How the EPA is Rubbing Poison Into Libby's Wounds Breach of Trust in America's Most Toxic Town

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/peacock01152008.html

By ANDREA PEACOCK

The voice on the phone spoke with the confidence of authority: he had called to say that the people of Libby, Montana, were being screwed over once again. The culprit, however, was not the W.R. Grace & Co., whose asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mine had been the source of death and disease for these folks for most of the 20th century. This time, the anonymous caller asserted, the Environmental Protection Agency was to blame.

He had my attention.

A contractor on the cleanup, he said, was secretly ignoring decontamination procedures in violation of federal law, while the EPA turned a blind eye. "It's fraudulent and deceptive, and the blame goes all the way up."

For the better part of 70 years, Libby miners dug away at a virtual mountain of vermiculite located about seven miles northeast of town as the raven flies. Under the auspices of the Grace corporation (which bought the mine in 1963), this small town in the far northwestern corner of Montana provided the vast majority of the world's commercial vermiculite. Marketed as a soil conditioner and do-it-yourself housing insulation, Grace's ore resides in the walls and attics of an estimated 35 million buildings in the United States. It also happens to be contaminated with a highly virulent form of asbestos referred to as Libby Amphibole.

Grace kept this information to itself for the nearly three decades it spent mining Libby of its wealth and health, tracking the decline of its workforce through annual medical exams, and blocking the inquiries of doctors and federal regulators when the stench of its secret aroused anyone's curiosity.

The death toll ran to almost 200 before anyone outside of town noticed. A subsequent study found nearly one in five locals who volunteered for testing showed signs of lethal asbestos-related damage in their lungs. When the EPA rolled in at the tail end of 1999, its agents promised a new era of accountability. "In the past you've dealt with government as a broad, faceless bureaucracy," team leader Paul Peronard told a packed town meeting hall. "Your satisfaction or not is my responsibility."