In Attic and Flowerpot, a Lurking Menace
By Nicols Fox
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
AN AIR THAT KILLS
How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National
Scandal
By Andrew Schneider and David McCumber
Vermiculite is a mineral with remarkable properties. It is found naturally, mined like ore, and when it is heated it writhes like a worm -- "vermiculite" indeed means wormlike -- and "pops" when the water stored in its layers of magnesium-aluminum-iron silicate expands suddenly. This expanded material is fireproof, useful as an insulator, and it can be made to work -- among other things -- as a soil lightener. It is often found in potting soil mixtures -- those tiny, angular, iridescent bits -- and other household products, including some brands of kitty litter. Most vermiculite, according to the authors, contains asbestos in the form of a fiber called tremolite, which is found in some talc as well.
During World War I, at a time "when materials to produce the machinery of battle were in great demand," Edgar Alley explored a mine he had inherited near Libby, Mont. He was looking for vanadium, which war industries were then using to harden steel. Instead, he found vermiculite, a normally useful substance that, in the case of the Libby mine, would harden not steel but the lungs of miners -- and the lungs of their families.
Tremolite, which has long, needlelike fibers that embed themselves in the lungs, is now known to be one of the most dangerous forms of asbestos, its links to various cancers well established. The enduring image from Andrew Schneider and David McCumber's "An Air That Kills" is of feeble men and women, not all of them old, too weak to walk more than a few steps before stopping to rest, trailing green bottles of oxygen around town.
The Zonolite company eventually took over Alley's claim to the mine. Zonolite ran the ore through expanding ovens to produce a feather-light insulation of the same name; by 1942, the company was shipping 1,400 bags a day. In 1963 Zonolite merged with W.R. Grace, which between 1960 and 1990 mined 9.8 billion pounds of vermiculite, shipping the material widely throughout the United States and Canada. Three-quarters of the world's supply originated in Libby.
"Zonolite Mountain was like a heart now," write the authors, with more poetry and passion than one expects from journalists, "pulsing with the roar of steam shovels, pushing its geological hellbroth of vermiculite and asbestos along the arterial rails, washing across the country in every direction, to hundreds of processing plants, warehouses, factories, suffusing the flesh and bone of a new society. It would be added into wallboard, into roofing, into garden products. And worst of all, it would be placed undiluted into sacks that carried no warnings, sold as insulation and dumped in dusty, deadly profusion inside millions of walls and acres of attics in houses across America."
Schneider was the reporter and McCumber the editor of the report that broke in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in November 1999. In "An Air That Kills," they supply a thorough inventory of the malignant neglect that permitted the scandal to go undetected for years. Town officials not only ignored but also chose to deny the increasing numbers of ill and dying miners. The local medical community helped conceal a growing crisis by misdiagnosing asbestos-related disease, denying the obvious links to employment, failing to tally the full extent of those affected in the community and choosing not to confront the company about sick workers.
Zonolite's executives were well aware that its workers were in danger and quietly tracked their illnesses even as they downplayed the risk and resisted regulation. Interestingly, the dangers of asbestos, as Schneider and McCumber point out, have been known "to civilization . . . for thousands of years." A government agency -- in this case, the Environmental Protection Agency -- neglected its responsibility to protect the public from certain harm by failing, among other things, to use updated testing methods even as more sophisticated tests clearly identified the risk. The authors also write of the heroes who helped uncover the Zonolite menace: the now archetypal citizen-activist, formidable and persistent; the relentless reporter; the alert editor; the committed lawyer and the heroic and tenacious EPA employee who bucks regulations and challenges authority to right a wrong. It is the stuff of opera, a tragic tale of greed, betrayal and corruption finally revealed -- if not entirely righted -- by courage and perseverance. Unfortunately, such stories, while always shocking, are no longer surprising. We have heard them before. Libby, Mont., is different mainly by virtue of the numbers of people affected and the extent of contamination in the town.
If the dust in the air from the mine were not enough to sicken and kill, there was the clothing of the workers, which had carried home the fibers to the wives who washed the clothes and to the children who breathed the air in the homes. And there was the athletic field of the school -- yards from the expanding plant -- where countless feet stirred dust that was created out of mine tailings. Children climbed on the mounds of debris. Houses were insulated with the stuff. It was virtually everywhere, and it was deadly.
It is easy enough to be scandalized by this story and still assume that it is someone else's problem. But as Schneider and McCumber remind readers, attics across America are still filled with this insulation. Mines elsewhere in the United States are still producing ores that contain asbestos. Workers still suffer debilitating diseases -- and health costs that companies are reluctant to acknowledge or cover.
The government warns of dangers only reluctantly -- the air in New York after Sept. 11 contained these and similar fibers even as health officials gave assurances that it was safe. And, perhaps most surprising of all, the assumption that asbestos has been outlawed and is no longer in commercial products couldn't be further from the truth (a current bill to do so remains in a congressional subcommittee). The initial regulations to phase out asbestos in consumer products were overturned by a judicial decision in 1991 and have never been reinstated.
In my garage there is a container of potting soil. I open it and even in the dim light see the sparkling bits of vermiculite and wonder. It's easy enough to see how this happened, how magical vermiculite seemed in the beginning. It's much harder to understand why it is still going on.
*** POSTED ON FEBRUARY 25, 2004 ***