Documents: EPA scuttled first Libby plan
Initial declaration expanded cleanup
WASHINGTON – Documents show officials with the Environmental Protection Agency prepared in April 2002 to declare a public health emergency over asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont., but changed their minds around the same time they met with the White House.
The documents and e-mails were obtained from the EPA and released Wednesday by U.S. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who is holding a hearing today to examine them. The documents show agency officials were prepared to make the declaration, which would have led to more extensive cleanup and health protections.
But the agency eventually decided against it, instead ordering an easier, cheaper and less extensive way to remove asbestos from the attics of residents.
Libby is home to the now-closed W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine. The EPA, which has declared the area a Superfund site, first arrived in Libby in 1999, when news reports linked asbestos contamination from the mine to deaths and illnesses.
Lawyers for Libby residents say asbestos has sickened about 2,000 people in the town and killed up to 225.
In early 2002, EPA readied a public health emergency declaration, a designation allowed under Superfund law, according to several e-mails between officials at the time. It would have forced the agency to clean residents’ entire homes and provided extensive health care for those who were infected.
“I believe CTW wants this PHE announced within 10 days,” EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Piper wrote in an April 9, 2002, e-mail, referring to the then-EPA administrator, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. “note: Earth Day is the following week.”
Seven days later, a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget appears on the schedule of Marianne Lamont Horinko, then the assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response.
A few weeks after that, the EPA released an “action memo” expanding the agency’s current authority to allow the cleanup insulation from Libby attics. But a public health emergency, which would have forced a much wider cleanup, was not declared.
The EPA did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment Wednesday.