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A firefighter sanitizes his face mask as crews from the Libby Ranger District on the Kootenai National Forest train for deployment in OperableUnit 3.
LIBBY – Inside a building at the U.S. Forest Service’s Libby Fire Cache are two shelves with 28 boxes. Fourteen of the boxes have gray covers and 14 have red. The gray boxes are “clean.” The red boxes are “dirty.”
For the most part, these containers sit on the wood shelves untouched, only dis- turbed on training days. Even then, only the gray boxes are opened.
If the red boxes are disturbed it means something is happening inside Operable Unit 3, home to one of the most contami- nated places in America.
Operable Unit 3, also known as OU3, is a 35,000-acre swath of forest in Lincoln County once home to the W.R. Grace & Company’s vermiculite mine, ground zero for the Libby asbestos contamina- tion. Over the last few decades, thou- sands of people have been sickened and hundreds have died due to exposure to asbestos fibers that are found in the dust and dirt around Libby.
Since 2000, Lincoln County has been the epicenter of one of the largest Super- fund cleanups in American history. And while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has billed the community as the cleanest it has been in years (in 2014, it reported that air asbestos concentrations were 100,000 times lower now than when
the mine was running), the shuttered mine site and the contaminated forest around it remain relatively unchanged from the days when vermiculite was har- vested from the earth. Because asbestos is still found in the soil, the forest floor duff and in the bark of trees there, local, state and federal authorities have long worried about what would happen if a large wildfire started near the old mine site, possibly releasing asbestos-laden ash into the air.
“If we have a fire inside OU3, that could impact Libby, Troy and just about any community down wind from it, even the Flathead Valley,” said firefighter and Kooteani National Forest engine captain Jacob Jeresek.
Jeresek is part of a specialized team of firefighters based out of Libby who have volunteered to go inside OU3 should a large fire ever ignite. Every spring, the team gathers at the Libby Fire Cache just north of town for a training day. This year, 14 firefighters are on the OU3- trained roster.
The training program began nearly a decade ago after the mine and the sur- rounding forest were designated as OU3. The EPA often splits up Superfund sites into more manageable pieces. For exam- ple, OU1 is Libby’s Riverfront Park, where vermiculite was once loaded into rail cars.
Prior to the Superfund designation, firefighters went into the forest sur- rounding the old mine with no protective gear. Assistant Fire Management Officer Jason Sunell said the contaminated land surrounding the mine was treated just like any other part of the forest. Sunell was among the firefighters who worked in that area in the late 1990s and early 2000s and said none of those he worked with have shown adverse health impacts from the exposure. However, Sunell and the others also note that it can take any- where from 10 to 40 years for asbestos-re- lated respiratory issues to appear.
After the cleanup began in the early 2000s, the U.S. Forest Service decided to keep its fire crews out of the area and battle any wildfires near the mine from the air, but Jeresek said that proved to be ineffective.
“You can’t effectively fight a fire with water bucket drops,” he said. “You need people in there mixing and stirring and the only way to do that is to protect the firefighters.”
If a blaze does break out, firefighters must don protective masks and a pow- ered air-purifying respirator that gives them fresh air to breathe while work- ing. The masks prevent the crews from breathing in contaminants. While the public is allowed to go into most parts
of OU3 without protection, even to har- vest firewood, any time a Forest Service employee is working in the area, such as trail maintenance, they are required to wear a mask.
On June 1, during the annual training day, Sunell spent much of the morning fit testing each firefighter with a mask, which is similar to what a structure fire- fighter wears. The fit test ensures each person has a mask that properly fits and does not have any air leaks. The test takes about 10 minutes and requires the subject to do different exercises, including mov- ing their head side-to-side and up and down and reading a short passage of text. Each movement of the face or mouth can expose a possible leak in the mask.
The mask is one of the most import- ant pieces of equipment found inside the firefighter’s gray box that is stored at the fire cache. The gray, or clean, box has a mask, a powered air-purifying respira- tor and Nomex clothing. Before opening the other plastic tote, the red box, the firefighters have to don their masks and ensure a proper seal. Inside the dirty box is equipment that has already been used inside OU3 and may be contaminated, including pick-axes, backpacks and hard- hats. Once a piece of equipment has been used inside OU3 it is permanently rele- gated to the red box until it is disposed of.
JUNE 10, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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