A Mountain of Trouble Pulls a Town Together

In the rain forest of northwest Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, hidden from public view, sits a mountain with no top. Its peak was sacrificed to the W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine, which once supplied 80% of the world’s ore for the manufacture of asbestos. Seen from the air, the dug-out mountain looks like a massive, suppurating sore, with pustulous yellow tailings spreading down through a poisoned, dying forest.

The mine officially closed in 1990, but people are still dying from the poison it released before then. To date, as a direct result of exposure to the ultrafine tremolite fibers in the vermiculite taken from the mine, more than 200 people have died in and around Libby (pop. 3,000). Some of those who died were W.R. Grace’s miners; others were friends and family members who came in contact with mine dust on workers’ clothing. As the health risks of asbestos exposure became known, W.R. Grace divested billions of dollars of its suddenly vulnerable assets into other companies, then, in 2001, filed for bankruptcy.

Death from asbestosis is not pretty. As the disease progresses over 20 or 30 years, an impenetrable latticework of scar tissue forms on the victims’ lungs, making it ever more difficult to breathe. Near the end, the afflicted cannot even walk out to get the morning paper without having to stop and gasp for air.

The Environmental Protection Agency has determined, after extensive monitoring, that the community is safe now. But that doesn’t mean the area’s troubles are over. We have only 19,000 residents in all of Lincoln County, and of those 7,000 who have been screened for asbestosis, nearly a third show some sort of pleural thickening or abnormality. I am one of the lucky ones, without damage, having moved here the year the mine ceased operating.

Asbestosis isn’t W.R. Grace’s only legacy. The principal employer in Libby, the county seat, used to be a plywood manufacturer, owned by an Oregon company, Stimson Lumber. The mill employed about 330 people and was responsible for the direct livelihood of about 1,000 people, counting spouses and children. The mill faced the same market forces that have put a squeeze on the entire U.S. plywood industry: the increasing use of far-cheaper pressboard and chipboard instead of plywood and competition from imports of cheap, high-quality plywood from Russia and elsewhere. But the Stimson mill in Libby faced another challenge, that of W.R. Grace’s legacy of poison. Because of asbestos liability, Stimson’s insurer raised the mill’s premium by $600,000 in a single year, and that made the difference between profit and loss in a tight market.

For a time, it looked as if the mill could survive if it just had a source for an additional 10 million board feet of lumber per year. This came at a time when some in Congress (and our own governor, Judy Martz, a self-professed “lap dog of industry”) were clamoring to subsidize increased logging in national forests, but our local solution was more moderate and collaborative, more sustainable and economical.

Robyn King of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (a local environmental group working to achieve permanent protection for the Yaak Valley’s last unprotected roadless areas) and I were invited to work with a task force from the mill, to see whether we could help find some “extra” volume. With the help of local U.S. Forest Service leadership, local businesspeople, mill workers and elected officials, we did, by looking at the overstocked, smaller-diameter groves around nearby communities -- not in the wild, distant backcountry, which is so ecologically and socially valuable in its existing wild state.

It may have seemed odd for a couple of tree huggers to have worked with the lumber industry to locate trees to chop down, but we need a mill in this area. The economic reasons are immediately apparent. A lot of us would also like to see a mill here become a beacon to a future kind of wood production, in which burned and small-diameter logs become the norm. And it was important to keep the mill going because if it couldn’t find a way to insure workers in an area contaminated by W.R. Grace’s legacy of tremolite fibers -- as well as the creosote and diesel fouling the Stimson mill site -- then all the timber in the world would not allow a business to succeed there.

Stimson ultimately pulled out despite our efforts. But that hasn’t stopped the community from pushing ahead. There are dozens of ideas floating around -- for an employee-owned mill, for a nonprofit mill, for the mill to become a center for government pilot projects utilizing new logging procedures.

Our so-far insurmountable problem, though, is the asbestos legacy. The area has been declared a Superfund site, and Montana’s senior senator, Max Baucus is working to establish a federally funded “White Lung” fund for asbestosis victims similar to the “Black Lung” fund established for coal miners with silicosis. We’ll need that. Meeting the asbestos-related health-care needs of just our small community is likely to cost between $50 million and $500 million over the next 60 years.

Meanwhile, Lincoln County continues to struggle. We’ve rejected some rotten ideas -- like one politically charged proposal to cut more trees in the area’s national forests, up to $1 million of “extra” logging, and to dedicate the money to a local health fund. But the community understands the need to hold together and not allow such “logging-versus-lungs” proposals to pit us against one another. We need our wild forests and we need to take care of the sick and the dying. And we need to find a new way to support work in the woods since the mill left town.