EPA announcement about leaving Libby has legal consequences

Terry Trent

Commentary

Now EPA is leaving Libby. And, of course, the agency is leaving behind much of the vermiculite that  former EPA Director Christie Todd Whitman told you all would be gone when they left.

Quoting Whitman: “EPA is going to clean up the contamination in Libby, Montana, including vermiculite in homes, attics and walls.”

It is time to review the options that were available to Libby prior to and especially with the 1999 publication of “Uncivil Action - A Town Left to Die, Asbestos: Forgotten Killer,” still available today.

Prior to Libby’s public wake-up in 1999, there had been a lot of skirmishes about asbestos contaminated homes, property, etc.— especially publicly in El Dorado County, Calif. Almost all of these skirmishes took place in courtrooms.

The bottom line in federal courtrooms was this: “For the purposes of liability, asbestos is not pollution but a hazardous material.”

This one sentence is much more than just the word and phrase it defines: “pollution” and “hazardous substances.” It is important because it says who pays.

In 1999 it was scientifically apparent that Libby was way beyond the help of a Superfund clean-up. Not even the eventual public health emergency announcement, which held great promise in its written words, but was bastardized by political manipulations into being far less help than what the regulation required, could truly help Libby. It was apparent politically that what the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)  and EPA had to do was to apply a poultice to the minds, and soil, of Libby residents, in lieu of doing what was right.

I wrote at that early time that Libby residents would want to investigate their homeowners insurance policies. Now that EPA is dumping all future costs off on homeowners (which incidentally comes as no surprise at all) it is another opportune time to investigate homeowners insurance policies. Why?

Because your homeowners insurance policies, when the subject is addressed, if at all, excludes “pollution.” It does not exclude “hazardous substances.” Many of you are and always have been insured fully for the hazardous substances that contaminates your homes, that will certainly take your health away and may eventually be your cause of death. Children born into such contamination are nine times more likely to contract mesothelioma than you are. It is guaranteed that ATSDR has not taken this fact into consideration in Libby.

Sadly and ironically, you are not insured for the actions of government. The ignorance of the toxin the agencies were dealing with, the incompetence repeated over and again by ATSDR and EPA officials and employees in Libby, are acts of government. Where these agencies have directly caused additional contamination, you may not be fully insured. Far more seriously, the greater hazard presented by tremolite and its associated fibers as opposed to “asbestos” in general, to the towns people of Libby, has not been officially established in the last 15 years, but has been known for more than 50 years.

 So, in a very real sense, residents of Libby would have had the efficiency of private industry to help them clean up their homes via their insurance companies and it wouldn’t have taken 15 years of utter nonsense.

In even a much more real sense, of the planned abandonment of today, the unaccomplished business of classification of risk, and the thousands of unclean homes, Libby could have been far better off if ATSDR and EPA had never come to Libby at all. Then there would never have been “acts of government” to contend with. This was apparent in even the briefest of studies of EPA’s history and the past actions of the U.S. on asbestos, before anyone ever wrote a book saying that EPA were the heroes of Libby — the white knights who came to save the day. Which they never were.

Kindly contact your attorneys regarding what I say. I am not proffering legal advice. It is just my opinion based upon reading legal cases, as well as just yet another avenue that required investigation in the biological aspects of a horrible debilitating Libby toxin/hazardous material, that is rarely taken seriously enough.

-Terry Trent is a biologist based in Auburn, Calif.