Apparently, though he couldn't go into great detail in his note and though he didn't know I'd been following the same story, his firm had been sort of caught between Dow Chemical and the EPA. His job was (quoting him) "to characterize the soil samples using a number of small tests to determine the soil type, etc. and to photograph the cores before they were sampled." He found himself "rushing to complete the process under the supervision of both an EPA and a Dow representative, who wanted to take them to an internal Dow lab as quickly as possible." He also noted that he found it odd that "Dow was running scientific tests for on soil samples for release to the EPA which, if certain levels were detected, would lead to liability and enormous cleanup costs."

Given all of this, I was not surprised to read a little later that Dow claimed that the dioxin hot spot was not as damaging as was being reported.

Likewise, I was not surprised but still taken aback when the news broke last week that a senior EPA official had been fired by the Bush Administration for pursuing the case too thoroughly. The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post both reported that Mary Gade had been fired:

[F]ollowing months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.