The accusations are damning, yet the accused aren’t likely to be held accountable for anything.
As the lungs of Libby residents choked on asbestos, as 200 of them died, as 2,000 more fell ill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sat on its bureaucratic hands.
Documents and e-mails obtained from the EPA last week by U.S. Sen. Max Baucus’ office detail the worst kind of politics: a deadly crisis in Libby ignored.
In 2002, the town, already a Superfund site, was poised to be declared a public health emergency. The designation would have provided more cleanup, medical care and a helping hand to a population fatally sickened by a vermiculite mine owned by W.R. Grace & Co.
Instead, the EPA opted for an easier, cheaper alternative – one that, as documents show, may have been influenced by a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget. An on-scene coordinator for the Libby asbestos site vows that’s the case; the assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response ardently disagrees. To those who died struggling to pay for oxygen as their lungs shut down, who’s to blame matters little now.
What does matter is the ineptitude of the federal government to, once again, stave off – or at least appear competent in the face of – a crisis. Washington shouldn’t be depended upon to baby sit its citizens, but it should be called upon when one of its communities is under siege by widespread disease, or, yes, ravaged by a hurricane. The revelations last week are just further proof that’s not a role the federal government can be trusted to assume.
That’s not a referendum on one political party, rather on bureaucrats too busy saving face, and money, to offer a hand to a small Northwest Montana town that is otherwise self-reliant; to the type of people – like many in Montana – who wouldn’t ask for help unless they needed it.
The mine that plagued Libby closed in 1990. But for more than 25 years, extracted vermiculite containing asbestos was stuffed in home insulation, carried on miners’ shoulders, breathed and rendered deadly.
Lawsuits followed. Earlier this year, a bankruptcy judged ruled that W.R. Grace owed the federal government $250 million for cleanup. The company has also agreed to settle for $3 billion with future plaintiffs to emerge from bankruptcy. W.R. Grace executives also may still face prison time.
Meanwhile, Libby has worked to skirt the stigma of being ground zero for one of the nation’s worst Superfund sites. In a recent interview, Libby Chamber of Commerce President Matt Hussey said, “I think that as we move along here you’ll see less and less of this image that ‘jeez people are wearing gas masks around in town, and there’s strange vapors in the air’. Well, that’s not happening here at all.”
Baucus should be commended for following through on his pledge to hold the EPA accountable. In one agency e-mail his staff uncovered, White House officials asked for language that asbestos was “inherently” dangerous be changed to “potentially.” They also wanted the Libby cleanup to be deemed “unique,” so it would not apply to other potential cleanup sites.
In other words, it was the White House’s position, which the EPA mimicked, that the Libby situation should be downplayed at the expense of the residents who lived there.
Montana’s senior senator has vowed to hold agency officials accountable. But I doubt he gets very far. If recent history is any indication, when the federal government is accused of wrongdoing, it responds with a familiar, albeit maddening, shrug.