Chemical firm 'poisoned town' with asbestos

Residents of a Montana mining town will have their day in court today to see a major chemical company accused of poisoning their homes and schools with asbestos.

Lawyers for Libby residents say the pollution has killed 225 people and afflicted about 2,000 in the area.

WR Grace and Co and five of its executives are charged with knowingly exposing the residents to the fibrous mineral linked to cancer.

Prosecutors have had to overcome years of legal challenges that went all the way to the US Supreme Court.

“This trial is one of the most complex and creative criminal prosecutions in the history of environmental regulation,” said Andrew King-Ries, an assistant professor at the University of Montana School of Law.

The case stems from the mining for vermiculite from Zonolite Mountain near Libby, which began around 1920 and continued until 1990. The mineral could be processed into products used for plumbing insulation, fireproofing and gardening. Zonolite brand insulation is in some 35 million homes in the US.

But the vermiculite from the Libby mine was contaminated with naturally-occurring asbestos mineral fibres, which can be inhaled and can cause mesothelioma, asbestosis and lung cancer.

US District Judge Donald Molloy has placed a gagging order on the parties involved, but court documents set the stage.

“The defendants in this case knew the dangers of asbestos they released into the Libby, Montana air, yet they concealed the dangers, putting local residents at risk while enriching themselves,” prosecutors said in their trial brief.

Lawyers for WR Grace, based in Columbia, Maryland, deny there was any conspiracy to knowingly release asbestos and say most of the releases occurred years before an applicable law was passed in 1990.

“The government has illogically charged that the defendants conspired in 1976 to violate a statute that would not exist for another 14 years,” the company said in its trial brief.

The case has outraged many people in Montana, which has a long history of environmental and economic exploitation by giant corporations that extracted wealth while leaving behind their messes. Many are impatient with the delays that Grace has sought through numerous appeals.

“Folks in Libby have suffered long enough,” US senator Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, said. “It’s well past time for the wheels of justice to get rolling.”

Libby is a town of about 2,600 people located in a forested valley of the Cabinet Mountains, about 100 miles north west of Missoula, Montana.

Kristine Paulsen, a Libby resident who wrote a master’s thesis on how townspeople were coping with the pollution, said many were unsure how to react to the start of a trial that is expected to last for months.

“They want to get their hopes up, but they’ve gotten their hopes up so many times it is hard to do anymore,” she said. “The things that happened to these people are just so terrible.”

Tiny particles of the ore got into homes on the clothes of miners. The ore was also taken to processing plants in Libby, one of which was located next to a baseball field.

The mill smokestack released up to 24,000lbs of dust a day. Asbestos-contaminated mine tailings were used to build running tracks at local junior high and high schools, and lined an elementary school skating rink.

After news reports of health problems, the Environmental Protection Agency sent an emergency team to Libby in 1999 to collect information about asbestos contamination, and the town was declared a Superfund cleanup site in 2002.

Under the Superfund law, the government provides funds to clean up heavily-contaminated toxic waste sites that have been abandoned.

“There were visible flakes of vermiculite everywhere,” said Dr Charlie Weis, an EPA toxicologist, at a recent pre-trial hearing.