How a Clean Water Advocate and Senator Became a Chemical Industry Lobbyist

By David Corn, Mother Jones. Posted February 23, 2009.

A 2005 National Academy of Sciences report [PDF] said that it was safe for people to consume drinking water containing up to 24.5 parts per billion of perchlorate. (This was greater than the EPA proposal, but much less than the Pentagon's suggested standard of 200 parts per billion.) Subsequently, the EPA recommended the 24.5 ppb standard. But it encountered harsh criticism from scientists and environmentalists who argued that this level did not take into account the impact of such a dose on infants. Still, there was no actual federal regulation, and the EPA continued to work on determining whether issuing one was necessary. Meanwhile, the Pentagon deferred any extensive cleanup program. ("We heard of an Air Force base that wanted to test for perchlorate," says a congressional aide following the issue. "They thought they had it in their groundwater. The DOD said, 'Don't test.'") As the feds did nothing, states set their own limits; California proposed a six parts per billion rule, and Massachusetts established a more stringent two ppb standard.

In early 2007, with the EPA slowed down, Boxer and Solis each introduced legislation that would compel the agency to impose a strict perchlorate drinking-water standard. In doing so, they went up against the Pentagon and a band of chemical industry lobbyists. At the time, Bryan and his former-legislator director, Brent Heberlee (who years earlier had also become a lobbyist), had been retained by Aerojet, Alliant Techsystems (an aerospace conglomerate that has Utah facilities linked to perchlorate contamination), American Pacific Corporation (a major producer of perchlorate for space and defense programs), and Tronox (a chemical company spun off from Kerr-McGee, which had owned a plant in Nevada associated with a plume of perchlorate-contaminated groundwater). Their fee, according to congressional lobbying records, was about $10,000 a quarter. Two years prior, Bryan and Heberlee had been hired by Kerr-McGee to work on perchlorate issues.

Almost 20 years before going to work for the manufacturers, Bryan had become familiar with one hazard of the compound. In 1988, when he was governor of Nevada, a factory 10 miles outside of Las Vegas that produced perchlorate exploded in a tremendous blast that left a 400-foot crater and flattened an industrial park. Two people were killed and three hundred were injured. A marshmallow factory next door was destroyed in the blaze. Noting that the destruction could easily have been worse, Bryan declared, "We may have a miracle on our hands here." Later that year, Bryan was elected to the Senate, and one of his first acts in Washington was to join with his fellow Nevada senator and close friend Harry Reid to introduce legislation to use federal land in southern Nevada for the development of an industrial facility where perchlorate could be manufactured away from populated areas.

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David Corn is the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and the co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush. He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.

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