LIBBY, Montana – A contractor on the EPA cleanup at Libby, the site of one of the worst cases of asbestos contamination in the country, claims that the EPA has fallen down on the job and is continuing to expose the townspeople to asbestos.

The Libby mine, owned for thirty years by W.R. Grace & Company, is highly contaminated with amphibole asbestos. Grace was aware of the contamination and hid it from officials and the public for decades. During those decades, vermiculite mined at the Libby mine was sold as a soil conditioner and do-it-yourself insulation. Grace vermiculite is estimated to have been used in 35 million or more American homes. During those thirty years, Grace tracked their workers’ illnesses with annual medical examinations and hid the records from inspectors.

It took nearly 200 mesothelioma deaths before anyone outside the town noticed anything amiss. Since then, over 1,200 residents – nearly one in five of those who volunteered for testing – have been diagnosed with asbestos related diseases. In 1999, the EPA arrived in town, promising to clean up the hazardous waste and make the town safe again.

Now an anonymous contractor working for the EPA says that the federal agency has stopped using filters on the pond water used to decontaminate the dump trucks that haul asbestos away from the old mine site. In fact, he says, they stopped using the filters in 2003, violating both EPA regulations and federal law in the process.

According to the scenario presented by the contractor, the EPA’s cleanup plan is fairly straightforward. Crews at the work site fill dump trucks with contaminated soil. The dump trucks bring the soil to a specially built landfill to be buried where the asbestos fibers cannot become airborne. The dump trucks are supposed to be rinsed off with specially filtered water before they return to the site, thus reducing the chance of spreading contamination.

The water is supposed to run through a two-part filter system to remove asbestos from it. The first filter removes asbestos fibers of more than 20 microns in length. The second filter removes fibers of more than 5 microns in length. The problem is that the filters clog up and need to be replaced about twice a week – at a cost of $25 per filter for the 20 micron filter and $150 per filter for the 5 micron filter. That rapidly adds up to big money in a short while.

Originally, the filters were provided by the EPA. To all estimations, as long as that was the case, the filters were changed when needed. But in 2003, the EPA restructured its contracts with Environmental Restoration, a St. Louis, MO company that won the contract to do the work of cleaning up Libby. At that point, ER bid a flat rate to do the job and took over the expense of supplying the filters. In 2005, ER switched managers. Either of those incidents could have marked the point when ER simply decided to stop using the filters and instead ran the water through the empty filter housings – which removes nothing from the water.

The oversight was only discovered last fall. And while the EPA can assess fines of up to $7,000 per infraction of “serious” violations of air quality standards, the repercussions in this case were confined to slapping a CURE notice on ER. The company was simply told to remedy their actions or risk losing the contract. ER quickly replaced the filters with 100 micron filters.

This is just the least of the issues that the anonymous source had with the way the cleanup is being conducted. He cited such things as cleanup workers in protective suits shoveling contaminated dirt while a mother pushes a toddler along the other side of the road, or suited EPA testers taking samples from homes while families go on about their daily business.

Paul Peronard, the team leader of the EPA cleanup crew has called in the Army Corps of Engineers to audit the operation and try to get things back on track.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 10:44 am and is filed under Asbestos Abatement, Asbestos Exposure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.