After the horror: hope and healing

LIBBY - It's been five years since Libby's asbestos contamination plight made national headlines. Town leaders declared then that Libby would deal with the problem and move forward.

Not everyone would survive the throes of asbestos-related disease, they came to acknowledge.

But Libby would survive.

Indeed, Libby has persevered in the aftermath of decades of toxic asbestos exposure linked to the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine. The economic indicators are everywhere.

Sixty new homes were built in Libby this year. Libby and Troy area real estate agents are enjoying the best market in several years, closing on 144 residential sales in the area. At least 77 sales are pending, they reported at a recent Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

At the former Stimson lumber mill site, 106 jobs have been created, with the prospect of up to 150 more jobs in the next year. Stimson's closure in October 2002 was a blow to the community, but the negative became a positive after Stimson donated its 411 acres to the Lincoln County Port Authority, creating an enviable avenue for economic development in Libby.

An infusion of $8 million for economic development - federal money secured by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont. - breathed life back into Libby after publicity of the widespread asbestos contamination sucker-punched the town.

The money was divvied up for myriad projects, including the expansion of Turner Mountain ski resort, nine more holes at the Cabinet View golf course and a memorial gymnasium that houses a performing arts center.

Libby Mayor Tony Berget has been the point man for most of the reporters who arrived in search of a woeful asbestos tale.

"It's been trying, a lot of pressure," he said in 2000.

These days, he sees a stronger Libby emerging from the shadows of the asbestos problem. While there are still health concerns and issues over the cleanup of contaminated homes, there's also a greater understanding of the problem.

Berget looks to Libby's future with anticipation and hope.

"I'm probably more optimistic than most," he said. "But I'm really excited about things like the research center."

Libby has been in survival mode since Nov. 14, 1999.

That's the date the Daily Inter Lake published the first round of reports that detailed the asbestos exposure in Libby. Other newspapers followed suit, and over the next year, nearly every major news network, magazine and daily newspaper sent crews to Libby to find out about the death and disease linked to asbestos.

More than 200 deaths were linked to asbestos and many hundreds more people were ill or would become ill.

To everyone's horror, Libby had fallen through the proverbial cracks.

W.R. Grace, once regarded as the town's best employer, had knowingly put hundreds of miners and their family members in harm's way, investigations proved.

But not one state or federal agency had held the corporation accountable.

Asbestos - a fibrous, incombustible form of magnesium and calcium silicate used to make insulating materials - was actually an impurity removed from the vermiculite milling process at the Libby mine. Long before it was found to be harmful, the company considered it a nuisance mineral in the mill because it generated dust and clogged up the screens in the machinery.

It also clogged lungs.

Vermiculite expands many times its original size when heated, and the popcorn-like black insulation that resulted was called Zonolite. In addition to the mine and mill, the company operated a research lab at the site and an expanding plant near the railroad tracks in downtown Libby.

Tremolite asbestos, the byproduct specific to Libby asbestos, is up to 1,000 times more hazardous that the more common chrysotile asbestos, researchers have discovered in tests on animals. The asbestos fibers get caught in the lung, causing scarring and subsequent disease in most cases.

Federal and state agencies rushed to Libby's side as news reports detailed the sickness and death cause by asbestos exposure over several decades from the vermiculite mine.

Government officials held Libby's hand, testing the air, soil and water while they confided they didn't know bad it was or how many had already died.

Early on, the community embraced the Environmental Protection Agency, which set up an office in downtown Libby early in 2000 to dispense information and listen to people's questions and fears. Though the EPA players have changed, the office is still there, at the helm of the biggest asbestos cleanup ever undertaken.

Progress is now quantifiable. Some $90 million has gone into the cleanup so far, with the promise of $17 million annually for the foreseeable future.

The federal agency tackled the biggest and most contaminated sites at first, overseeing the cleanup at the former Raintree Nursery, where vermiculite was screened for decades. The EPA also kept tabs on Grace's cleanup of the former Millwork West site, the former export plant.

One by one, other contaminated sites came to light - an ice-skating rink near Plummer Elementary School, the high school track, ballfields, park areas and most recently an area along the Kootenai River where a boat ramp is planned.

Just before Christmas 2001, Gov. Judy Martz made a commitment to use Montana's one-time "silver bullet" privilege for Libby, putting the Superfund project on a fast track, bypassing public comment periods so the cleanup could begin more quickly. At the time EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman also made a commitment to clean Libby within the three-year timeline specified by Martz.

Today, most of the big sites have been restored in Libby, but residential and commercial cleanup will continue for another five to seven years.

The Stimson property is being evaluated for potential contamination.

"We're not sure to what extent cleanup will be done there," EPA project manager Jim Christiansen said. "We haven't found anything really bad out there."

Lincoln County Commissioner Marianne Roose said there has been frustration with the pace of the cleanup, and some contractor issues, but by and large she's pleased with the progress being made.

"Any one of us can call Jim Christiansen and have communication. He's accessible," she said.

On the medical front, great strides have been made in setting up health care for asbestos victims.

More than 6,800 current and former Libby residents were tested for asbestos disease in early 2000 through a screening program paid for by the federal government.

The clock started ticking toward an eventual death sentence for some. Thirty percent of those in the first round of testing showed lung abnormalities most likely linked to asbestos exposure.

Although Grace shut down the mine in 1990, the asbestos legacy will plague Libby for years to come.

Dr. Alan Whitehouse, who has treated hundreds of asbestos victims through the years at his Spokane office, figures the asbestos problem will peak in the year 2015.

The Center for Asbestos Related Diseases, or CARD clinic as it is widely known, was set up in 2000. Along with St. John's Lutheran Hospital, the clinic is on the front line of treating people with asbestos disease.

W.R. Grace has donated $250,000 a year to the hospital for the past four years, and until last year all of the Grace money helped subsidize the CARD clinic and paid for X-rays of whose who couldn't afford health care, said Jeanie Gentry, director of support services at St. John's.

The CARD clinic split from the hospital a year ago, forming its own nonprofit corporation to pursue grants for the research center and other projects.

Grace has a medical plan to play health-care costs for asbestos victims; 850 people are currently enrolled.

"We committed to the medical plan and have worked very hard to make it work and get the bills paid," Grace spokesman Alan Stringer said.

A $3.5 million federal appropriation allowed the hospital to build an addition for more clinic space to handle asbestos patients and a new emergency room. It also paid for a tele-radiology system that allows the hospital to send and receive digital X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds and other images.

The city of Libby recently earmarked $250,000 of its $8 million economic development grant for seed money to establish an asbestos research center in Libby.

There has been international interest in a research clinic from as far away as Australia, CARD clinic physician Dr. Brad Black said. Many of the 38 National Cancer Institute sites around the U.S. also have expressed interest in using the clinic, including the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. The University of Cincinnati, University of Montana and Mount Sinai Hospital are other institutions interested in studying the health effects from the type of asbestos found in Libby.

Just as there's now a better understanding of the contamination and resulting cleanup, there's a better comprehension of asbestos disease.

"There was a lot of division in the community at first," Black said. "There's a better understanding that this is a real disease. Before, so many thought it was only the miners getting sick. Now it's started affecting their friends. Even the tough ones start worrying."

When the story went national, it split Libby: victims on one side, business promoters on the other. As Libby residents came to realize that asbestos exposure is not confined to those who worked at the mine, there has been gradual acceptance through the years that the problem must be dealt with openly.

Gayla Benefield was one of the early advocates who wanted W.R. Grace held accountable. She spent more than two decades campaigning for the rights of asbestos victims, and watched her parents die of asbestos disease along the way. The feisty Benefield, who has been diagnosed with asbestosis, has taken her share of criticism for publicizing the asbestos program.

She's tough enough to take it, she said.

"When I look back five years to that first town meeting, we've come so far in helping people with the disease and with the cleanup," Benefield observed.

The county commissioners set up three solid goals when the asbestos publicity erupted - clean up the contaminated sites as soon as possible, take care of medical needs and develop a research center.

"Bad news travels fast, and we didn't want to be known as the valley of sickness," Commissioner John Konzen said. "We want to get the word out that Libby will probably be the cleanest city in the nation. This type of cleanup won't happen in other areas."

Even before the asbestos saga, Libby was in survival mode more often than not, fighting economic downturns in logging as well as mining. Asbestos created a perfect storm, so to speak, over Libby.

It's been an arduous task returning Libby to the town it was before November 1999. Tourism dropped off, homes stopped selling, people were getting sick, political infighting erupted, all under the microscope of national media scrutiny.

Somewhere amid the strife, Libby turned a corner, and good things started to happen.

"People have learned to cope, they've gone beyond the anger and denial. They've moved on to reconciliation," Lincoln County Commissioner Rita Windom said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com