Libby: The Town That Was Poisoned

On a hillside above Libby, Montana, the Zonolite Company began mining vermiculite in the nineteen twenties. Vermiculite is a silvery mineral that expands when heated, useful as insulation, as a soil additive, and as packing material. For seventy years it came out of this mountain and was shipped across the country, used in millions of homes and businesses. Almost none of the people who touched it knew that the Libby mine's vermiculite was contaminated with a particularly lethal form of asbestos called tremolite-actinolite, which lodges in lung tissue and never leaves.

The Zonolite Company knew by nineteen fifty-six. When W.R. Grace and Company bought the mine in nineteen sixty-three, they knew too. Neither company told the workers breathing the dust every day. The mine operated until nineteen ninety. By the time it closed, the damage was spreading well beyond the miners themselves. The processing facility sat in town. Vermiculite was used in the local baseball diamond, in the school running track, in gardens. Children played in piles of the material that came off the railcars.

In nineteen ninety-nine, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named Andrew Schneider began investigating an unusually high number of deaths in Libby from lung disease. The story he published sent federal investigators to the town. What they found prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to declare the Libby situation a public health emergency in two thousand nine, the first time in the agency's history it had invoked that designation. More than four hundred deaths have been directly linked to asbestos-related disease. Thousands more residents have been diagnosed with asbestosis, mesothelioma, or related lung conditions. The EPA has called it the worst human-made environmental disaster in United States history.

W.R. Grace agreed to pay two hundred fifty million dollars, the largest Superfund reimbursement in the program's history, though a two thousand nine criminal trial ended in acquittal on charges of knowingly endangering the community. The cleanup took nineteen years and cost the federal government over six hundred million dollars. More than a million cubic yards of contaminated soil and building materials were removed from eighty-two hundred properties around Libby.

The mountain still stands above the town. The mine is closed. The cleanup is officially complete. But residents continue to be diagnosed, because tremolite asbestos fibers, once inhaled, remain in the lungs indefinitely.