Cover photo: Masked workers at Ground Zero. (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution).
By Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 08/02/2007.
Some of the destruction terrorists inflicted on Sept. 11, 2001, was immediately obvious, even if you were watching it on television thousands of miles away in Montana. The twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) collapsed. Thousands of people died.

What was less obvious was the collapsing towers’ collateral function as a sort of dirty bomb, pulverizing or igniting all the hazardous substances of a small city, the poisons contained in computers, fluorescent light bulbs, windows and any number of construction materials, and blasting them through the city’s streets with the percussive force of two falling skyscrapers.

Post-9/11 photos show residents of Manhattan covered in layers of white ash so thick they look like ghosts. Residents in neighborhoods near Ground Zero reported finding inches of dust in their cars and homes. A plume of smoke rose from the burning debris for weeks. But on Sept. 13, two days after the towers fell, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman told New Yorkers their air was safe to breath.

Asbestos, some of which came from W.R. Grace & Company’s vermiculite mine in Libby, was one of the many substances released by the attacks.

As the towers fell, Libby had just begun to come to terms with its own tragedy. The EPA had begun considering the town for Superfund designation earlier in 2001, following revelations that thousands had been sickened, and hundreds had died, due to asbestos exposure.

But while the EPA seemed at last to recognize the dangers of asbestos exposure in Libby, it ignored those same dangers in New York, apparently at the direction of the White House.

The discrepancy has given ammunition to activists who want a more thorough cleanup in New York, and it also offered a lifeline to W. R. Grace, which was arguing for less stringent standards on asbestos exposure and cleanup, in Libby and in Manhattan. The discrepancy also reveals an EPA of two minds about asbestos cleanup, and the mind that prevails – for better or for worse – could set regulatory precedent for a whole host of toxic baddies.

]]> http://www.asbestoswatch.net/featured/libby-meets-manhattan/feed/ 0 http://www.asbestoswatch.net/politics/groundhog-day/ http://www.asbestoswatch.net/politics/groundhog-day/#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:43:35 +0000 admin http://www.asbestoswatch.net/?p=68 A public hearing in Libby offers new promises

By Paul Peters

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 04/12/2007.
It must have seemed like déjà vu for some Libby residents on April 5. That’s when Montana Sen. Max Baucus held a field hearing for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at a conference room in Libby’s city hall with Susan Parker Bodine, who heads Superfund cleanup for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Baucus’ public show of indignation in front of 100 curious Libby residents was almost exactly the same as a hearing held in 2000, although the specific targets of anger had changed.

The last field hearing was held after it was revealed asbestos-containing ore had poisoned Libby residents while federal and state agencies, along with W.R. Grace, the company that mined the ore, allegedly ignored the problem. At that time, the hearing allowed Baucus and representatives of the EPA to express mutual resentment over what had occurred, and make bold promises to ensure the town would be cleaned. But in retrospect, the EPA cleanup since 2000 makes the first hearing look like a dog and pony show, and leads one to wonder if the latest hearing is more of the same.

The recent meeting comes on the heels of a series of gaffes by the EPA. Earlier this year, after being investigated by the EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the agency admitted it cannot, after seven years and $110 million dollars, say whether or not Libby is clean because it hasn’t done toxicological studies of the town’s asbestos. Before being investigated, the EPA planned to finish the cleanup this year, without doing the study.

Baucus, who was positioned at the head of the conference room opposite Bodine, as if in a debate, focused on the two main questions concerning Libby residents: why did the EPA not do a toxicological study of Libby asbestos years ago, and when will Libby finally be cleaned?

The audience watched in silence as Bodine, who appeared flustered and unprepared for the questions, struggled to deliver any definite answers. She admitted a toxicological study is standard operating procedure during cleanup of a Superfund site, but could not offer an explanation on why it hadn’t been done in Libby.

Baucus then offered his own theory-the EPA avoided the study, despite Libby being the deadliest Superfund site in the world with more than 200 asbestos-related deaths, because of money.

“EPA’s own scientists requested a toxicological study, but the funds were denied [by the EPA],” Baucus said. “Why in the world would the EPA turn that down?”

“I don’t know why that didn’t happen,” Bodine responded.

“I’m a little surprised that you wouldn’t know that,” Baucus replied. “The buck stops with you.”

Later in the hearing, Baucus addressed the question of when the cleanup would be finished.

Bodine said it would take three years and $6.2 million to complete the toxicological study alone. When Baucus pressed for a final cleanup date, she objected to giving a specific timeline, saying it would be impossible to plan until the initial study is complete.

Baucus resigned to asking Bodine to look into ways of speeding up the toxicological study, and submit a monthly progress report on her findings directly to him.

After Baucus finished questioning Bodine, a preselected panel of Libby residents spoke about the cleanup, and then audience members were given a chance to speak and ask questions. Despite skepticism, some took advantage of the forum as a legitimate chance to raise concerns to Baucus and the EPA.

Tom Wood, chief of Libby’s volunteer fire department, pointed out the EPA’s decision to leave asbestos containing vermiculite in attics, crawl spaces and behind walls in Libby’s homes is causing firemen to be exposed when those residences burn down. Wood noted five firemen have died in recent years due to asbestos-related disease. He asked Baucus for more funding to supply the department with proper equipment for avoiding exposure; Baucus said he’s working on the issue.

Other Libby residents wondered aloud whether, once again, Libby was just getting a political show. This group included Gordon Sullivan, who formerly worked as a liaison between the EPA and the town on technical issues surrounding the cleanup. Sullivan quit in 2005 over frustrations the EPA had not done toxicological studies.

Sullivan brought up a report made by former OIG investigator Cory Rumple, which was the catalyst for exposing problems with the Libby cleanup, but has still not been released to the public.

“The fact is, Senator, we’ve never gotten Cory Rumple’s report, have we?” Sullivan asked.

“No,” Baucus answered.

“And we won’t, will we?”

Baucus ensured Sullivan that he would get it, telling the Independent later, “I want to see it.”

Sullivan also brought up what he says was a commitment given by the EPA to do a toxicological study during a 2004 meeting in Denver.

“[In 2004] they promised us that they would have a risk assessment in six months,” he said, confirming with other members of the audience that this promise had been made.

“How many promises does it take?” he asked. “We would like to think there’s a new day coming in Libby, Montana. I’d especially like to see that happen.”

But, he continued, echoing a sentiment felt from Baucus and the rest of the crowd, “I don’t trust you, Ms. Bodine. Sorry to say that, but I don’t trust you.”

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 10/19/2006.

Vindication has come in small increments for the men who made their concerns over the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup of Libby public in the July 27 issue of the Independent.

Dr. Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard all maintain that EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigator Cory Rumple completed a report supporting their belief that asbestos exposure in Libby continues, and that the EPA cleanup has not been based on sound science.

When the Independent filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Rumple’s report, the OIG responded that it could neither confirm nor deny its existence.

The Independent appealed the OIG decision, and this month received a response. While the OIG continues to withhold the report, now on the new grounds that it was a FOIA-exempt communication between Rumple and his supervisor, it finally acknowledged the report’s existence.

Also on Oct. 10, the EPA decided it would no longer circulate a brochure titled “Living with Vermiculite.” Maynard, Henningsen, Sullivan and Troyer had cited that brochure as proof of the EPA minimizing the risk of asbestos exposure in Libby. The brochure advised Libby residents on how to handle vermiculite, the asbestos-contaminated mineral W.R. Grace & Co. mined just outside the town.

Since “Living with Vermiculite” was first issued in October 2003, Maynard has been one of its most outspoken critics, demanding that the agency pull the brochure.

“I don’t even know how to act,” Maynard told the Independent, describing his elation that the brochure had been pulled.

“It’s been a long battle,” he says. “Somebody finally listened.”

The listener, Maynard says, was Paul Peronard, the man who led the initial EPA cleanup of Libby, and who returned to his post as remedial project manager this August. Peronard says he understands the impetus for the brochure’s creation.

“We have folks coming into contact with vermiculite in Libby with some frequency,” he says.

“The rub,” he continues, is that “a lot of folks thought it downplayed the risks,” making vermiculite seem too easy to handle.

“If I had my druthers” Peronard says, “it would just be, ‘Stay the hell away from the stuff.’”

In July 2006, the Independent published the story of Dr. Gerry Henningsen, Gordon Sullivan, Abe Troyer and Clinton Maynard. The four men, who have been deeply involved with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) cleanup of asbestos contamination in Libby, said a report by EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigator Cory Rumple confirms their belief that the EPA is hiding the possibility that Libby is still contaminated, and still dangerous, in part because the agency has never bothered to study the type of asbestos specific to that town.

The OIG told us it could not “confirm or deny the existence” of that report, despite there being an official number attached to the document and four men who say they talked directly with the investigator about it.

In our story, we noted that Sen. Conrad Burns had sent a letter to OIG Acting Inspector General Bill Roderick asking him to clarify whether or not the report exists and when its contents might be made available to the public.

On Aug. 7, Burns received a response from Roderick, which read, “Contrary to what you have been told by your constituents, I can assure you that we have not issued any public reports on remediation efforts in Libby.”

The OIG appears to be playing language games here. No one has ever asked for a public report. The problem with the report is that it is not public. And if the report never existed, why was the Independent not simply told that, point blank, when we first requested it?

Asked if the letter marked the end of the senator’s quest for Rumple’s report, Burns spokesperson James Pendleton replied, “There is no report.”

On Aug. 23, Sen. Max Baucus sent his own letter to Bill Roderick. That letter asked the OIG to investigate claims made by Henningsen, Sullivan, Troyer and Maynard, without attributing those claims to the four men or asking for Rumple’s report.

Although he’s apparently reading our paper (hi, Max!) Baucus’ office, as usual, did not return calls seeking comment.

If the report does exist – and whatever the EPA is calling it, it clearly does – then it would appear that an agency that’s already stonewalled reporters and senators alike on the results of its investigation is being offered a chance to re-conduct an investigation it’s already carried out, then buried. Will the results be any different the second time around?

At press time, the Independent can neither confirm nor deny it. What we can report is that Rumple, non-author of the agency’s non-report, recently announced to us his intention to resign at the end of August. Perhaps not surprisingly, he declined to discuss his reasons.

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.

By Paul Peters
Editor

A version of this story appeared in the Missoula Independent on 05/11/2006.

Mike Crill is a pain in the ass. He’s an alarm with a snooze button you can’t quite reach, a mosquito buzzing in your tent at night, the itch in the center of your back.

If you’re at all familiar with Libby’s history of vermiculite mining, the deadly asbestos-related diseases it caused, and W.R. Grace, the corporation that allegedly knew its mine was poisoning the town and did nothing about it, you’ve probably heard of Crill.

He is quoted in multiple news stories about Libby, and he appears in Dust to Dust, a documentary about the town and its illness-stricken inhabitants. Time after time he’s raised red flags regarding problems with the Libby cleanup and has pressed for fixes. He’s written countless letters to editors, politicians and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials. He phones anyone who will listen to him and many who won’t. His life has become focused on one thing: seeking justice for the poisoning of his family and the town of Libby. His single-minded pursuit of justice has made him a hero to some and a crank to many.

Almost unbelievably, this is not the first time he’s had his life hijacked by a cause he never asked for, but it may be the last. After having his life’s trajectory knocked off course by his efforts to right wrongs, after seeing his health ruined and a close family member die of asbestosis, Crill is nearly a broken man. You can see it in the dark circles under the 51-year-old’s deep-set blue eyes and you can hear it in his wheezes and coughs as he climbs a short flight of stairs.

Mike Crill is done fighting. Now he just wants to live his remaining days in peace.

Fighting city hall

Michael David Crill was born in 1955 in England, where his father, Harold Crill, served in the U.S. Air Force.

In 1966, after his father finished his military service, the Crills spent a short time living in Ohio, then loaded their belongings into a big Ford station wagon and headed for Libby, on the advice of Mike’s uncle William Crill, who had just gotten a job at W.R. Grace’s vermiculite mine.

Mike was 12 at the time, and he remembers being enchanted by the Montana lifestyle: the hunting, the fishing and the rugged mountains.

“It was a wonderful place,” he says now. “Those were good times.”

Mike grew up in Libby, growing close to the uncle who had lured the family there.

“He took me fishin’ and huntin’,” Mike says of the uncle whose life would in many ways tie him to Libby’s fate. “He did all the things my dad never did with me.”

Mike eventually started his own family in Libby, marrying his wife Dena in 1976. They had met just six months earlier, after Mike had finished a short stint in the Army. That same year, Mike’s uncle William got him a job as a general laborer for Grace, which he held for one year, and which he believes is the likely source of his present-day lung problems. Later he worked in a local lumber mill.

In 1984, Mike and Dena moved to Coeur d’Alene, which city had hired Crill as its new fire hydrant repairman. His reminiscences of that move echo the wonderment he felt upon first moving to Libby, only this time he was the father moving his two children, John and Sarah, to a scenic new place. He and Dena would own a home and property for the first time, in the form of a rustic cabin on 10 wooded acres just outside the city. Mike was proud as hell of his job and the responsibility he carried.

“I made sure every fire hydrant was working and accessible,” he says.

He had everything he wanted, a family and a good job in a beautiful environment, but his life was about to veer off the tracks he had laid.

“One day I had it made,” he says. “The next day, my kids got sick.”

It was July 1987 when Dena, John and Sarah arrived at the city workshop to pick Mike up after work. They lingered at the shop for a few minutes and then headed home. According to Mike and Dena, when they got just a few miles from the shops, John started screaming about a headache and Sarah began vomiting. When they got home, Sarah had red splotches all over her torso. After visiting bewildered doctors, the Crills called Poison Control and learned that their children’s symptoms were consistent with exposure to hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas often released from landfills.

The city shop where Mike worked was located across the street from a defunct landfill, and workers there had long complained about headaches they believed were caused by landfill fumes. For a full year Crill says he tried to get his supervisors to address the apparent hydrogen sulfide contamination at the city shops, but little was done. The shops were tested and shown to be safe, but Crill felt the city was manipulating the tests. Eventually, he reported to another city building for work, refusing to go to the shop. In return the city gave him a three-day suspension, then fired him.

It was a turning point in Crill’s transformation from proud family man to chronic burr in the saddle. A month after they fired him, Couer d’Alene city officials met the new Mike Crill. News photos from Sept. 13, 1988, show Crill and his daughter standing on the side of the road holding picket signs, Mike looking fit with a slight bulge of muscle under his T-shirt and a smile on his bearded face. He spent several days out there picketing, with just his daughter for support. He also continued to talk with the city and county, trying to resolve a problem the city insisted didn’t exist.

And despite the ongoing battle, Crill wanted his job back. In October 1988 he appealed his firing before the city’s personnel board and lost. He also hired a lawyer to fight the city’s decision to deny him unemployment benefits. He won that case. In the meantime, other city employees who worked at the same shop had quit over their concerns about exposure to toxic gas. In response, the city hired a health expert to determine whether or not the buildings were safe. The new study concluded that the buildings were unsafe for workers, and in February 1989 the Coeur d’Alene city council voted to abandon the contaminated shops.

“I’ve learned through this ordeal that you have to stick up for what’s right,” Crill told Coeur d’Alene’s Spokesman-Review after his vindication. “I just feel sorry for the guys down there that have worked for the city all their lives, and are afraid, because they’ve got house payments and kids to support, to take on the city.”

Crill, of course, had those concerns too, but he wasn’t any good at forgetting about problems, or letting others ignore them. He’s still not sure why.

“He’s just not the type of person to let things go,” his daughter Sarah offers.

Mike’s son John puts it even more succinctly: “He’s got balls.”

Ultimately, while his fighting spirit benefited his fellow workers in Coeur d’Alene, it’s hurt Mike and his family. A Spokesman-Review story published after the city’s decision reports that the Crill family was barely scraping together a living after his firing, surviving on a part-time job Dena got with the Forest Service and donations from a local church. In March 1989, after Mike’s suspicions had been validated, the city awarded him a $25,000 settlement in lieu of rehiring him. Five thousand of that went to his lawyer and another $1,000 went to cover past-due bills. With what he had left, Crill replaced his cabin with a trailer and bought equipment to start a landscaping business.

In July, the Spokesman-Review asked him how business was coming along.

“It’s coming. It’s going slow, but I’ve been doing a few houses, and I’ve got a few bids,” he told the newspaper.

But jobs came too slowly for the Crills. Mike’s business never made any money, he says, because he’d been “branded” as a troublemaker. His voice shakes when he talks about the winter after his business failed, when he and his family spent a 20-below-zero night inside their trailer after the electricity had been turned off, staying up in shifts to make sure the wood stove kept burning. The next day, Mike says, his father came out, packed the family up and took them back to Libby.

“It takes a lot for a man to admit he’s been licked,” Mike says.

Into the fire

When the Crills returned to Libby in 1990, things had changed dramatically. Although news stories that would reveal the full extent of Libby’s asbestos contamination were still almost a decade away, the evidence was already coming to light. Mike and Dena say they noticed it in the number of people who were suddenly attached to oxygen tanks.

One of the people feeling the effects of asbestos exposure was Mike’s uncle, William. At the time Mike and his family returned to Libby, William was trying to get doctors to diagnose his chronic respiratory problems as asbestosis. Although William had worked 17 years as a laborer for W.R. Grace, he was told that smoking cigarettes caused his problems. To try and help him, Mike wrote to an attorney representing people diagnosed with asbestosis, asking the attorney to represent his uncle.

Mike’s efforts failed, but the activist in him was fired up again. This time, rather than picketing, he took up the role of watchdog. He scrutinized everything the EPA and Grace did, and managed to catch both in serious missteps.

He blew the whistle when Grace began tearing down its old screening plant, where the corporation had processed vermiculite before shipping. Grace, he pointed out to the EPA, was cleaning the site without taking precautions to prevent asbestos-tainted dust particles from entering the air, or doing anything to protect its workers. That one cost Grace a $500,000 EPA fine and earned Mike a $5,000 whistle-blower award.

In November 1994, when Crill saw that the processing site had been sold to a family named Parker for use as a residence, he tried to blow the whistle again, to no avail. A letter from the EPA, dated April 5, 1995, states that an inspection of the site “found no apparent violations of the Clean Air Act.” But four years later, in 1999, the family was evacuated from the property, which was found to be among the most contaminated in Libby. The EPA demolished the home and nearly everything in it.

“Nobody listened to him,” says Paul Peronard, an emergency response coordinator with the EPA and former manager of the Libby cleanup. “He saw the problems at the screening plant almost a decade before we did.”

But the screening plant screw-up was just the big-ticket item. Peronard remembers that Mike was constantly contacting the EPA with day-to-day concerns about the cleanup, and that “He was active with all the work down there.”

And though Peronard generally appreciates what Crill has done, he thinks the events of Libby have taken a toll on the watchdog.

“Mike’s got some insights,” Peronard says, “but sometimes anger gets the best of him and clouds things.”

The price paid

When Mike and Dena first returned to Libby they took a class on hazardous materials cleanup, intending to go to work in that field. Mike and Dena began applying for jobs, and with each application, Mike says, the prospects would look good at first, but then he’d suddenly get turned down. He suspected, and confirmed, that the city of Coeur d’Alene was giving him terrible references. He sued the city again and won, but later lost on appeal.

In 1996, he managed to find a job as maintenance man for Virginia City, but was ultimately fired, for reasons he says were unfair. That time he didn’t fight. He says he became suicidal and “ended up in a nuthouse” – a veterans’ hospital in Sheridan, Wyo.

Mike says his anger over what happened in Coeur d’Alene, and at watching friends and family die of asbestosis, and from learning in April of 1999 that he had pleural plaque on his own lungs, a precursor to asbestosis, took him over and became an obsession. These days, conversations with Crill inevitably swerve into the rut that his life has become – his anger about the poisoning of Libby, which he believes is ongoing. It’s apparent that there’s a Libby-focused monologue running constantly through his mind. When vocalized, it goes on for as long as you let it, his voice rising until it shakes.

Since leaving Virginia City Mike has been on antidepressants and unable to return to a regular job after having been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. These days he and Dena live in a small, cement-floored apartment in Missoula, supporting themselves on Mike’s disability check. Mike’s health has gone downhill. The muscles from his Coeur d’Alene days are gone. His belly hangs over his belt, he wheezes when he tries to climb a flight of stairs. He rarely smiles. He and Dena have never owned another home since Coeur d’Alene. Mike spends most of his days – when he isn’t writing letters or making phone calls – drawing and playing guitar. Every two weeks he sees a psychiatrist to work on his anger issues.

His family says the stress nearly ruined him.

“We worry about him a lot,” Dena says. “It’s not healthy to be angry for so long.”

Hero or heckler?

People close to Libby’s ongoing struggle with its asbestos-tainted past have mixed views on Mike Crill and what he’s done for the community.

Gayla Benefield is certainly not a fan. Benefield is perhaps the best-known advocate for Libby’s asbestos victims. Like Crill, she has been featured in numerous articles about Libby, and in Dust to Dust. In March 2005, she was presented with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization’s top award for her work helping asbestos victims. While Crill has worked at the periphery of the system, critiquing EPA cleanup efforts, Benefield has worked hard from the inside.

She is a member of Libby’s Community Advisory Group (CAG) and Technical Advisory Group (TAG), both funded with federal Superfund dollars and serving as liaisons between the EPA and Libby’s citizens.

“[Crill] really hasn’t been helpful here,” Benefield says. “He’s been more of a hindrance, because he’s uninformed.

“He did have some really good points at the onset,” she admits, noting that Crill was right when he first raised issues about the family that moved onto the screening plant site. “But you simply don’t write your impassioned pleas, you get out and you physically do something about it… We’re continually working every avenue of this and meeting with all the elected officials and whatnot… these people have jobs too, and they still manage to take the time, because they’re committed to getting something done and constructing something down here. And I guess that’s the biggest difference. All we’ve gotten is criticism from [Crill] for what we’ve tried to do.”

Asked if she’s surprised that some of those involved with Libby would end up depressed like Mike, she says, “Well, I know a lot more people… my whole family is affected by it. People have died in my family. Every month a friend of mine is getting sicker and sicker and…I guess it depends on your mental balance to start with. You learn to deal with it.”

But, she adds, “I guess if you’ve got 24-7 to sit and think about it, you could become [obsessed].”

Gordon Sullivan, the former consultant to Libby’s Technical Advisory Group, feels differently. Like Crill, Sullivan is frustrated with EPA cleanup efforts, and resigned over his concerns last year.

“Mike Crill has not only been correct in most of the things he’s pointed out on this cleanup site, but he’s also been consistent,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan notes that Mike’s work has brought multiple investigations to Libby, and that his hunches often turn out to be correct.

“You know what’s interesting about being an advocate in something of this magnitude?” Sullivan asks. “The people who you’ve got to be really suspicious about are people who always go out to please somebody else. In a debate of this magnitude, where science is a slippery slope, if you do not alienate half the public, you’re not doing your work.”

Sullivan also acknowledges the toll Mike’s activism has taken.

“I think it’s more guts than a person deserves to have,” he says, “because you put everything you have on the line for a moral position, and Mike has certainly done that. He’s taken his health, his welfare, his community standing, and he’s put all that on the line for something he really believes in. We just don’t find people like that in our society anymore.”

“What makes someone like Mike Crill?” he asks. “I don’t know, but I wish we could bottle it and sell it. Because we’d have a heck of a lot less problems in this world if people would just take a stand and stick by that stand, and say ‘No, this is wrong.’”

For his part, Mike sees himself as a “gladiator.”

“A gladiator gets in the ring, and when each fight’s over, he goes for the next guy,” Mike says.

He says that some of those who think he’s a hero realize the price he’s paid for fighting, but others don’t.

“They think I’m Superman,” he says.

As far as those who dismiss him as a crank, Crill points out all the times he’s been called that name, only to finally be proven right.

Raising hell

Mike Crill continues to raise hell about Libby.

“It’s my full-time job,” he says, shuffling through stacks of letters and documents he keeps filed in grocery bags at his Missoula apartment.

These days he’s focused on the trial of Grace executives accused of knowingly exposing workers to dangerous asbestos, and on his belief that Libby remains unsafe.

In February 2005, executives from Grace were indicted at the federal courthouse in Missoula for allegedly having information about the dangers asbestos posed to Libby residents and concealing it. Mike stood outside the courthouse with two signs hung over his shoulders, one facing his front, another on his back. On the front sign he’d pasted two photos: one of the memorial crosses for Libby’s victims set up in Libby in 2000, and another showing the same scene in 2005, with a lot of new crosses. On the back was the word “Guilty” followed by a list of reasons supporting that verdict. He held another sign that read, simply, “Libby is not safe.”

As the executives left the courthouse, Crill confronted them.

“How do you feel about that?” Crill says he asked them, pointing at the crosses. “Do you know any of these people?”

He admits now that he “kind of blew up a little bit. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Shortly afterward, lawyers for the Grace executives asked that the trial be moved out of Montana, due to the bias of its residents. Some, including Gayla Benefield, felt Mike was partially to blame for the legal maneuver, which eventually failed.

Besides the courthouse picket, Mike continues writing letters, raising issues over the safety of Libby. Most recently he’s been calling attention to studies, prompted by his letters and phone calls, showing that some trees in Libby have asbestos-contaminated bark. Once again, Peronard says Crill was ahead of the EPA.

“He was the one urging us to look at the trees,” Peronard says. “That’s not somewhere you’d expect to find asbestos fibers.”

Mike says their presence proves the town is still tainted, but others point to EPA air monitors that say it’s not. This, of course, isn’t the first time Mike’s been told that government tests prove him wrong. In the past, in the end, it seems Mike has usually been proven right.

Happy trails

Mike’s uncle William Crill died Feb. 2, 2006, of cardiac arrest. Mike had accompanied him on a doctor visit last summer where he was finally diagnosed with asbestosis, which Mike says contributed to his demise.

The day his uncle died, Mike says, was the day he decided he’d had enough.

“That kind of put an end to 15 years of trying to seek justice,” he says. “I’ve been angry for so long. My life has been consumed. I’m trying to get away from it so I can have a life.”

On May 13, Dena will graduate from Missoula’s College of Technology, where she’s studied culinary arts and food management. After Dena graduates, Mike says, he’ll step away from Libby. He and Dena hope that she’ll be able to find work as a chef somewhere mellow, preferably a hot spring resort.

“I want him to find peace,” Dena says.

Then again, 20 years ago, it looked like Crill was back on track and ready to live a normal life with his family. “Happy Crill can afford a fresh start,” read the headline on the Spokesman-Review’s coverage of Crill’s $25,000 settlement from the city of Coeur d’Alene.

The story continued: “Mike Crill grinned. Holding his hand at arm’s length in front of his face he said, ‘I’m going to smoke a cigar that long.’ ”

“I went up against them all,” Crill told the reporter. “I went up against them all, and I won.”

Victory in the Libby struggle, if there can be such a thing, still seems a long way off. Crill is conceding the battle. He says his uncle’s death reminded him that his own life is running short.

“I don’t have much longer to live,” he says. “I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life being angry.”

By Paul Peters
Editor

A version of this story originally appeared in the Missoula Independent on 04/27/2006.

Gordon Sullivan finally felt some hope of vindication for his criticisms of the Environmental Protection Agency’s work cleaning up the asbestos-contaminated town of Libby when a federal investigator interviewed him about two weeks ago.

Sullivan quit his job as Libby’s technical advisor last year over his concerns about the EPA’s cleanup of cancer-causing tremolite asbestos, rained upon the town by the W.R. Grace Corporation’s nearby vermiculite mine.

As technical advisor, Sullivan was paid to study EPA reports and present his findings to Libby’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which is funded with federal Superfund money to make the EPA aware of the community’s technical issues.

“I saw the process being overwhelmed by the EPA,” Sullivan says of his decision to quit. He thought that by working from the outside, he’d find other ways of helping with the cleanup. As it turns out, other ways found him.

Should the investigation justify his concern that the EPA has flubbed its Libby cleanup, Sullivan says, eventually “Libby will be a cleaner, healthier place.”

The EPA, on the other hand, could find its efforts tainted.

The investigation, according to Sullivan and other community members, is being carried out by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a branch of the agency that conducts internal audits and investigations.

John Manibusan, a spokesman for the OIG, says the office performs two types of investigations, aimed respectively at efficiency and criminal concerns. Manibusan says that the OIG is not engaged in an efficiency investigation in Libby, and that the OIG’s policy on criminal investigations is to neither confirm nor deny their existence.

Sullivan says he was interviewed by an investigator named Cory Rumple who, when contacted by the Independent, declined to comment on whether or not he is taking part in an investigation. Rumple did confirm his role as a criminal investigator for the OIG. Peggy Churchill, project manager of the Libby cleanup, confirmed the existence of an investigation, and Dr. Gerry Henningsen, technical advisor to TAG since Sullivan quit, acknowledged meeting with an investigator in March, and said “many others” have been interviewed as well.

Henningsen says he and the investigator discussed “concerns about various parts of the cleanup,” although he declined to specify those concerns.

Sullivan says he was also asked to explain his concerns about the cleanup, of which he has many, ranging from the technical to the personal.

Sullivan’s personal issue is that he and his wife Kathy’s home, like approximately 2,500 other homes in Libby, was insulated with asbestos from W.R. Grace’s mine. The EPA has remediated the Sullivans’ home, and contained hard-to-reach asbestos behind its walls.

But on a sunny Friday afternoon, Gordon stands at one corner of the log home, looking for glints of sunlight in spider webs. From the webs he pulls shiny bits of what he says is vermiculite, the asbestos-containing mineral from W.R. Grace’s mine, that he says have fallen through the walls of his home. Above the fallen vermiculite he points to a spot where cardboard was apparently used to hold it inside the walls.

The EPA has scrubbed about 550 homes in Libby since cleanup began in 2002. Sullivan says his isn’t the only home leaking vermiculite. His concerns about the way local homes were remediated goes to the heart of his problems with the cleanup.

In 2002, when Sullivan was first hired as TAG’s technical advisor, he says the plan was to completely remove asbestos from the town. That initial plan, Sullivan says, was steadily eroded by the EPA, from removal to containment to minimization of asbestos release. Now, he says, “It’s gone from minimizing release to ‘You clean it up.’” That comment refers to the EPA’s provision of HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaners to Libby residents so they can suck up any asbestos dust that escapes containment.

Sullivan’s other major problem with the cleanup is more technical. Before the cleanup even began, he says, the EPA should have done a risk assessment, a baseline study to determine how dangerous a toxin is, and how people might be exposed to it. Without such a baseline study, Sullivan says, it is impossible for the EPA to really know how safe anything in Libby actually is. It could turn out that it’s safe to leave some asbestos in people’s homes, and have them clean up spillage with vacuum cleaners. Alternately, that could turn out to be a deadly mistake. The problem, he says, is that nobody knows.

Sullivan says that while he served as technical advisor, he tried repeatedly to get these concerns dealt with by the EPA, with no success, which eventually led to his resignation as technical advisor.

Project manager Peggy Churchill says she’s unable to comment on Sullivan’s concerns, as they are part of an ongoing investigation.

At this time, it remains unclear what criminal charges might eventually arise from the investigation. What seems evident to Dr. Henningsen, Sullivan’s successor as technical advisor, is that the investigation itself will ultimately be good for Libby, no matter what investigators find.

“Everyone will benefit from a solid, clean, accusation-free process,” he says. “This should be seen as a chance to alleviate concerns.”