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COVER
Mike Cirian, EPA’s remedial project manager, speaks to a group during a public tour of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company site.
BEACON FILE PHOTO
MIKE CIRIAN
Superfund Sentinel
Mike Cirian has earned a reputation for fairness as the point man for Libby’s high-pro le Superfund project, and now he assumes the same role for the edgling CFAC cleanup
On a cloudy Friday afternoon, EPA Superfund Remedial Project Manager Mike Cirian drove around a Libby neigh- borhood north of the Koo- tenai River with country music playing softly on the radio.
“We did that one,” he said, nodding to a square blue house with a trim front yard. He turned left, pointing out a few more homes with short grass and young trees, and then drove across a bridge to River- side Park. He pulled into a parking spot
and looked out at the green lawn.
“It’s a pretty park,” he said. “The trees
will grow in.”
Cirian’s daughter, Holly, got married
there in 2012. The trees were even shorter then, and the grass was coming in, but it was still pretty. It was clean.
“Before, the whole site was
BY CLARE MENZEL
THE
contaminated,” Cirian said.
Just like the homes and yards he had
pointed out, the park was once laced with asbestos. So was much of Libby, formerly one of the world’s largest producers of the mineral vermiculite and now the coun- try’s most high-pro le U.S. Environmen- tal Protection Agency Superfund cleanup. Superfund sites, listed on the federal National Priorities List, are designated for critical cleanup due to concerns about contaminants that pose a signi cant risk to human health and the environment.
This stretch of land by the river had been the site of a W.R. Grace vermiculite processing and exports plant, but now it’s healthy, after crews ripped down old buildings too contaminated to clean and scooped out all the toxic dirt. Now, the community park is a symbol of progress, a tangible mark of how far the resilient
City of Eagles has come.
Cirian backed out of the parking spot
and drove on. As a remedial project man- ager since 2005, he oversees planning, safety, budget, and scheduling for the Libby cleanup. He sits in the middle of a complex web, mediating between com- munity members, scientists, contractors, elected o cials, and partner government agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
The project manager’s most di cult duties are the unwritten ones, like earning the respect of individualists with a deep- seated distrust of the federal government and nding the middle ground in polarized communities. The job also includes break- ing down opaque scienti c processes for salt-of-the-earth communities who just
want to know that their kids will grow up safe, and trying to nd solutions when there is a lot of fear and few answers.
“Of all the jobs we have in the regional o ce at the EPA, one of the most chal- lenging is to be a remedial project man- ager,” said Bill Murray, the Denver-based EPA Superfund remedial program direc- tor. “It takes a rare person to do it all, and do it well, and Mike is one of those rare people.”
Cirian, a 55-year-old Nebraska-born engineer, is a Lincoln County resident, a father of three adult children, an avid hunter, and a Monday night bridge player at the local senior center. He wears cow- boy-style boots and a beard, and has an a able, “aw, shucks” kind of laugh. And, as the Superfund delisting of the Libby project comes into sight, he has also begun to manage the nascent cleanup of
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NOVEMBER 9, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM