When Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen L. Johnson visited Libby back in August, the message seemed to be that help was on the way, that the cleanup of asbestos contamination from years of mining by W.R. Grace would be given priority. But committing enough money to adequately decontaminate the town was apparently not part of the deal.

Last week, the townsfolk were asked to choose whether they wanted to use part of the $17 million budget for 2008 to clean up Flower Creek, or Libby’s Cabinet View Country Club public golf course.

Documents indicate that the EPA has been aware of asbestos contamination at the golf course since at least 2005, and in August, the EPA acknowledged that asbestos at the Country Club “presents a significant exposure risk to course employees.”

Besides the employees, golfers play about 15,000 rounds on the course each year.

But the EPA, which did not return calls for comment, seems to be taking a mulligan, neither closing the Country Club to public use nor seeking the money necessary to clean it up. It’s all a bit ironic, considering that a cornerstone in the federal case against W.R. Grace is that the company “knowingly exposed” people to deadly asbestos.

Back in August, when EPA chief Johnson visited Libby, he was in the company of Sen. Max Baucus, who publicly embarrassed the agency for failing to even figure out how to make the town safe despite spending $110 million dollars over seven years, and for not declaring a Public Health Emergency for the town.

That declaration would have guaranteed a lot more money for cleanup, and Baucus is currently reviewing thousands of pages of EPA documents to figure out why the declaration wasn’t made.

“Max believes that a public health emergency should have been declared in Libby, and wasn’t,” Baucus spokesman Barrett Kaiser told the Independent in a Jan. 22 interview. “He thinks a greater priority should be given to cleanup efforts to give Libby a long-term clean bill of health.”

Kaiser’s says the senator’s wrath extends to the EPA’s whiff at the golf course, as well. “Max thinks it’s an outrage,” Kaiser said. “Everything in Libby should be cleaned up, every house, every trail, every recreation site, and the EPA should dedicate emergency dollars to get it done.”

It’d be hard to disagree with that statement, but watching the ongoing comedy of errors that is the Libby cleanup, it’s hard to believe that it will ever happen.

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 02/15/2007.

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set up an air monitoring station in Helena last fall, they didn’t expect to find anything.

That station was designed as a control against which to compare results from monitoring stations in Libby, where asbestos fibers from a W.R. Grace & Company vermiculite mine have been fingered as the culprit in approximately 400 deaths, and more than 1,000 cases of illness, by recent estimations.

But initial studies of a sample taken by the Helena monitor in October have turned up several asbestos fibers.

The EPA has begun an investigation into the source of the Helena fibers, originally sourced to Libby, but Fran Costanzi, one of the EPA’s project directors in Libby, says the EPA is still doing tests to make sure that the fibers did in fact originate there. Until that is confirmed, she says, it will be difficult to determine their origin more specifically.

John Podolinsky, who heads the Montana Asbestos Control Program, has also been looking into possible sources of the fibers. At first he theorized that remodeling work on a nearby house could have been the culprit, but as of Feb. 12, he wasn’t so sure.

“There could have been other sources too,” he says, including the possibility that the fibers might have piggybacked to Helena on someone who had been to Libby, or that the monitor itself was somehow contaminated.

Ultimately, he says, it may be impossible to determine exactly how the fibers got to Helena.

Should Helena residents be worried?

On one hand, Podolinsky points out that federal standards for safe amounts of asbestos, which the Helena sample fell below, correspond to what microscopes were able to detect when the tests were designed 20 years ago, and not to actual health effects. There’s also the lack of any EPA-approved study showing just how dangerous the particular form of asbestos found in Libby is.

But the good news is that since October, the Helena monitor has not detected any more fibers.

Podolinsky hopes it stays that way.

A version of this story was published in the Missoula Independent on 12/07/2006.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has confirmed allegations aired by four men in the July 27 Independent regarding the Libby asbestos cleanup.

A vermiculite mine operated by W.R. Grace and Co. contaminated the town of Libby with deadly asbestos fibers for several decades. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began cleanup of the site in 1999, after asbestos exposure had claimed more than 200 lives.

In a report released Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006 the OIG states, “EPA cannot be sure that the ongoing Libby cleanup is sufficient to prevent humans from contracting asbestos-related diseases.”

This despite seven years, $110 million dollars worth of cleanup and EPA claims that Libby was safe.

The report states that EPA cannot ensure the cleanup is sufficient because it has never assessed the toxicity of amphibole asbestos, the type of asbestos found in Libby.

According to the OIG’s report, such assessment is usually standard procedure.

“[W]e determined that EPA had not followed its own guidance regarding the conducting of a toxicity assessment,” the report states.

The EPA has 30 days to respond to the OIG report.

For years, Libby residents Clinton Maynard, Gordon Sullivan and others asked the EPA for just such an assessment.

The OIG report credits U.S. Sens. Conrad Burns and Max Baucus as the impetus for its report.

Sullivan says he’s satisfied with the OIG’s findings, but frustrated at the difficulty of getting the report done at all. After four years spent asking the EPA to follow its own guidelines, he complains, “We had to go to a U.S. Senator to prompt an investigation to protect our own damn health.”

He also asks an ominous question:

“Who is responsible for exposures between 1999 [when the EPA began its cleanup] and today?” he asks. “Is that on W.R. Grace or is that on the EPA?”

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 06/15/2006.

In its April 27 issue, the Independent ran a story with a headline asking, “How clean was the cleanup?” in reference to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) remediation work in asbestos-contaminated Libby.

The answer we got last week, at least according to U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, is not very.

On June 5, a city utility crew digging a trench for a water line to irrigate Libby’s new Asbestos Victims Memorial discovered a bed of vermiculite-the mineral that contains asbestos-3 feet wide and 20 feet long sitting 18 inches below the soil.

The site, which W.R. Grace used as a staging area to bag and ship vermiculite mined just outside of Libby, had been cleaned by W.R. Grace and inspected by the EPA, and later cleaned again by the EPA.

Libby resident Gordon Sullivan, a critic of the EPA’s cleanup and former consultant paid by the EPA to act as a community liason, says this recent discovery means all of the agency’s work should be contested.

“It’s an indication that the whole sampling process is in question,” he says.

In other words, the revelation that the site was twice tested by the EPA and still unsafe makes Sullivan wonder if Libby residents should trust other tests which deem their living area clean, or air monitoring that show the town is asbestos-free.

James Pendleton, a spokesman for Burns, says that these exact concerns are what led the senator to call for an independent investigation into the EPA’s work in Libby.

“If someone says an area is clean and 18 inches below the soil we discover a bed of vermiculite, it raises very serious questions about the cleanup process,” says Pendleton.

But Peggy Churchill, project manager for Libby’s EPA cleanup, counters that, “Our goal is not to remove every piece of contamination.”

Instead, she says, EPA workers sample the surface, and, if contamination is found, they then remove it. “In all likelihood we sampled on the surface and there was no contamination found,” she says.

If and when the independent investigation occurs, it will determine whether that explanation holds water.

Note: A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Indpendent on 02/02/2006.

Usually, children are told not to climb trees for fear of broken limbs (the children’s and trees’). Children at schools in Libby are being told to stay away from the trees for fear of cancer.

That, for now, is the result of a Jan. 12 Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting in Libby, during which Dr. Tony Ward, a research assistant professor at the University of Montana Center for Environmental Health Sciences, announced that bark samples taken from trees at the Libby Middle School turned up asbestos fibers, the culprit that caused mesothelioma in Libby residents.

Previous testing at areas closer to the sites of the W.R. Grace mines, whence the asbestos came, and along the transport corridor it traveled, showed that bark there was contaminated as well.

Ward told the community that it’s now unknown whether the fibers can be dislodged from the tree bark when disturbed, and it remains unknown whether there’s any safe threshold of exposure to asbestos fibers. In the meantime, Kirby Maki, superintendent of Libby schools and CAG member, is telling students at all Libby schools to stay away from the trees.

This isn’t the first time asbestos has been detected near Libby schools. In 2001, Libby’s high school and junior high school had to tear up their running tracks, which had been constructed of asbestos-containing vermiculite from the Grace mine.

But Maki, for one, personally believes Libby is safe, noting that he raised his family here and that he, his wife, and one of his children still live in the town.

“If I didn’t think it was safe for my family, I wouldn’t stay,” Maki says.

Maki says his willingness to stay in Libby, despite the fact that he’s told school children to avoid trees due to cancer concerns, is due in part to his confidence in Environmental Protection Agency efforts to ensure Libby’s safety.

“I feel good about their work,” he says. “We keep a close eye on them.”

Note: A version of this story originally appeared in the Missoula Independent on 06/30/2005.

It appears even Libby’s trees couldn’t escape the asbestos pouring out of W.R. Grace’s deadly vermiculite mine.

According to a recent report prepared by University of Montana’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences, bark samples taken from three locations in Libby yielded “substantial amphibole fiber contamination.” Amphibole fibers are the ones responsible for asbestosis in Libby residents.

But Dr. Tony Ward, who prepared the tree study, noted that the word “substantial” may not have much meaning when it comes to the health of Libby residents, because the human threshold for exposure to the fibers is unknown.

“No one knows the amount needed to cause disease,” Ward says.

Ironically, this news comes on the heels of an announcement that $1 million worth of new wood-burning stoves, chimneys and services are being donated by the wood stove industry in an effort to help curb an air pollution problem that makes air quality in Lincoln County among the worst in the country. Outdated woodstoves in Libby were identified as the culprit in the bad air.

But fiber contamination in the bark may make Libby trees useless for burning in stoves. Ward said he will continue studying the bark this summer, and hopes to provide Libby with enough information by this winter to decide whether or not to burn the wood.

Michael Crill, a Libby resident dying of asbestosis and an activist in Libby’s fight for justice, raised more questions about the contaminated bark.

Crill pointed out that logging could also be affected by this latest discovery. Crill’s wife, sister, brother-in-law and son all worked in Libby’s lumber mills. Crill wonders if dust from timber-cutting operations may have polluted the air mill workers breathe. He also mentioned the possibility that Libby bark may have been sent around the country for landscaping.

The effect of the bark on loggers and people who use the bark as landscaping is unknown, but Crill hopes that studies will eventually give more concrete information.

In the meantime, the discovery of asbestos fibers in tree bark makes one thing clear in Crill’s mind: the EPA is wrong to say that Libby is in the clear.

“You can’t declare Libby clean, because it’s not clean; you can’t declare Libby safe, because it’s not safe.”