Thursday, November 25, 1999

By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT

LIBBY, Mont. -- As a child, the governor of Montana played in the piles of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite ore that some residents in this small mining community say have caused death and disease.

Marc Racicot lived about 12 blocks from the buildings where the W.R. Grace Co. stored and shipped the vermiculite, which was called Zonolite. The company also experimented with the raw ore and the tremolite asbestos it contained.

No one in his family has had any lung diseases, he said yesterday, but admitted "it's been a while" since he's had a chest X-ray.

While Racicot may not be concerned about his health, he makes it clear that he's unhappy about the possibility that the state dropped the ball when it came to Libby's health problems.

"I'm frustrated and extremely worried about the situation," Racicot said. "We have an obligation as a government to protect our citizens, a statutory obligation, an ethical obligation and yes, a moral obligation. If we failed to do that, then something is very wrong."

As a child, Racicot went up to the mine frequently, and remembers the Zonolite being all over town.

"Yeah, I played in the piles," the governor said. "We weren't supposed to, but all the kids played there.

"We had it in our house. I can remember bringing the bags home and putting it in as insulation in the roof and the walls," he recalled. "It was in the garden. It was everywhere."

He remembers his favorite ice-fishing spot, down by the conveyor that carried the ore over the Kootenai River to the railroad cars.

"We were down there quite a bit," he said.

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigation published last week found that at least 192 miners and their family members have died from the tremolite asbestos which contaminated the mine's vermiculite ore.

The newspaper found that another 375 people had been diagnosed with fatal diseases caused by the fibers. Information in hundreds of e-mails and telephone calls received by the P-I indicate that the actual number of deaths and asbestos-related diseases may be far higher.

The question that is plaguing many residents is: Does a danger still exist from what W.R. Grace left behind?

"That's obviously the first question that we're going to address and we're starting now," said the governor.

Now, after years of inaction, there is almost a race to see who can get to the truth first.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has had an emergency response team in town for most of the week. They've set up air-sampling monitors downtown and on the mountain where the mine was. They're asking for residents who have Zonolite, the vermiculite insulation, in their homes to allow the air to be sampled. The EPA team is covering every corner of the community with an urgency motivated by concern that rain and imminent heavy snow will preclude meaningful testing.

The governor said that investigators from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the state health department are also on the scene.

A spokesman for W.R. Grace, which operated the mine from 1963 until it closed in 1990, said the company is extremely busy working with the state and federal investigators, "helping to provide answers to the people of Libby."

Libby officials, including the mayor, told the P-I that state agencies and the governor knew about the situation, and if anything was wrong the governor would have told them.

"That is absolutely not true," said Racicot. "Not a single official in Libby, Lincoln County nor the state had told me anything, whatsoever, about the deaths, the amount of illness or even the lawsuits in that community."

But the former Montana attorney general added, "I should have known."

He said he has ordered Montana department heads to determine whether or not their agencies should have been involved in protecting the public health in Libby.

"We're going to investigate that question thoroughly," he said. "We will determine whether or not that responsibility was obviated for whatever reason, purposefully, knowingly or negligently."

Racicot's grandfather arrived in Libby in 1917 to work as a logging camp cook. Forty-nine years later, Racicot, then a high-school senior, led the Libby team to its first and only state basketball championship.

"It was a great place to grow up," he said.

Libby is a beautiful town that hasn't stooped to Western frills to draw the tourists. The main street is dotted with gun and antique shops, taxidermists, bookstores and espresso stands. You can get a huge steak for $12 or gourmet duck with huckleberry sauce.

Most of the 12,000 people or so who live in and near Libby are feisty and independent, surrounded by the snow-capped Cabinet Mountains, national forest land, fish-filled rivers and a waterfall or two.

It has survived the boom and bust of silver, gold and vermiculite mines and of timber companies slashing their operations.

As far back as the 1950s, state inspectors were the first to document that Grace workers were being contaminated with large amounts of asbestos. But the reports were marked "confidential" and were given only to company management.

According to Grace documents and interviews with workers, the worldwide company never told its employees of the potential hazard for almost 20 years.

"That would never wash now," the governor said. "It was before OSHA, it was before the air quality act or the water quality act. It was before public health became as prominent as it should have been.

"Things we take for granted today . . . would be totally foreign to people in those days," he said, adding that at the time, regulators guaranteed the company confidentiality in order to get public-health information.

Racicot, a Republican, was elected Montana's 20th governor in 1992. He is now serving a second and final term. The governor is helping run Texas Gov. George W. Bush's Republican presidential campaign in the state. And some political observers in the region say he has his eye on a Cabinet position.

Some of his critics say Racicot is "too nice to be real" or "too smooth," but none offered any specifics. He may be the only governor in the nation who drives his own car and has his home number listed in the phone book.

When it comes to the problems in Libby, his anger at the state's inaction is barely concealed.

"We're going fix what must be fixed and then we're going find out how it happened," he said. "We want people to see what we're doing or see what we haven't done.

"The citizens of this country and of this state understand that human beings are fallible, but they will not tolerate or understand human beings not being honest," he said.

P-I senior national correspondent Andrew Schneider
can be reached at 206-448-8218 or andrewschneider@seattle-pi.com

*** POSTED DECEMBER 9,  1999 ***