Wasting Libby: The True Story of How the WR Grace Corporation Left a Montana Town to Die — Book Excerpt
Our next release is at the printer now: Wasting Libby: The True Story of How the WR Grace Corporation Left a Montana Town to Die. It’s by Montana-journalist Andrea Peacock, with a short introduction by Jeff “Big Lebowski” Bridges.
Wasting Libby is beautifully written, but a tough read nonetheless, a heart-wrenching story of a small Montana town where W.R. Grace & Company ran a vermiculite mine that supplied the world with insulation, fireproofing, and gardening materials for nearly 30 years. But Grace’s vermiculite was laced with a virulent form of asbestos, and in its quest for profits the company betrayed this rural community, spreading a legacy of death and disease from northwestern Montana to the World Trade Center, through more than 35 million buildings in the United States estimated to have been insulated with Grace’s lethal ore. Decades of neglect by state and federal agencies allowed the Grace corporation to reap millions in profits, while knowingly exposing generations of Montana residents to fatal levels of asbestos-contaminated dust. The town of Libby and its inhabitants are dying. Their story, which culminates in the 2009 criminal trial of the corporation’s executives, is ultimately the tale of the families who fought Grace for justice, who refused to sacrifice their dignity even as they lost their lives.
The excerpt below is taken from Chapter 4: “Mountain of Grace.” Read it and weep…and then get pissed.
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The hotel room is stuffy with recycled air from the heater, a shield against the winter weather outside. It’s my first introduction to Les Skramstad, a slight man who this evening just before Christmas 1999 wears a gray complexion that matches the season, and is clearly uncomfortable in the closed space. Yet he, his wife Norita, and their friend Gayla Benefield have insisted on this meeting late tonight. They sit facing me like a panel of judges, though I’m the one asking questions. The tape recorder chews through cassette after cassette. I’m coming down with a cold, and the evening weighs heavy on me. But Gayla and the Skramstads have come down with something much worse, a modern plague that will rob them and at least three of their collective children of a full life. They know now, maybe decades ahead of time, how their death certificates will read: pulmonary fibrosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma. The diseases of asbestos.
We get to know each other slowly. I ask about work and their kids. But this is not small talk. Les worked for two and a half years for the company mining on Vermiculite Mountain, first putting in his time sweeping the dusty, dry mill. Later, Les transferred into town where he crawled around on his hands and knees, separating impurities from the piles of pure asbestos fibers his bosses wanted to experiment with. That was forty years ago, and in the meantime, he supported his family working as an auto mechanic, playing electric bass on the weekends for a country band called the Sundowners. For the sake of those few paychecks early in his married life, he’s dying now, without insurance, unable to work. But the worst of it is, so are his wife and two of his five children. He can barely speak for the weight of his guilt, so Gayla chimes in. “What person doesn’t set out to protect his family? I mean, this man here would give his life for his family.”
The snow has turned to rain outside, and we sit listening to its drumming on the pavement. “It’s a heavy cross to bear,” Les finally says. After the three leave, I sit typing my notes late into the night. They’ve lain out a map, an outline of a mystery that calls into question the essence of human nature: Why did W.R. Grace let its workers be poisoned? What kind of people can make such decisions? There won’t be easy or pleasant answers, I suspect, maybe none at all. Still there must be some wisdom here, something to redeem guilt, settle anger, make us all better people. I decide the place to start looking is where it all began: on Grace’s mountain.
Vermiculite Mountain rises to a modest 4,200-feet, a smallish, unremarkable hill compared to the spectacular ice and rocks of nearby Glacier National Park. Many of the peaks and valleys in the surrounding Kootenai National Forest have been logged, with clearcuts lining the road for most of the 90 miles east to Kalispell, the region’s largest town. It was a fate escaped by Vermiculite while its owners were busy extracting ore. Now that the cut has declined on public lands, and the mine has closed, loggers have begun to work this hill as well.
EPA toxicologist Chris Weis agrees to be my guide to the mountain the morning after my meeting with Gayla, Les and Norita, though he is practically a tourist himself. Weis is part of the agency’s emergency response team sent from Denver, which swooped down on Libby like a SWAT team within a week of the dire reports in a Seattle newspaper breaking the story that 200 people of this town had been killed, and possibly thousands more made sick, while no one from any level of government paid any attention.
Weis picks a chunk of the ore out of the trunk of his rental car to show me. “Looks like coyote scat, doesn’t it?” And it does—remarkably so. Weis has parked half-way up the dirt road to the mine, and is pointing out landmarks. Across the ravine is the old tailings pile, where miners dumped waste rock. Practically a mountain in itself, the terraced pile supports scraggly clumps of grass and not much else. The hill slopes down to Rainy Creek, where a half-dozen ducks float on one of two ponds created by a mud dam, a system engineered to keep mine waste out of the nearby Kootenai River. The lowland is lush with cattails and willows, and an osprey nest suggests the presence of trout. “This is actually a very healthy wetland,” Weis says. “I wish all mine closures were as good looking as this one.”
But looks are deceiving. By Weis’ calculations, the amount of tremolite asbestos in that tailings pile ranges from 30 to 40 percent. Those ponds are most certainly contaminated, he allows. Asbestos washed—still washes during flood season—downstream, into the river and beyond.
“We can’t go all the way up—it’s private land,” he says pointing to the top of the hill, where the actual mine was. “But on a clear day, you can stand on top and see town.”
Pink flags line the dirt road every 1,000 feet or so down to the river marking the EPA’s sampling sites. Extra flags dot the “amphitheater,” a clearing by the side of the road where trucks hauling ore down to the river could turn off to let each other pass, used until now by high school kids for weekend keg parties. Grace stored vermiculite, graded by size, in a series of bins and silos on the west side of the river. When the time came to load the ore for shipping by rail to expansion plants across the country, an operator would pull a switch, dumping a mess of it onto an underground conveyor belt that emerged from the riverbank and crossed the water to the old Burlington Northern railroad tracks on the east side. Another set of flags mark the grounds where the old storage and loading facility sat, currently occupied by a family-owned nursery. The business, which sold houseplants to the EPA to help brighten up the agency’s spartan office, would be forced to shut down several months later, after the officials declared the grounds to be highly contaminated. On into town, the agency has flagged baseball fields that adjoin more processing facilities.
In the early months of 2000, the EPA will find that all of the mining facilities are contaminated with asbestos. Preliminary results show tremolite in the dust along the Rainy Creek road, in the tunnels at the loading facility, the old export plant downtown near the Little League baseball fields.
But that’s not all.
Vermiculite mining was a dusty business, and the workers went home filthy each night. Employees were told the asbestos-laden dirt was “nuidust,” and their wives breathed it in as they scrubbed clothing and curtains and floors. Their children inhaled it as they played on the carpet. Their neighbors got a dose when they put vermiculite in their gardens, and insulation from the mine in their attics.
When news of dead and dying townspeople with no connection to the mine finally hit the media in 1999, Grace CEO and Chairman Paul Norris responded with a press release, saying, “We were surprised to learn of the allegations since no one had raised them with us previously.” His point man, Alan Stringer, seconded and clarified Norris’ statement. “Sure, I knew that there were issues with past workers and workers’ families, this is a small town and for people to deny that they didn’t know that is a little short-sighted,” he told me. “I knew it, but I didn’t believe that there was a problem to the town in general from past or current operations.”
But Grace’s dust ignored artificial boundaries, obeyed no property lines, and corporate managers knew this. When the winds blew right, the nearly-constant dust cloud from the dry mill drifted into town. In a 1965 memo, one Grace supervisor wrote, “Butch thinks you could get a 5 count in downtown Libby on many dry days.” Former Grace manager Earl Lovick interpreted this for lawyers during a 1997 deposition: Butch was Libby manager Raymond “Butch” Bleich, and a five count translated to five million particles of dust per cubic foot. One of Grace’s own engineers put the asbestos content of the dry mill dust as ranging between 12 and 23 percent, dust which was exhaled outside the mill by huge fans, then left to the whims of the prevailing winds. Added up, this means Libby’s citizens working or shopping downtown were breathing air that contained between 600,000 and more than one million particles of asbestos fibers per cubic foot of air.
In 1967, Grace would measure the dust coming out of one stack and find that it spewed out about 12 tons of airborne particulate matter a day. While state law allowed less than one ton of such discharge per day, Lovick said he could recall no effort on the part of Montana officials to enforce the law.
Likewise, Grace and its Libby employees did nothing to discourage a long-established practice whereby Libby folks went down to the Grace export plant, or out to the loading facility, and hauled pickup truck loads of waste vermiculite—ore that wasn’t quite up to standards for commercial use—and took it home to put in between their walls as insulation, and in their gardens to break up the hard clay soil. This went on with Grace’s tacit approval, and continued until the mine closed in 1990.
The EPA tested 52 homes in the first months of 2000, taking soil and insulation samples, and pumping air through a high-tech vacuum system. The results: More than half of those, 27 homes, had asbestos in the air or dirt, with four of those registering tremolite at dangerous levels. Test results were still pending for Libby’s schools, with more aggressive sampling scheduled for the summer months. Eventually, EPA technicians would find still more asbestos under the high school and middle school running tracks, in the grade school skating rink, and hear rumors of it—gossip that would thankfully turn out to be false—lying in the corner of a pre-school playground. But by the summer of 2000, the conclusions were clear: Ten years after the mine closed, Libby residents were still being poisoned by asbestos from Vermiculite Mountain. Members of at least four generations of Libby residents, maybe more, could expect to die from the mine’s airborne dust.