Libby, Mont.- When Rick Erickson looks into the future, he sees his own death. And while no death is easy, the one that awaits this former mine worker is horrifying.
The asbestos that already contaminates his lungs will continue to scar them, causing a slow suffocation that will take years to run its course.
As the end nears, doctors will increase his doses of morphine and antidepressants, trying to control his brain’s natural panic response as he’s unable to catch a breath.
His personality will change as his brain gets less oxygen. Virtually any movement will exhaust him. At the very end, heavily drugged, he’ll drift in and out of consciousness, literally choking to death.
It’s a death Erickson, 54, has seen before. He cared for his father, who died two years ago from asbestosis, the disease Erickson and his 32-year-old son also have.
And his feeling that W.R. Grace & Co., the company for which he worked briefly, may ultimately kill all three – as well as many others in this small Montana town – fills him with rage.
“When W.R. Grace did this to the community, it basically sentenced us to death,” Erickson said of the chemical giant, which mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite on a mountain above the town for 27 years.
“I can picture my son going through that (kind of death). I can picture myself going through that. It becomes really overwhelming to look into the future,” he said.
Tucked at the base of the Cabinet Mountains, Libby is one of the country’s largest Superfund sites, contaminated by a naturally occurring mix of vermiculite and asbestos that floated in dust clouds over the town or was brought home by miners to put in attics and gardens. Sold nationally, the mix was used for home insulation, as a commercial fire retardant and as garden fertilizer.
News of alarming rates of asbestos disease here in 1999 set off a media storm that exhausted officials and bitterly divided the community.
Seven years later, the media have mostly moved on, but Libby continues to struggle with the spread of a disease that, because of a long latency period, still hasn’t peaked. Experts say that the community is dealing with a slow- motion public health crisis of staggering proportions.
Of the 8,000 people who live in Libby and the surrounding valley, more than 1,500 have been diagnosed with asbestos-related disease – nearly 19 percent of the population. More than 265 people have died, a victims’ group says, counting a small number of disease-related suicides. The main asbestos clinic here makes 20 diagnoses a month.
Once thought to be largely limited to workers at W.R. Grace’s vermiculite mine or their families, the disease is claiming victims much more broadly. The youngest are in their mid-30s, and many never set foot in the mine, which closed 14 years ago.
In 2005, after years of civil lawsuits, the U.S. attorney in Montana filed criminal charges – including conspiracy, endangerment and obstruction of justice – against the company and seven former officials, accusing them of conspiring to conceal health risks. A trial is expected to start next year.
Court documents cite internal memos that show W.R. Grace officials knew workers and residents were getting sick, even as they hid that information from federal agencies, and as they provided asbestos-contaminated material to pave a high school running track and for use at a local elementary school.
Residents whose families have been decimated, who have watched their community undergo a seven-year cleanup that still is less than half over, say they’ve learned a terrible lesson of greed and corporate betrayal – and now want justice.
“I want their balls on a platter,” said Eva Thomson, a 67-year-old grandmother who is otherwise flawlessly polite. Thomson lost her mother, father and husband to asbestos-related diseases and has seen at least another nine relatives sickened.
Company denies claims
A blue-collar town with a strong sense of its own capacity for hard work, Libby’s prosperity was built on a sawmill and the W.R. Grace mine. Even as evidence mounted in the 1980s and early ’90s that workers were getting sick, many in the mine and the town continued to strongly defend the company.
“If you worked for Grace, you could walk downtown and buy a car, buy furniture without a penny in your pocket,” said Les Skramstad, who worked at the mine in the early ’60s and now has advanced asbestos-related disease.
But a company memo cited in court records shows that Grace officials knew as early as 1976 that two-thirds of their veteran workers were developing lung disease. Another, written in 1980 in response to a proposed federal health study of Libby, outlines possible countertactics, among them obstructing the study through the courts or using congressional influence to block it.
Greg Euston, a spokesman for W.R. Grace, said a gag order in the criminal case prevents the company from commenting. On its website, the company denies knowingly endangering workers and says it has spent more than $10 million in a voluntary program to pay for the medical bills of sickened residents.
But the trust here is mostly gone.
“Some of the (uncovered) memos are pretty inflammatory. They talked like these were just some old miners,” said Laura Sedler, a hospice worker at the local hospital.
“These are the little guys, and they got stepped on big-time,” she said.
In a community where just about everyone concedes there were illnesses and other signs of problems for a decade or more before the mine closed, the finger-pointing isn’t all outward. Fathers got sons summer jobs at the mine. Workers brought the contamination home on their dusty boots and clothes.
“I used to take the kids up there so they could see the big trucks, see what I did,” said Mike Noble, 54, a bear of a man who worked at the mine for 21 years.
“The Bible says the heavenly father will take care of us like a father does his children. That’s what parents are supposed to do. It bothers me that I may have put my children in danger,” said Noble, whose lungs are so badly damaged he has a hard time climbing stairs.
Cleanup has at least 7 years left
The fiber that is destroying Noble’s lungs has turned out to be far more aggressive than the common commercial asbestos used in brake pads or wrapped around pipes in old basements – and more deadly.
Breathed in as dust, tremolite asbestos punctures the lung, causing progressive scarring of the pleural lining. But the contamination also appears to be related to a cluster of other diseases that plague the town’s residents: Libby has higher-than-normal incidences of lung cancer, autoimmune disease and a rare form of cancer known as mesothelioma.
And the asbestos is everywhere. For decades, W.R. Grace gave away vermiculite free to locals, who hauled it home by the pickup load to put in their gardens and homes.
In a 2000 survey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found nearly 1,500 properties in Libby had dangerous levels of the contaminant. Of those, 769 have been cleaned so far at a cost of nearly $130 million.
The cleanup has at least seven years to go, the EPA says.
The contamination has wrought a peculiar landscape: While billboards lure motorists with huckleberry ice cream and video slot machines, men in respirators and white hazmat suits scurry in and out of contaminated homes.
Frequent testing shows the air is now clean, according to Anthony Berget, Libby’s mayor. Even so, a neighboring softball team recently refused to compete here because of parents’ fears, and a national drugstore chain scrapped plans to open a branch, afraid of the liability if their employees got sick.
And while some residents have abandoned the town, the crisis has turned many others into activists. They attend countless meetings, pressing the EPA on cleanup standards and Congress to fund a permanent health care trust for victims.
Planning for the future
But for most, their struggle is less public, shaped by an unpredictable disease that allows some to live for years with minor symptoms, while killing others rapidly and painfully.
Larry Hill, a 53-year-old meat cutter, never worked at the W.R. Grace mine. He lived on Main Street growing up and remembers the vermiculite dust blowing off trucks that rumbled by. He and other children used to play in piles of it near the railroad tracks.
Two years ago, Hill was on a 14-mile run when he collapsed. His lungs are now so badly damaged he can’t walk from the handicapped-parking space in front of Safeway to the store’s front door without stopping at least three times to rest.He thinks of the future often, though it’s not necessarily his own. On the table is a living will he recently completed. He’s thinking about buying a new truck, but he concedes that if he’s not around, it will give his wife a good vehicle in winter.
“I have everything in order,” he said.
Libby is struggling with how to chart a future in which residents will continue to get sick for years, perhaps decades, to come. That contaminated vermiculite was used to cover a local high school running track – and that a generation of children may have been contaminated as a result – is a symbol for some of how the company robbed Libby of its future as well as its present.
Dean Herried remembers running on that track. He was 36 years old when doctors told him five years ago that he had asbestos in his lungs. He has grown increasingly short of breath.
“Driving one day, I pulled over and started having a pity party for myself. I was just so mad,” said Herried, a teacher at an alternative high school here.
But he also realized that with his future uncertain, anger at Grace or the world wasn’t going to help. So, with his students, Herried is making a movie about the contamination in Libby and the potential danger for cities nationwide – including Denver, where Libby vermiculite was processed until 1990.
“First it was, ‘What’s going on in Libby?’ Then it became, ‘We need to warn other parts of the U.S.,”‘ said Herried, who spends as much time as he can teaching his second-grader to fly-fish.
“It’s a roll of the dice. You come to understand that whatever God wants is God’s way. But we can still intervene to stop whatever’s out there” from hurting more people, he said.
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at mriley@denverpost.com or 303-954-1614.
A history of concerns
A timeline of developments in Libby, Mont., involving W.R. Grace & Co., as detailed in court documents filed by federal prosecutors in the criminal case against the company and former officials:
1963: W.R. Grace acquires vermiculite mine above Libby.
1976: A safety official for Grace gathers data on an emerging pattern of illness among mine workers in Libby. Of 18 retired workers studied, 14 had lung disease. Sixty-three percent of all mine workers with more than 10 years on the job also showed signs of the disease.
From 1977 onward, Grace performs a series of tests that show routine handling of its products caused a release of asbestos fibers into the air and that asbestos was released when home insulation made from Libby vermiculite was installed in attics.
1978: A toxicologist hired by Grace provides the company with data that showed asbestos from the Libby mine caused cancer in animals. A consultant hired by the company later removed that finding from the final report.
1980: Grace officials see a memo that alerts them that employees of fertilizer maker O.M. Scott in Maryland, where vermiculite was processed, were getting sick.
1981: Grace donates asbestos-contaminated vermiculite to an elementary school for use in the foundation of an ice rink. Sometime earlier, the company donated vermiculite to the local high school to surface the running track.
July 8, 1981: A Grace employee monitors samples from the high school running track that show high concentrations of airborne asbestos kicked up when the track is being heavily used. The asbestos isn’t fully removed from the track for 19 years.
April 5, 1982: A Harvard professor hired by Grace examines the death certificates of 66 former mine workers and finds that “an excessive number” had died of respiratory cancer, including a rare form of
asbestos-related cancer known as mesothelioma.
July 15, 1983: A mandatory uniform and shower policy adopted to minimize take-home dust was scuttled because it would cause “unwarranted fear or concern” in the community.
1992: Libby closes the mine and associated operating plants, having made at least $140 million in profits over more than three decades.
