For Polluter, EPA Times Libby Emergency Declaration Perfectly

The eight-year delay in declaring a health emergency, which the EPA was provably pressured into by W.R. Grace and the White House’s Office of Budget Management (OMB), cost several years of health aid to Libby, and will leave the public to pay for any additional costs in Libby, which are estimated at a minimum of $80 million.
Perhaps the best record of how the OMB and Grace torpedoed the EPA’s initial attempt to declare a public health emergency in Libby comes from a September 2008 report by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, “EPA’s Failure to Declare a Public Health Emergency in Libby, MT.”
This report reconstructs the decision using emails and internal memos between the EPA and the OMB, interviews with EPA staff, and interview records from the EPA Office of the Inspector General’s Office investigation of the decision, which resulted from the Rumple Report, but did not lead to charges.
According to the Senate report, the EPA began internal discussions about the need to declare a public health emergency in early 2001. EPA officials at that time noted that Zonolite attic insulation posed a threat to the health of residents in Libby.
Zonolite was a insulation product manufactured by W.R. Grace from vermiculite mined in Libby. The product is contaminated with Libby amphibole asbestos, and was used as attic insulation in as many as 30 million homes across the U.S., including many in Libby. It was also sold and widely used as a soil additive in yards and gardens.
In the EPA’s internal discussions, officials acknowledged that Superfund law required them to declare a public health emergency in order to move a commercial product from a building or residence.
At first, that was exactly what the EPA set out to do.
According to the Senate report, after then EPA head Christine Todd Whitman visited Libby in September of 2001, she was touched by the suffering she has seen there, and convinced that the emergency declaration was the right thing to do.
By March of 2002, the EPA was on the verge of making the emergency declaration official, to the point that it had begun drafting press releases to make the announcement to the nation.
The final press release was to include this quote from Whitman, “The EPA believes that the conditions in Libby present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and the environment. By declaring a public emergency the EPA can take aggressive steps the EPA can protect the citizens of Libby from enduring further exposure to asbestos.”
Internal memos show EPA was set to announce the public health emergency on April 19, 2002. The decision was to be a major affair, and the EPA anticipated full media coverage, much like what happened when it finally did make the declaration last week.
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