Monday, November 22, 1999

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Hundreds of people in Libby, Mont., have been consigned to die painful deaths because they were exposed to highly toxic asbestos dust.

And many more of Libby's 2,700 residents may die simply because government officials can't stir themselves to learn whether the health threat still exists.

The appalling failure of government officials to prevent the human health catastrophe in Libby ranks as one of the worst cases of dereliction of duty in the annals of bureaucracy.

No one with the authority to do so ever did a thing to prevent the W.R. Grace Co. from killing Libby residents by carelessly exposing them to tremolite dust stirred up in its vermiculite mining operation. That is a clear conclusion we derive from a report Thursday and Friday by Post-Intelligencer senior national correspondent Andrew Schneider.

Worse yet is that -- even after 192 people have died and at least 375 more have been stricken with the slow-acting lung diseases that will kill them -- not a single city, county, state or federal agency or official has lifted a finger to prevent more of Libby's people from dying.

State, local and federal officials apparently do not wish to know whether the dust of tremolite -- a most toxic form of asbestos -- still is slowly killing Libby's residents.

They apparently don't want to know whether Libby residents are breathing in death sentences. They don't want to know whether the killer dust has leached into the Kootenai River. They don't want to know if the workers' children and grandchildren will die from exposure to the dust decades from now.

But the public has every right to know these things.

Much of the exposure of miners and their families to the dust that saturated everything in Libby -- the air, the walls of its houses, its streets, its vegetable gardens -- easily could have been prevented. All that was needed was for Grace to install the showers workers repeatedly requested. But no one forced the company to do so.

The dangers posed by asbestos were understood from the first year the mine went into operation in 1924. But Grace, which acquired the mine in 1963 and had every reason to know full well why its workers were dying, did not admit until 1979 that the tremolite dust was a serious health threat.

Yet no one forced Grace to act responsibly. Certainly not the U.S. Public Health Service's Bureau of Occupational Safety and Health. Instead, in 1969 it promised Grace it wouldn't reveal the mortality rates among its workers if they were higher than normal.

Certainly not the now-defunct U.S. Bureau of Mines, which was a handmaiden to the mining industry. Certainly not the Montana Board of Health, which kept its inspection reports secret from the public even though as early as 1956 it found dust of "considerable toxicity" in the air at the plant. And certainly not the Montana Department of Environmental Quality or Lincoln County officials, who consider asbestos contamination in the county to be a state issue.

And certainly not the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which assigned a higher priority to ridding Libby of old fuel tanks than protecting its people from a catastrophic public health hazard.

John Wardell, the EPA's regional coordinator in Montana, told the P-I that "we cannot go out there unless we're invited." And he, added, no one in Montana has "invited" the EPA to protect the public in Libby.

"We are not responsible if the workers went home before being properly decontaminated and brought asbestos into their homes. That's a personal issue," Wardell added.

We don't think so.

*** POSTED DECEMBER 9,  1999 ***