A Dangerous Lie

An uncalculated risk

The four men Rumple interviewed about problems with the EPA cleanup, and to whom he ultimately revealed the results of his investigation, have strong connections to the EPA’s work in Libby. Lifetime Libby resident Clinton Maynard is a former construction worker who had dreams of entering the jewelry business in 1999, when the asbestos contamination of Libby was revealed, and put his life on hold in order to devote himself to helping rehabilitate his town.

In 2000, while scouring federal regulations pertaining to Superfund sites, he discovered the “silver bullet” provision, a clause that allows each state to cut through government red tape and start one cleanup immediately, no questions asked. He found out that Montana was one of seven states that had not yet used its silver bullet. He then started a letter-writing campaign asking then-Gov. Judy Martz to fire it for Libby, which she ultimately did. Since 2000, Maynard has been a member of Libby’s Community Advisory Group (CAG), which serves as liaison between the community and the EPA on cleanup issues.

Abe Troyer moved to Libby in 1999, just before Seattle Post-Intelligencer stories by Andrew Schneider began to reveal the town’s asbestos problem. “I didn’t think too much of it at first,” Troyer says. But as he learned more, he wanted to get involved. In August 2001, Troyer began work for Burlingame, Calif.-based Environmental Chemical Corporation, removing asbestos contamination from former industrial sites. Over the next four years, he continued working on various aspects of the cleanup, eventually removing contamination from Libby homes. He also became a member of Libby’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) in 2004. TAG works with the community and the EPA on technical aspects of the cleanup.

Gordon Sullivan came to Libby from Helena in 1996. Before that, he had worked at the Anaconda Mining Company for 10 years, ending that career with the company’s Montana Mining Division, where he did geological research and worked on environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. Later, he spent nine years working in administration at the St. James Healthcare hospital in Butte, at Columbus Hospital in Great Falls and at St. John’s Lutheran Hospital in Libby. In 2003, he was hired as technical adviser to TAG. In that position, Sullivan was paid with an EPA grant to study EPA reports and present his findings to TAG in layman’s terms, relaying citizen concerns back to the EPA. He quit that position in May 2005 out of disgust with the EPA’s handling of the cleanup.

Of the four people that Rumple spoke to, Dr. Gerry Henningsen is probably the most damaging critic of the EPA’s Libby cleanup. Henningsen worked as a senior EPA toxicologist for 12 years, helping to assess the risk that 12 different Superfund sites nationwide posed to humans and the environment. He was hired to replace Sullivan as TAG adviser in August 2005 and officially began work in January. He currently resides in Evansville, Ind., and flies into Libby for one week each month to perform his duties as TAG adviser. Henningsen believes that of all the Superfund sites in United States history, Libby is by far the worst. He notes that other sites, at most, have two or three deaths directly attributable to local contamination.

Nonetheless, Henningsen says that before he had even been hired as technical adviser, when he was doing background research on Libby last fall, he saw problems with the way the EPA was going about its cleanup. Most notably, Henningsen saw that the EPA had never established what risks amphibole asbestos, a particular type of asbestos most commonly found in Libby, presented to the public. Risk, Henningsen says, is determined by multiplying exposure by toxicity. The EPA, he says, has never done tests to determine how toxic amphibole asbestos is. There are estimates that it is 10 to several hundred times more dangerous than other forms of asbestos that have been studied, but there are no conclusive scientific studies to back up those theories. Henningsen also says that it remains unknown—in a town where asbestos-containing vermiculite was given away to residents and tilled into gardens, spread on lawns, poured behind walls and into attics as insulation and mixed into the running sur- face on the high school track—how much asbestos people are still being exposed to, and what the remaining sources of that exposure might be.

In order to determine current asbestos exposure in Libby, Henningsen says extensive testing over a period of time and in various locations—churches, schools, offices, yards, and homes, for instance—is needed. It hasn’t been done.

Page : 1 2 3 4 5 6ALL