agonizing death from E. coli.