Libby looks through the dust to the future
By Kyle Lehman
Grace Case Project reporter
Like mining towns across the west, Libby, Mont., was built on industries that scraped revenue from the hills and forests around town. But when one of those corporations, W.R. Grace, pulled up roots and departed, it left behind something more than mining scars and unemployment. Today, that something is evidenced by the millions of federal dollars streaming into the town, by workers in biohazard suits and by rates of asbestosis and mesothelioma that are described in multiples of the national average.
Asbestos, a byproduct of the W.R. Grace-owned vermiculite mine near town, has emerged in recent decades as the bogeyman of Libby, the cause of cancers and concerns, both real, and to some, imagined, in an otherwise remote and idyllic river valley in northwestern Montana.
For the people of Libby, their town is more than just ground zero for what is being called the largest environmental travesty in U.S. history. It is where they live and work. A town they accept despite its blemishes.
“Every community is going to have something,” said Dusti Thompson of the Libby Chamber of Commerce. “It’s how you choose to deal with those situations that determines if you make it.”
As asbestos-contaminated remnants of the past are scooped up from Libby’s lawns and playgrounds and trucked up to Zonolite Mountain to be stashed safely in the old vermiculite mine, Libby’s business owners and workers look to an uncertain economic future.
The government funded clean up of Libby has poured money into the area, still faltering after W.R. Grace went under in the early ’90s and other mines and mills closed or downsized.
Ted Linnert of the Environmental Protection Agency reckons that the government’s economic footprint reaches all sectors of the economy.
“We are currently the biggest economic driver in town,” he said. “We figure that we have put $9 million into the local economy.”
Linnert said that outside workers not only spend money in Libby, some have chosen to buy homes and raise their families in the town. Despite the money that the EPA is bringing in, Linnert acknowledges that the clean up obstructs business as well as daily life in Libby.
While the EPA workers try to minimize their impact by doing things such as monitoring the number of dump trucks that rumble through town, Linnert said that there are inevitable disruptions caused by a job of this magnitude. One of the biggest impacts Linnert sees is when cleanup teams close a business while they remove traces of asbestos from its grounds.
“We cannot compensate businesses for their losses while we are working,” he said. “That is obviously a significant hardship.”
According to the EPA’s Mike Cirian, who oversees the cleanup, when the EPA started testing homes and businesses in Libby for asbestos they came back with 1,600 properties out of 4,400 that had high enough levels of asbestos to warrant a cleaning. To do this, Cirian oversees a work force he said is 99 percent Libby residents.
The workers tear out insulation, scrape attics bare, and vacuum the affected buildings. Outside of the homes, teams remove at least one foot of topsoil from the lawn. If they find traces of vermiculite in the first foot they keep going until the vermiculite ends or they reach three feet, at which point they lay down orange fence and refill the area.
Cirian does not take the invasive nature of his work lightly. He understands how some residents can feel anxious when crews roll up to their property.
“That’s someone’s castle, as a homeowner it is probably your most prized possession,” he said. “People have worked their whole lives for their homes and it is hard to see someone you don’t know go in there.”
Rod Delaney thinks the government is going about the cleanup all wrong, hurting the town more than helping it.
Delaney describes himself as a Reagan hippy. Born in Libby, he worked in mills and a silicon mine before becoming a real estate agent 13 years ago. Delaney said that sensational media coverage allowed the government to rush forward with a poorly executed cleanup that unnecessarily burdens the small community.
“It’s like most of our over-ramped, over-hyped federal boondoggles. It adversely affects business,” he said. “It’s just a whole scam, the fact that we even let them come in here is a joke.”
In his job as a real estate agent for Libby’s Beaglewood Realtors, Delaney said that he has seen the effects of the cleanup in tentative buyers and a shaky housing market, some of which he attributes to the current financial crisis.
Delaney said that Libby’s real estate agents must show paperwork on all of the homes they sell, documenting the results of the EPA’s asbestos tests. Delaney himself lives in a house that the EPA is scheduled to clean up and has lived in others around town.
According to Delaney, the danger of asbestos has been overblown, and, like the cleanup, the lawsuit against Grace will do little to help the town of Libby.
“It’s just the name of the game today, how many corporations can be overstressed by lawsuits and not go broke?” he said. “If they opened W.R. Grace back up tomorrow they could fill it up with people willing to work.”
Although it is unlikely the Grace mine will ever reopen, locals agree that Libby could use the sort of jobs it once provided.
Dusti Thompson of the Libby Chamber of Commerce said that the employment offered by the cleanup is helpful, but she said that more long-term employment is needed.
“There are a lot of local people that are employed by the cleanup,” she said. “Probably 50 to 100 men when they are running full steam … A lot of those guys are going to have to look out of our area for employment when the cleanup is done.”
Thompson said that in order for the town she grew up in to thrive, it must look for smaller employers that will provide jobs for years to come. According to Thompson, the largest employers in town are the hospital, the U.S. Forest Service and the school district.
To attract business, the town recently installed fiber optic cable and is trying to educate outsiders about Libby, which, she said, will be one of the cleanest towns around after the EPA’s work is completed.
Libby City Councilman Lee Bothman said that city government is trying its best to plan for a future with fewer resource driven jobs and a more diversified economy. Bothman pointed to the city’s main street renovation project and its new hospital facility as examples of the sort of innovation he hopes to promote in Libby.
Bothman said that the town will continue to look to the mountains that embrace it for some of its jobs, especially considering the reality that the cleanup will end, and its workers will be looking for work.
“We need to be looking forward and planning for that now,” he said. “We are in the process of trying to permit another mine in the Cabinets (mountain range) … that could replace those jobs and then some.”
Thompson, who was born in Libby, raises her own children there and breathes the air every day, a large part of the struggle to move forward is removing the negative stigma associated with the town’s past.
“(Asbestos) is a big scare for a lot of people that haven’t been educated about it,” she said. “Libby just gets beat up so much … you’ve got to keep trying or else Libby would just dry up and cease to exist.”