Gov't scientist accused of sample tampering

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has accused Thomas White, the manager of the agency's Port St. Lucie laboratory, of "generating and reporting deceptive or fraudulent lab results." At issue is nearly five years' worth of monitoring data from South Florida waters, including the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee. In many cases, the data reveal high pollution levels that would establish the waterways as impaired under the Clean Water Act.

The DEP is reviewing White's case and considering termination. White, who has worked for the Florida DEP for over twenty years, has declined to speak to the press while the decision is pending. Attorney Jerry Phillips, Florida director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility(PEER), is representing White. "Tom White adamantly denies that there is any fraud," Phillips told The Scientist.

The program manager at the Port St. Lucie branch deferred all questions to DEP spokesperson Stephen Webster and told The Scientist no one in the lab could comment on the case.

The data in question were collected between January 2001 and July 2005 as part of a program to identify polluted waterways. Those classified as "impaired" will be assigned "total maximum daily loads" (TMDL), or legal limits on the amount of pollutants that permit holders would be allowed to discharge. Such limits could require upgrades to plants and factories, said Phillips. "That, as you can imagine, can be a very big source of contention."

The DEP hasn't accused White of falsifying data for the TMDL program per se, but charged that he appended his TMDL data with a statistically low number of "data qualifiers," technical codes that describe possible limitations to the data. Such tags may identify a data point as a mean rather than a single measurement, for example, or note that a sample wasn't tested within the approved holding period. The qualifiers don't necessarily indicate problems, but append important information "so data can be reliably evaluated," William Coppenger, chief of DEP bureau of laboratories, told The Scientist.

In a written response to the charges, White maintains that his former manager, Greg Graves, encouraged lab members to use as few data qualifiers as possible. A 2002 audit by the office of the inspector general found the lab compliant. And when White replaced Graves as lab manager in 2004, he helped the lab earn certification from the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference (NELAC) for the first time.

While White insists that his data are clean, his analyses indicate that South Florida's waters are anything but. "In some cases the pollution was so off the charts the sample had to be diluted to get it to register on the scale," Phillips said. He and White alleged that the agency is looking for an excuse to make the unappealing data disappear. "I think that the primary objective is to throw the data out, [and that White] was a target of opportunity," Phillips said.

The agency won't use White's data to verify impaired waterways for the TMDL program, Webster said, but will still use the data for planning purposes. According to Coppenger, waterways short-listed as potentially polluted based solely on data from the Port St. Lucie lab will be reevaluated to determine if they are, in fact, impaired.

Webster denied that the agency's intention was to invalidate White's data. "This approach is being taken because Mr. White is accused of intentionally misrepresenting the data -- not just negligence or accidental omissions."

The DEP has given no deadline for their decision about White's future with the agency.

Kirsten Weir
mail@the-scientist.com

Links within this article:

Florida Department of Environmental Protection
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/

P Woodworth, "What price ecological restoration?" The Scientist, April 1, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23277/

PEER
http://www.peer.org

National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference
http://www.nelac-institute.org

G Flores, "Report: US oceans a mess," The Scientist, September 20, 2004.
http://www.the-cientist.com/article/display/22407