EPA official defends actions

Acting Region 8 EPA Administrator Howard Cantor makes no bones about it: Libby is a much safer place now than it was before the agency began its cleanup.

However, critics of the EPA liken the agency’s cleanup actions in Libby to those of a motorist attempting a cross-country road trip without so much as a map or navigation device.

In interviews with The Western News on Friday and Monday, Cantor defended the 13-plus year, nearly $450 million cleanup, saying Libby is safer now, despite the lack of a formal risk assessment.

Cantor said the term “safe” is relative when it comes to any place in the country. Areas across the country have different risks - such as automobile exhaust and particulate matter - and living in Libby carries some risk of asbestos exposure. 

“What we have been doing is creating a safer place to live. We are taking a situation where people have been exposed to very high levels of a dangerous substance and reducing those exposures, and continuing to reduce those exposures and getting them down to lower and lower concentrations so that it’s a safer place to live,” Cantor said. “How we make a determination about whether a particular place is a safe place to live has many different factors that go into it. Certainly when the toxicity values come out, we are going to look at those and make some decisions about what more we need to do. Maybe we’ll need to do more. Maybe we won’t.”Cantor said the air in Libby is 5,000 times cleaner than it was in 1999 when the EPA took notice of the contamination from the W.R. Grace mine. He said evidence of the five monitoring stations bears this out.

“We know asbestos is hazardous to human health. By lessening its affects, we knew Libby would be safer.”

Since the cleanup began, more than 1,700 sites — homes and businesses — have been serviced by the EPA and its contractors.  

Meanwhile, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report recently that says further studies are necessary to determine whether the expensive, continued cleanup efforts in Libby are paying dividends.

A decade after the EPA began its cleanup, Libby was declared a public health emergency in 2009 with the promise of a risk assessment. Still, four years later, a risk assessment has yet to come, and many concerned are still asking the same questions.

Michelle Hartly, a citizen’s advocate, said the principle is simple: The EPA is supposed to protect the public.

“The EPA’s mandate is to protect U.S. citizens and the environment,” Hartly said. “After 13 years, the EPA has not kept its promise to deliver a risk assessment. A lack of transparency undermines the public’s trust.”

On Monday, Cantor said despite the criticism, the EPA has a good relationship with local government leaders.

“I think we have a robust relationship with city and county officials,” Cantor said a week after meeting many of those officials in Libby.

Presiding Lincoln County Commissioner Tony Berget was among those who met with Cantor during his visit.

“I think we have an open dialogue,” Berget said. “No, I don’t always get the answers that I want, but I think we have dialogue.”

In the Inspector General’s report, investigators attributed the delays in achieving a risk assessment to competing priorities within the agency, contracting problems and unanticipated work that came up as the process unfolded.

One of those problems was the time it took the Science Advisory Board to begin and finalize its report, a document took 15 months to complete.