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Witness: Residents faced imminent risk

by Kyle LehmanUniversity of Montana
| April 21, 2009 12:00 AM

The W.R. Grace & Co. environmental trial entered its eighth week on Monday with testimony from a government witness that described the imminent risk of asbestos exposure to Libby residents.

Expert witness Richard Lemen said the mineral’s needle-like fibers build in a person’s lungs over time. Lemen said that the more asbestos one inhales over time, the more they are pushed toward disease, thus an exposure poses an imminent threat.

“Asbestos-related disease is dose response related … that is, the higher the exposure, the higher the risk of getting a disease,” Lemen said. “The risk is how much a person takes into their body, as their body accumulates these indestructible fibers, that’s when we see disease.”

Lemen was allowed to testify Monday only as an expert epidemiologist after Judge Donald Molloy ruled that the prosecution could not also offer him as an expert industrial hygienist because they did not previously disclose him as one. Lemen served in the U.S. Army assessing health issues before going on to a decorated career in the Public Health Service, reaching the highest non-politically appointed position in the agency.

After retiring in 1996, Lemen went on to teach public health at Emory University and also to work as an epidemiological consultant for legal matters. Lemen said that he charges $350 an hour for his services as a trial witness and has made $38,000 in the four years since the government began building their case against W.R. Grace.

Lemen said that his opinion on the threat posed to the residents of Libby was based on his career, education and also time spent reviewing thousands of articles on asbestos exposure. Lemen described an epidemiologist as a medical detective, looking into diseases and trying to determine their cause.

“We want to look at where the most concentrated exposure is happening first,” he said. “We go to areas where people have been found to be sick and we try to determine why they’re sick.”

Because the community itself did not have a history of sampling and air testing, Lemen said that he looked to the exposure results from Grace facilities and testing conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency during their cleanup efforts in town. Lemen said that it is common to look at a wide array of data when forming opinions on exposure because it can be difficult to get sampling results from individuals.

“You would almost have to follow an individual throughout their daily activities,” he said. “That’s something that’s very impracticable to do.”

Lemen said that monitors connected to EPA workers digging up vermiculite during the cleanup could be similar to exposures that an average citizen might experience while working in their garden, landscaping or digging a well.

“You know that (the EPA is) digging into the material,” he said. “You can also have extreme types of disturbances in community activities.”

In other news from the trial, the defense during a special hearing on Friday tried to show the government’s case is riddled with problems of perjury and prosecutorial misconduct.

Molloy has yet to rule on the defens’s allegations. If either of them are found to be true, the case could be acquitted or even dismissed.

At the center of the allegations is Robert Locke, a former global vice president at Grace who gave contradicting information on the stand in comparison to grand jury testimony in 2005.