LIBBY, Mont. — The airborne motes that killed and sickened hundreds in this little town over the years didn't scare off Bobby Whitefield when he decided to retire here.
To him, Libby is a paradise, and Whitefield had examined it with the hard-eyed insight of an environmental biologist.
"I had done quite a bit of research, about two years," said Whitefield, who retired in 1993 from the Texas version of the Environmental Protection Agency. "Even knowing the facts about the asbestos, we kept being drawn to Libby."
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999 reported a link between asbestos contamination from the defunct W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine here to nearly 200 deaths and dozens more illnesses. The vermiculite ore, used to make a wide variety of products including household insulation, contained toxic levels of tremolite asbestos.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been in town ever since, locating "hot spots" of asbestos contamination. Among them was a high school track where W.R. Grace had spread vermiculite as a running surface years earlier. Grace faces more than 100 lawsuits filed by the families of the sick.
Despite all that, Whitefield and his wife moved from Dripping Springs, Texas, just outside Austin, to 25 acres just south of this town of 2,900 last May and began enjoying their view of the Cabinet Mountains and the company of friendly residents.
"They're kind of like Texans used to be," Whitefield jokes.
But Whitefield is no fool, either. He bought land upwind of the long-defunct mine that powdered the area with lung-scarring asbestos from 1963 to 1990. And the couple's property is far from any of the nine other sites where the EPA has been conducting emergency cleanup.
The Whitefields are a dream personified for the Libby Chamber of Commerce and local business people, who foresee their northwestern Montana town doomed to be shunned by tourists and investors.
They worry that even the well-publicized effort to clean up the asbestos will only add to the stigma.
The latest dilemma: Should the town let the EPA declare it a Superfund site and add it to the EPA's National Priorities List? It may seem like a simple decision--unless you live in Libby.
A listing would bring benefits, most notably the assurance of enough money to finish the cleanup. Atty. Gen. Mike McGrath says it's the only viable option. A researcher for the Environmental Quality Council said the same.
