Storefronts can reveal how a town makes its living. On a sunsplashed morning in early July I drove slowly down U.S. Highway 2 through the mountain town of Libby, Montana, tallying enterprises that together made no sense.
Six tiny casinos, none of them any larger than a Denny’s, and two or three state health offices and, right downtown, an office of the Environmental Protection Agency. Curious.
I also saw a sign pointing toward a mine. “Is that how Libby makes money?” I asked our hosts, Jana and Dave. They were to be married the next day and my girlfriend Anjali and I were there to celebrate with them. We all were tucking into scrumptious plates of huckleberry flapjacks and hash browns at the bustling Libby Café on the street that comprised downtown.
“Well, it used to…” Dave said reluctantly.
The Zonolite Mine outside of town is the world’s largest repository of vermiculite, a mineral that is an ingredient in fireproofing, insulation, and many other products and that for decades made Libby a prosperous mining town.
Residing under the soil with vermiculite was tremolite, which, it turns out, is one of the most toxic forms of asbestos and thus a cancer-causing killer, according to the newspaper report that revealed the scope of the tragedy.
The mine ground up rock and spewed its tailings in the form of white dust that traveled home on the clothes of the miners. This dust blew into town sometimes, where children would draw figures in the dust on the cars. In the early 1990s a doctor called attention to the ridiculously large number of respiratory problems among miners and their families.
As of 2001, as many as 30 percent of the town’s population of 2,600 had contracted a fatal disease, and hundreds had died. The W.R. Grace Company, which owned the mine and knew about its deadly contents, has paid out millions in settlements to the citizens of Libby. But legal reparations haven’t rehabilitated the town, where heathcare agencies are still the biggest employer.
It is startling to learn that the town you visit on vacation – lounging in a hot tub, eating flapjacks, admiring the Cabinet Mountains rising out of town – is, by the way, the epicenter of the largest community poisoning in U.S. history.
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