"A Town Left to Die" by the Seattle Post Intelligencer

Six years after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer documented the tragedy of Libby, Montana, the U.S. Justice Department has finally issued criminal indictments against the WR Grace company and seven of its executives for knowingly poisoning the residents of that small town. More than 200 people have died and more than 1200 have become ill, out of the town's total population of only 2,700.

As the Post-Intelligencer's Feb. 9 Editorial noted, "The victims are receiving the kind of respect they deserved all along."

According to the Post-Intelligencer investigation, W.R. Grace was fully aware from the time it bought the Zonolite vermiculite mine in 1963 why the people in Libby were dying. But for the 30 years it owned the mine, the company did not stop it. Thousands of pounds of asbestos were spewed each day from the mill stacks, blanketing the town and contaminating its air and water. The unprotected miners and workers would inhale the asbestos, then unwittingly spread this hazard to their children and families when they arrived home covered in this toxic dust.

Besides the current death toll deaths and illnesses, every month another 12 to15 people from Libby are being diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases such as asbestosis, mesothelioma and lung cancer. And because it takes anywhere from 10 to 40 years from the time a person is exposed to dangerous amounts of asbestos for the diseases to reveal themselves, the killing in Libby will go on.

As the families of Libby cope with the fatal diseases caused by this massive asbestos exposure from W.R. Grace's mining, Congress is actually considering legislation that would shield this company and others from full accountability for the devastation it has caused. The proposed federal trust fund legislation would directly benefit W.R. Grace by bailing them out of $1.7 billion in unpaid judgments, while stripping away the legal rights of dying and injured Americans.

The small town of Libby, Montana, depended for years on the jobs at the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine. But the mine is closed now, and the town is paying a tragic price for those jobs.