Federal agency cuts cost by giving mentally challenged workers asbestos removal work

Alexandria, VA – The Federal Aviation Administration has been accused of using mentally challenged workers to do demolition work without protective gear on a building that managers were aware contained asbestos.

Diane Spitaliere, an FAA spokesperson, brought the incident to light. She reported that last year, FAA managers called in a crew of mentally disabled people to tear down an old guard shack, which had been found in 1993 to contain the substance, at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center site.

She said that the managers placed the workers’ health at risk by assigning them to such a complicated task.

The FAA’s inspector general, federal prosecutors and a grand jury are conducting an investigation into whether the managers purposefully gave the job to the worker’s in an attempt to cut costs, even though they had knowledge of the presence of asbestos.

The workers were contracted from Echo Inc. (Every Citizen Has Opportunities), a charity that trains and finds jobs for mentally challenged and other disabled people. The organization has been in charge of groundskeeping duties at the FAA site for nearly thirty years.

In July of last year, a security guard filed a report to superiors, stating that mentally-challenged workers were handling asbestos-containing materials.

An FAA manager replied that the disabled workers were not involved, but Ms. Spitaliere denies that claim, saying the agency failed to follow its own standard guidelines for dealing with asbestos.

Although federal regulations state that asbestos-tainted materials need to be disposed of at approved landfills, the FAA has no record of where the removed materials were taken.

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