EPA needs to come clean on Libby
Libby residents probably want to know even more than Sen. Max Baucus why the EPA never declared an emergency over asbestos poisoning.
There was an expectation that such an emergency would be declared in 2002, but it never happened.
Baucus wants to know whether there was political pressure put on the Environmental Protection Agency by the White House, and has asked the agency to supply documents relating to the decision not to declare an emergency.
Regardless of how the decision was reached, it was probably a bad one. The EPA admitted last year it does not know if the massive cleanup in Libby has eliminated the risk from years of mining Zonolite, and there is potentially a nationwide problem relating to the health risks of exposure to asbestos, which was extensively used as an insulation material for dozens of years.
Baucus is on the right track. Information is the most important commodity to people at risk, and the people of Libby deserve all the information they can get after years of silence.
The day finally has come to open the doors, officially, to the Flathead Valley's newest education edifice.
Saturday is that day - Glacier High School's dedication day.
A project years in the making, Glacier High was built with $35 million from taxpayers in the Kalispell school district.
The new home of the Wolfpack covers 243,000 square feet near the intersection of West Reserve Drive and Stillwater Drive. It has 38 classrooms, a 600-seat performance hall, a 3,500-seat gym and, of course, the impressive commons area that greets visitors.
That commons area inside the school's south entrance will be the site of Saturday's dedication ceremonies from 10 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. Then there will be an open house from noon until 2 p.m.
This is a great opportunity for everyone to see what their tax dollars have produced.
When major fires are burning, information is critical for the public, whether those whose homes might be in danger, those who want to know how travel plans will be affected or those just wondering what's going on with those massive plumes of smoke.
Therefore it was frustrating for many people in the past few days when the main fire Web site, www.inciweb.org, was out of commission. It had become the primary go-to source for information on all of Montana's fires.
In its stead, fire officials put information on the Flathead Forest Web site and incident management team Web sites. And a new system of telephone information centers also has sprung up. That includes the Kalispell volunteer call-center operation initiated by the county Office of Emergency Services and even a new information center in Choteau for fires in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
We're glad to see these extraordinary efforts to keep people informed. And perhaps inciweb.org - which came back to life Thursday afternoon - will remain operational.