Opinion ID: 622359
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The 2005 Anthrax Shipping Incident

Text: Tri-Valley CAREs maintains that the DOE did not satisfy the standard set forth in Mothers for Peace I, which held that NEPA serves two fundamental purposes: (1) to require agency consideration of detailed information concerning significant environmental impacts; and (2) to ensure that the public can both access and contribute to that body of information via comments. Mothers for Peace I, 449 F.3d at 1034 (citing Dep't of Trans. v. Public Citizen, 541 U.S. 752, 768, 124 S.Ct. 2204, 159 L.Ed.2d 60 (2004) (emphasis added)). Specifically, Tri-Valley CAREs claims that the DOE violated NEPA by failing to fully disclose a 2005 anthrax shipping incident, therefore depriving the public of the ability to comment. The 2005 incident involved a professor at Louisiana State University who owned a collection of anthrax samples used at LLNL and contracted with a former LLNL employee to return to LLNL to package and ship the collection to two private labs. The former employee returned to LLNL on August 25, 2005, and packaged and shipped 1,065 samples from the collection to one of the labs, without incident. On September 13, 2005, the former employee returned to the facility to ship 3,108 samples to the other lab. The shipment arrived intact but the second lab noted discrepancies between the shipment received and the inventory. Finally, on September 14, 2005, the former employee sent a second shipment of 1,025 samples to the first lab. In unpacking the vials, employees at the first lab discovered improperly sealed vials, and were exposed to anthrax that had leaked into the interior packaging. The first lab concluded, however, that nothing was detected on the outside of the shipping container and therefore [the leak] was `not a public health issue.' As a result of the incident, the CDC suspended all transfers of select agents from LLNL, and LLNL voluntarily suspended all work with select agents pending an investigation. It also established an Incident Analysis Committee. In December 2005, the Incident Analysis Committee completed a comprehensive report identifying areas in need of correction and tracing many of the causes of the incident to the unique role of the former employee. In response, LLNL implemented numerous corrective actions, including expanding the Select Agent Security Plan. In February 2006, DOT examined LLNL's select agent program, concluded that the new procedures were sufficient and that the 2005 incident resulted from an unusual event. On April 18, 2006, the DOE authorized the resumption of select agent work at LLNL. In the original EA, the DOE reasoned that the addition of milliliter-quantity samples from LLNL to the hundreds of tons of infectious material already shipped daily would not have a significant impact on the risk of transportation accidents. In the DREA, the DOE added a brief discussion of the 2005 shipping incident, without identifying the select agent involved, but found that a more detailed discussion was not warranted when considered against the decades-long history of safe shipments of hundreds of tons of infectious materials. Following public comment to the disclosure of this incident in the DREA, including comments from Tri-Valley CAREs itself, the DOE revised the FREA to include an even more detailed discussion of the 2005 anthrax shipping incident in the hope of providing the public with a better understand[ing of] why the incident did not add significant information and did not challenge the conclusions of the document. Tri-Valley CAREs' arguments are unpersuasive because in the original EA, the DREA, and the FREA, the DOE specifically and carefully considered the risks of shipping infectious materials to and from the BSL-3 lab and disclosed these risks to the public. In the original EA, the DOE analyzed and found that the risk of fatality from hazardous waste transportation incidents was less than .11 per million shipments, and the specific risk from infectious substance incidents was too low to even be quantified. Tri-Valley CAREs cannot escape the logical inconsistency of its position. How could the DOE's disclosure of the 2005 shipping incident be so deficient as to deprive the public of the ability to respond, when Tri-Valley CAREs itself relied upon that very document to specifically and publicly comment on the 2005 shipping incident? The purpose of an EA is not to compile an exhaustive examination of each and every tangential event that potentially could impact the local environment. Such a task is impossible, and never-ending. The purpose of the EA is simply to create a workable public document that briefly provides evidence and analysis for an agency's finding regarding an environmental impact. 40 C.F.R. § 1508.9; League of Wilderness Defenders Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project v. Allen, 615 F.3d 1122, 1136 (9th Cir.2010) (emphasizing the parsimonious nature of an effective EA) (quoting 40 C.F.R. § 1500.1(b)). The DOE has more than met its burden here. Accordingly, we find that the DOE's discussion of the 2005 anthrax shipping incident in the DREA and the FREA satisfies NEPA.