On the heels of a congressional hearing blasting the handling of public information about air quality after 9/11, a June 25 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report indicates the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) similarly failed the public post-Katrina.

The GAO report, Hurricane Katrina: EPA's Current and Future Environmental Protection Efforts Could Be Enhanced by Addressing Issues and Challenges Faced on the Gulf Coast, found inadequate monitoring for asbestos around demolition and renovation sites. Additionally, the GAO investigation uncovered that "key" information released to the public about environmental contamination was neither timely nor adequate, and in some cases, easily misinterpreted to the public's detriment.

Hurricane Katrina was the first implementation of the National Response Plan (NRP), created in 2004 as result of the difficulties responding to the 9/11 disaster. Under the NRP, EPA is the federal emergency support coordinator for collecting, monitoring and effectively dealing with hazardous materials, specifically authorized to regulate asbestos emissions and maintain the National Priorities List of Superfund sites. By the time Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, EPA had already put air monitoring stations in those prioritized sites and coordinated state efforts to double their air quality sampling elsewhere.

However, according to the report, EPA failed to effectively monitor the air quality around New Orleans neighborhoods as they engaged in demolition and renovation, most notably the Ninth Ward. Merely conceiving of the agency's role to assist state and local officials to do the actual work, EPA only maintained the expanded air monitoring program for the first few months, shrinking back to its pre-Katrina scope by July 2006.

EPA also used its authority to suspend certain air quality laws via "no action assurance letters" to allow a faster building demolition process without requiring asbestos testing and removal. Though the regulation relaxation to speed demolition may have been reasonable, the failure to aggressively test for asbestos with known heightened risks was not. More worrisome, the July 2006 program reduction was due, in part, to not having found asbestos sampling concerns, but these lack of findings may have been due to the lack of aggressive testing.

While EPA made a significant effort to inform the public about environmental health risks, the report showed that it failed to do enough in this area. The first environmental assessment took three months to complete and contained information with confusing and sometimes contradictory messages. The GAO report details one instance in which the most common flyer stated that only buildings built prior to 1970 were an asbestos risk, while EPA's website used 1975 as the cutoff year, with the disclaimer that more recent buildings could also contain asbestos.

Echoing the 9/11 situation, EPA subtly manipulated information to portray New Orleans' air quality more positively than people might have concluded from the complete facts. For example, EPA's December 2005 assessment stated the "majority" of sediment exposure was safe. But eight months later, the agency revealed that this measure was for "short-term" visits, such as to assess immediate exposure damage, not to live near or in the area. Additionally, the 2005 assessment used data from outside sediment to generalize the safety of both outdoor and indoor areas, a dangerous assumption as buildings can act as traps collecting contaminants.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, EPA was presented with an enormous task, and limitations imposed upon it by the National Response Plan made its job even more difficult. Disturbing parallels with 9/11, however, are apparent: misleading the public through over-generalized and insufficient information and avoiding responsibility by blaming other agencies or local governments. In her response to the president about lessons learned from Katrina, Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend wrote, "The response to Hurricane Katrina fell far short of the seamless, coordinated effort that had been envisioned by President Bush when he ordered the creation of a National Response Plan."