Cheyenne Residents Worry about Asbestos

August 15, 2006 - A group of concerned Cheyenne (WY) residents who fear contamination from asbestos waste hope the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) will soon hear their pleas and come to their aid.

Residents living adjacent to a lot on the city’s Lupe Road say that based on testing the county has conducted, they have "fairly direct" evidence that there's a hazardous material on the site, but only the department can determine whether it poses a health hazard by entering the property.

According to a report in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, deputy county attorney Mark Voss has requested that the DEQ perform tests.  Up to this point, they’ve refused.

"Right now we don't have any real evidence that there's an environmental issue," said DEQ management services administrator Jim Uzzell in an interview conducted about 3 months ago. "If there is indeed buried asbestos, it doesn't represent an environmental hazard being buried."

The department has said that without evidence of an environmental issue, it cannot enter private property to take samples.

The property in question is listed as belonging to "Kornegay. Florence et al. Co-Trustee: Kornegay Family Trust," and neighbors say they saw a Kornegay family member bury waste there through the years. When ordered to clean up other lots, he dumped material from those lots onto this one, the neighbors told the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle. 

Others familiar with the lot say the buried material is just trash but nothing that presents a health hazard.  Neighbors disagree.  Some have even reached through the fence to grab samples of the dirt in the field, which they say has been trampled by horses, thus kicking up dust into the air.

The DEQ tested some of these samples and proclaimed that they contained non-friable asbestos, which is not a health hazard.  Other experts, however, say that friability is not determined by a few small samples but rather by inspection of the lot as a whole.

Though the county did gain limited access to the property, determining that 10 to 15% of their samples contained chrysotile asbestos, the DEQ is still refusing to get involved.  According to the article, deputy attorney Voss believes that that DEQ has been hesitant to enter the property thus far because of a legal case several years ago in which a court ruled against DEQ for entering a property for an inspection without prior warning.