By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 10, 2007

The Architect of the Capitol must fix safety problems in the asbestos-laden tunnels that have sickened maintenance workers under a settlement announced yesterday with the independent agency that enforces safety rules for Hill workers.

The deal, between the Office of Compliance and the Architect of the Capitol, comes at a time when congressional pressure has been growing to address long-simmering safety problems faced by those who maintain the tunnels beneath the Capitol.

The Office of Compliance, created by Congress in 1995 to address workplace safety and employment rights issues for workers in the legislative branch, first issued complaints about the tunnels in 2000, but the Architect of the Capitol failed to address them.

The settlement announced yesterday requires the Architect of the Capitol to fix various safety and health hazards in the tunnels within five years and allows the Office of Compliance to go to court to enforce the terms if the agency fails to adhere to them.

"We have a very extensive settlement agreement, and it covers a wide variety of hazards, including the ones we discovered in 1999 and issued citations for in 2000," said Peter Eveleth, general counsel at the Office of Compliance. "We'll have a full-time person assigned to monitor this agreement. That's something we did not have in 2000. We're going to have a site management plan, and a safety audit will be conducted every quarter; we'll be analyzing budget submissions. I'm confident that considerable progress will be made."

The 10 tunnel workers, who have complained for years about unhealthy work conditions, say the settlement means little.

"The bottom line is, it lets them off easy," said John Thayer, 43, of St. Mary's County, who has worked in the tunnels for 23 years. "It gives them another five years to [fool] around."

Nine of the 10 workers, known as "tunnel rats," say they have been told by doctors that their lungs show evidence of exposure to asbestos. They are demanding compensation for the damage to their health and for what they say has been harassment and retaliation by the Architect of the Capitol. They are considering a federal lawsuit, Thayer said.

The tunnels, constructed around the turn of the 20th century, carry steam to heat the Capitol and other federal buildings in winter and chilled water to cool them in summer.

Thayer and the other workers were suddenly pulled from the tunnels by the Architect of the Capitol last month at the urging of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who chaired a Senate hearing on the matter in March and accused the agency of ignoring safety hazards.

"This agreement is a good first step to address the [Architect of the Capitol's] astounding backlog of 13,000 health and safety violations throughout the Capitol, but it does not require the [agency] to remove all of the asbestos in the tunnels," Murray said in a statement yesterday. Now the agency "must lay out a plan to remove all of the asbestos in the tunnels and to make sure that workers who enter the tunnels in the future will finally have a safe and healthy workplace."