A Lake Oswego real estate broker could face two years in prison on charges stemming from cutting corners on a remodel.
William Gaffney hired six men to gut a 106-year-old house in Southeast Portland during March 2014 without first removing asbestos, state environmental regulators concluded. Multnomah County prosecutors allege that in doing so, he recklessly created a “substantial risk of serious physical injury” to others. Asbestos is known to cause a range of cancers, and there’s no amount that is considered safe to breathe.
Now, Gaffney faces two misdemeanor counts of recklessly endangering another person and one count of s econd-degree unlawful air pollution. He’s scheduled to plead Oct. 26, and faces a maximum sentence of two years and a $25,000 fine.
Because Multnomah County sees so few environmental cases, Chief Deputy District Attorney Kristen Snowden said the office is partnering with the Department of Justice on the case. The department declined to speak about the case until Gaffney’s plea.
Gaffney was featured in a recent set of articles by The Oregonian/OregonLive about the state’s system for catching property owners and contractors who fail to properly remove asbestos.
Arriving at the site of Gaffney’s Southeast Portland remodel, an inspector with Oregon’s workplace safety agency wrote. They were tearing out the insides of the house by hand and dumping waste into an open dumpster outside.
State and federal regulations require employers to give their workers respirators and protective suits if there’s a chance they’ll breathe asbestos more than a very small amount of asbestos. It also requires employers to minimize workers’ potential exposure to asbestos by, among other things, wetting asbestos-containing materials.
The temp company was the first to raise a red flag with Gaffney. One of the workers complained about the possibility there was asbestos in the house, so the company, Labor Ready, told Gaffney to stop work until he checked. A lab test of a sample Gaffney took from a wall came back negative, and the men got back to work, the OSHA inspector wrote.
Environmental regulators wrote that Gaffney didn’t test duct insulation or the vinyl floor, which state inspectors later discovered did have asbestos. The Department of Environmental Quality that Gaffney only took a sample of the wall insulation because he knew it would come back clean.
Duct insulation is a material that is particularly likely to release asbestos fibers into the air if disturbed. For that reason, state asbestos expert Penny Wolf-McCormick told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a past interview, it’s very likely they breathed asbestos. There’s no known safe level of exposure to the mineral. Breathing it can lead to a variety of fatal lung diseases, such as lung cancer and mesothelioma.
With few exceptions, state rules require people to hire a licensed company to remove all asbestos-containing materials before a remodel.
The OSHA inspector wrote that during his visit in March 2014, Gaffney told him he was “making a big deal out of nothing.” Gaffney said in an interview in September that the amount of asbestos that was disturbed in the house was minimal and “could probably fit in a coffee can.”
Gaffney likely knew what he was doing, regulators wrote. He’d hired licensed asbestos removal contractors on a previous project to take out asbestos-containing pipe insulation.
Prosecutors allege Gaffney recklessly created a “substantial risk of serious physical injury” to Teddy Hamar and Nathan Adams. Neither could be reached by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Asked about the criminal charges by a reporter, Gaffney said “absolutely no comment.”
