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State, federal authorities sending teams to Montana mining town
Monday, November 22, 1999
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
LIBBY, Mont. -- State and federal authorities say they will send teams of health and environmental investigators to this tiny northwestern Montana town to evaluate whether asbestos from a closed mine still threatens its residents.
Montana Gov. Marc Racicot and EPA Region 8 Administrator Bill Yellowtail both expressed concern after the Post-Intelligencer reported last week that 192 people have died and 375 more have been diagnosed with fatal diseases because of the asbestos.
In a prepared statement released by his office, Racicot said, "The state of Montana is concerned about the recent disclosures of the public-health issue in the Libby area."
Tons of asbestos were released into the air during more than six decades of vermiculite mining at Zonolite Mountain, three miles east of Libby. The W.R. Grace Co., which owned the mine for 30 years, closed it in 1990 and sold the property four years later.
After many Libby residents told the Post-Intelligencer of their fears that the dangers still exist, the newspaper took air and soil samples on a public road near the abandoned mine's tailing pile. When analyzed by EPA-certified laboratories, the samples showed the presence of tremolite, the rare type of asbestos that is found in the vermiculite ore from the mountain, at levels far beyond federally established safety limits.
The Post-Intelligencer also reported that documents from Grace and the state showed that asbestos had washed into the Kootenai River, which flows through Libby, and more is likely to wash into the scenic river during next year's snow melt.
"I am deeply distressed by these revelations," Yellowtail said. "We are
mobilizing in cooperation with the State of Montana to investigate the reports of asbestos contamination in Libby."
Libby officials, including Mayor Tony Berget, told the Post-Intelligencer last week that they believe there is no continuing danger. If there were, they say, Racicot, who is from Libby, would have told them.
The governor said the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the state health department "will be sending teams" to a public meeting in Libby on Dec. 1 "to address the concerns of the local residents."
"We hope to be able to identify which entities should be involved in the process to address this issue as well as determine what precisely that process should be," the governor's statement said.
The state's leading environmental group, the Montana Environmental Information Center, said it was "less than impressed" with the governor's reaction.
"Marc Racicot has ignored repeated requests from his former neighbors to help fix the problem here and, for all too long he has remained silent," said Jim Jensen, the group's executive director.
"The time is over for the finger-pointing around the table. We can no longer tolerate everyone saying the health of the citizens of Libby is someone else's responsibility," Jensen said.
"The public exposure of the issue in the newspapers has obviously forced the governor to take this situation seriously for the first time."
Jensen said "it's great that the EPA is finally sending in the cavalry, because the state of Montana does not have the money to do this job."
He said that the EPA should bring in its Superfund program.
"It is the EPA's job and it's their moral obligation to clean up the contamination so that this community and its children and grandchildren can have healthy and hope-filled futures."
Jensen and other environmental health experts say the focus of EPA's team and other investigators must be on whether the people of Lincoln County are still at risk from the sparsely covered tailings pile at the mine and from the asbestos that may still contaminate parts of downtown Libby. It was there that Grace bagged and shipped the vermiculite material they marketed as Zonolite, and experimented with the asbestos to see if it had a marketable use.
The fact that some miners and their family members died or became ill after working at the mine is no secret. W.R. Grace still insists it did nothing wrong, adding that it spent millions of dollars in improvements at the mine and was responsible to the workers and the community. But it admits that exposure to tremolite caused deaths and illnesses.
People exposed during the operation of the mine will continue to die for decades, doctors say. The latency period, the time from when exposure occurs to when the disease is diagnosed, is often 20 to 40 years.
Neither the most stringent laws nor the most dedicated investigators can do anything about those exposed years ago. Once the disease gets a firm foothold, its path is predictable. The only question that remains is what form will the eventual death take -- asbestosis, mesothelioma, lung cancer or failure of the heart weakened by the diseased lungs.
A comprehensive epidemiological study would be the only way to determine the actual numbers of people who died or contracted disease from exposure to tremolite from the mine.
Eighty-eight was the number of deaths used in many of the civil actions brought against Grace. The number was identified by Dr. Alan Whitehouse, who treated hundreds of workers from the mine and their families.
Whitehouse, a highly credentialed lung specialist, said in court testimony that the figure of 88 "was conservative" and came from his study of death certificates where he was able to study the corresponding medical records.
It was rare, even in the 1970s and '80s, for death certificates to list the cause of death as asbestos-related. Many just listed "cancer" or "heart failure" or some other diagnosis which offered no clue to the deceased person's exposure to asbestos.
The Post-Intelligencer was able to expand the number of deaths to 192 by comparing the names on Whitehouse's list with information from interviews with surviving family members and physicians at several major Northwest hospitals.
But even that number may be low.
People from across the country who read the Post-Intelligencer's stories have called or e-mailed the newspaper with sometimes tearful reports of their loved ones from Libby who died after working at the mine.
Others told the newspaper about family members who had died from diseases related to tremolite, but were not miners.
The families of three men who worked for Burlington Northern on the hundreds of trains that carried ore from Libby attributed the men's deaths to asbestos exposure. The family of a Montana highway department worker who often worked near Libby called to say that the man had died of an asbestos-related disease.
P-I senior national correspondent Andrew Schneider can be reached at 206-448-8218 or andrewschneider@seattle-pi.com
P-I SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
"I want the people of Libby to know that we take very seriously these threats to their health and we are going to bring to bear the resources of EPA to solve the problem and prevent further harm," Yellowtail said.
For more information, see Andrew Schneider's original report.
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