Death in the air

Wheezing and coughing are background noise in mining towns. You get used to the hollow-eyed men trailing oxygen bottles, begging your pardon for moving so slowly. Little wonder Libby, Mont., did not pause at the death of miner Glenn Taylor 43 years ago. Local doctors blamed it on tuberculosis, though the state hospital where Taylor was a patient said he died of asbestosis. By 2000, the death toll among Libby’s miners had grown to 200. Hundreds more were stricken. Not just miners, they included the wives and children of miners who brought the lethal dust home on their clothes, as well as people living thousands of miles away.

Libby’s tragedy unfolded under the watchful eye of W.R. Grace & Co., the industrial giant that owned the mine for nearly 30 years and, according to the authors of two new books, systematically suppressed conclusive evidence that the mine was a death trap and its asbestos-laden vermiculite ore a lethal export.

The two books, “Libby, Montana: Asbestos & the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation” and “An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal,” are parallel accounts of an epic cover-up with a finale worthy of Stephen King. The trail of mendacity leads from northwest Montana to New York City. The World Trade Center towers were insulated with the mine’s vermiculite, and when the buildings disintegrated, particles were released into the air and became part of the caustic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

It is an appalling story, and it isn’t over. The authors of “An Air That Kills,” Andrew Schneider and David McCumber, found that, despite the known hazards, asbestos-related material is still being used in household products, among them potting soil, cat litter and crayons. It can take up to 40 years for asbestos disease to show itself. So, it may be a long time before the firefighters, rescue workers and residents exposed to the dust cloud over New York find out whether they were fatally misled by federal officials who insisted on Sept. 13, 2001, that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

The saga begins with the 1916 discovery of a rich vein of vermiculite just outside Libby, a pretty town of 12,000 notched in a valley of the Kootenai River, not far from the Canadian border. Libby’s vermiculite is a sparkling, mica-like mineral that proved enormously useful in building insulation and soil additives. The mine was once the world’s biggest supplier, and the town prospered for much of the last century. But while Libby thrived, the glitter dust from the mine settled everywhere, in pine trees and berry bushes, homes and playgrounds. The high school track was paved with it.

Unfortunately, Libby’s “gold” is shot through with tremolite, an especially invasive form of asbestos that can bore deep into people’s lungs when inhaled. Annual chest X-rays showed that 30% to 40% of the mine’s workforce was suffering from lung damage at the time Grace bought the mine in 1963. Laboratory hamsters injected with Libby’s vermiculite developed asbestosis and lung cancer at an alarmingly swift rate. But those test results were proprietary and kept under wraps, according to both books. The miners weren’t told, though Grace’s insurance company warned company officials of the health hazard in 1967. Two years later, write Schneider and McCumber, company Chairman J. Peter Grace, legendary entrepreneur, confidant of presidents and crusading opponent of government regulation, received an interoffice memo on the danger lurking in Libby’s vermiculite.

By then the mine was turning out 80% of the nation’s supply of vermiculite. In the early 1970s, thousands of tons of it were used to fireproof the World Trade Center. Andrea Peacock writes in “Libby, Montana” that W.R. Grace won approval to use a product named Monokote-4 after assuring New York City officials that it did not contain asbestos. In fact, says Peacock, Monokote-4 used Libby’s vermiculite grade 3, “the baddest of the bad.”

Despite Grace’s assurances that vermiculite was harmless, officials were hearing too many reports of people who had handled it getting sick. In the early 1980s, after employees of an Ohio lawn-care company that had used Libby’s vermiculite were diagnosed with probable asbestosis, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to visit the mine. The inspectors concluded that people who came in contact with the ore were being exposed to extremely dangerous levels of asbestos. But the EPA report was shelved. The authors can’t prove who scuttled it, but they have their suspicions. They point to a special commission formed by President Reagan to identify costly meddling in private enterprise by government regulators. The EPA was one focus of the commission’s work. The man chosen to head the commission was Reagan’s friend, Peter Grace.

Both books rely heavily on Schneider’s reporting for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which broke the Libby story in 1999. Chasing a rumor that people were still dying from exposure to asbestos from a mine that had been closed for nearly a decade, Schneider found a town deep in denial. Civic leaders blamed the mine’s closure on excessive regulation (the authors say it was more likely related to mounting liability claims) and dismissed the few people who did speak out about the asbestos danger as sore losers angry at Grace for not paying them enough hush money. Grace had been quietly settling a string of personal injury suits.

These books couldn’t have been written without the help of Libby’s whistle-blowers. Not surprisingly, they are presented as the only sane people in town -- steadfast in their conviction that even in a company town the company doesn’t have a right to kill with impunity.

There is Gayla Benefield, an eloquently profane bartender who lost both parents to asbestosis and turned down Grace’s $600,000 settlement offer because it prohibited her from discussing the company’s letter of apology. And there is Les Skramstad, an aging miner dying of asbestosis whose soft-spoken protests won an unlikely ally in Montana’s conservative Gov. Judy Martz, who took office pledging to be a “lapdog of industry.”

Stylistically, the books are quite different. Peacock writes thoughtfully in a minor key, her conclusions no less damning for her reserve. Schneider and McCumber are in a high dudgeon. Their book bristles with indignation. It is also more ambitious. They have more to say about Grace and the continuing menace of an asbestos industry that has proven impervious to scandal, bankruptcy and government crackdowns. (Asbestos was still mined in California until a few years ago.) But the book can feel rushed in places. It contradicts itself on the date of the mine closure, an important detail. There are also inconsistencies between the two accounts. Schneider and McCumber say that an early effort to expose health hazards at the mine was quashed when Grace drove a dedicated young doctor out of town. Peacock quotes the doctor saying he left Libby for personal reasons.

Both books proceed from Schneider’s assertion, first published in the Seattle newspaper, that the mine was responsible for at least 193 deaths. The books raise the death toll to 200, but we never learn as much as we should about how Schneider arrived at his original estimate. He compared death certificates with lists of patients diagnosed with asbestos disease by various doctors. But the authors don’t say how they ruled out other possible causes of death, and the description of Schneider’s accounting methods is scattered and hard to follow. They could have supplied more details in the chapter notes, if only to buttress the book’s claim that Libby is the nation’s deadliest environmental “killing field.”

There is another reason for crossing “t’s” and dotting “i’s” in a book about W.R. Grace & Co. It was one of the villains of “A Civil Action,” Jonathan Harr’s bestselling expose about toxic chemicals that bled into the drinking water supply of a Boston suburb and were linked to several cases of childhood leukemia. Now, it seems, the case against Grace isn’t as clear-cut as originally alleged. A study by scientists at Ohio State University recently concluded that the company’s waste stream made a negligible contribution to the poisoned water wells.

But nothing in either of the books about Libby seriously undermines the main point of the story. For many years a tragedy was allowed to play out that could have been stopped, or at least exposed, on any number of occasions. If there were any lingering doubts about the harm done in Libby, a long-overdue study by the federal government of asbestos mortality should put them to rest. Conducted largely in response to Schneider’s newspaper articles, the Department of Health report in 2000 found that Libby’s asbestos-related death rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the country.

Books as unsettling as these inevitably raise imponderables. “What happens in a town where the covenants of basic humanity have been broken?” ask Schneider and McCumber. What indeed when the sick and dying are blamed, as they were in Libby, after news of contaminated homes and playing fields sent its economy into a tailspin? Peacock wrestles with it too. What causes a demoralized populace to scapegoat the wounded? They don’t have a good explanation. Maybe, write Schneider and McCumber, that’s because there aren’t many places like Libby where you can observe what happened.

You can hope. *