Tainted Montana town hits cleanup milestone

BILLINGS, Mont. -- Grass and freshly planted trees are sprouting in a new town park atop the site of a vermiculite plant that once spewed asbestos dust across the mountain community of Libby, a welcome dose of normalcy for a city long synonymous with lung disease and death.

It's a major milestone for the mining town of about 3,000 people near the Canadian border where an estimated 400 people have been killed by asbestos exposure. More than 1,700 have been sickened.

Lethal dust from the W.R. Grace and Co. plant and the company's nearby mine once blanketed the town, and asbestos illnesses are still being diagnosed more than two decades after the mine was shuttered.

After a 12-year cleanup, Riverfront Park hosted a wedding last weekend. Another wedding and a blues festival are scheduled for early August.

"It's sort of like phoenix rising from the ashes," Mayor Doug Roll said.

But the park, the first major finished piece of a federal cleanup that has cost $447 million, carries a significant asterisk: Because of the difficulty of removing all of the asbestos-containing vermiculite, federal regulators say some of the dangerous material remains.

For three decades, the Grace plant stockpiled vermiculite from the mine before it was exported by rail across the country for use as attic insulation.

Libby residents who today battle asbestos disease tell of playing in the plant's piles of raw vermiculite as children on ballfields next door.

Just 18 inches beneath the surface, under clean soil, is a fluorescent orange barrier, a warning to those who dig there that they face potential asbestos exposure. It's one of many reminders that Libby's tragedy has yet to run its course.