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"It's a predominantly minority community, and it's doing it on the cheap, and it's putting people at risk," he said. Scott Frost, a Dallas lawyer who specializes in asbestos cases and is affiliated with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, said the EPA and the city have tried to play down the risks. "Even very minute exposures to asbestos can cause cancer, period," he said. Frost helped fight the plans to use the wet method to demolish the Cowtown Inn. He is suing St. Louis over similar "wet demolitions" near Lambert Airport. City Environmental Director Brian Boerner said the wet method is safe. And if proven effective, he said, the wet method could make it easier for cities to rehabilitate old buildings with asbestos, which is a major obstacle in many inner-city neighborhoods. Fort Worth has "dozens, if not hundreds" of such buildings, Boerner said. "Then you think about Dallas, Austin, Houston." Fort Worth has been trying to demolish Oak Hollow for years. The city sued the owners of Oak Hollow and other apartments over violations of city codes and later bought the complexes with an eye toward demolishing them to make way for redevelopment. The City Council has approved about $1.5 million to demolish the apartments. Boerner stressed that the EPA is leading the wet-method demolition. Fort Worth officials, who originally proposed using the wet method to speed the demolition of asbestos-containing buildings, haven't been involved in the testing since 2005. The EPA has tested the method twice within the past two years on an isolated parcel that was part of the Fort Chaffee Army reserve base in Fort Smith, Ark. The agency has not conducted a health risk assessment of the alternative method, nor does it plan to, said Adele Cardenas Malott, a program manger in the EPA's regional office in Dallas who's working on the alternative method proposal. The guideline the agency must meet, she said, is no visible asbestos in the air. That angers some environmentalists, residents and asbestos abatement experts. "It's stupefying," said 7ohn Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that had opposed the Fort Worth method. "It's just incredible how wrong and unthinking they are to continue to inflict the same method on the same residents." Federal regulators say they are taking steps to ensure that the test is safe. They will set up an extensive network of air monitors around the site and erect a scaffolding wall, covered in plastic tarp, to try to keep materials from escaping the site, said Roger Wilmoth, chief of the industrial multimedia branch in the EPA's Office of Research and Development in Cincinnati. "We're doing everything we could possibly think of," he said. "Obviously, if we thought there was any possibility of exposure of the residents, we would not conduct the tests in an occupied area." ASBESTOS DEMOLITION The issue z 51 (b)