EPA misleading people of Libby about air

Guest Commentary:

Interesting. I was just working on a publication for a journal on precisely the above issue and the surrounding information. I was hoping to give a preview of that publication to the people of Libby via The Western News. At least the part that relates to them most. So, fortuitously, I will be able to share a bit of it here.

I am aware of the W.R. Grace measurements taken in December of 1975. I am also aware that both Chris Weis and Paul Peronard wisely decided not to publish this information formally, for the people of Libby, on the basis that these measurements were “unreliable.” It is only now that this comparative information can serve, in my estimation, a somewhat unworthy position of bolstering EPA’s overall story in Libby that they have now brought it forward. I also see the comparison, before and after, as you have interpreted it, as an extremely damaging contention. Not just for the people of Libby, but also for those people similarly situated to tremolite amphibole exposures or even much worse elsewhere in the United States.

I was researching in 1975, and I must tell you that we couldn’t see much relative to today’s standards. We could not identify directly the chemical composition of what we were looking at, either. We could have just as easily been looking at cellulose fibers as asbestos fibers, had I been looking for these things at all, and not known the difference. Even today the use of PLM for asbestos work is far more of an art than it is a science, with a relative few artisans capable of doing an acceptable analysis. I am certain that these facts played into Chris’ and Paul’s decision to call these 1975 measurements “unreliable”. I am also certain that the measurements taken in the downtown area of Libby and all very near the heavy influence of the lumber mill, which was one of the actual measurement sites, increase the odds of complete misidentification of the subject matter. Additional suspicion of these 1975 measurements should be raised by the fact that these are perhaps the highest measurements ever seen in a tremolite amphibole exposure scenario, even in areas of the world where tremolite deaths far outstrip what is seen in Libby.

Heavy exposure levels are quite visible and blacken the sky for those close to the ground for a mile or so around the immediate area for days on end. The levels EPA professes Libby to be saved from by 100,000 times are quite visible and would never have gone unnoticed by anyone in town, even in the days when we had no proliferation of digital cameras.

If the story EPA is presenting to Libby was anywhere near true, which it is not, the summers in Libby would have seen a continual smog-like ground cover for days and weeks at a time, reaching perhaps 25 or less feet in the air and smothering all below it with dust and grit the color of the moderate Beijing smog of today, day in and day out. In winter, combined with wood smoke, the people of Libby would have been required to turn on the headlights of their cars, in broad daylight, each and every day.

I think it far more likely that what EPA truly means to say is that they think that perhaps Libby is getting better than the times when tremolite was much more abundant and readily available for inhalation. They of course cannot be certain of that at all for everyone. In addition EPA fully intends to release, in a highly public way, all personal monitoring results that have been gathered over these many years, together with the dates, times and conditions under which the data was gathered. In that way the people of Libby may be the judge of what is and what is not acceptable to them. In addition EPA intends to inform the leaders of both Troy and Libby that ambient air sampling will not be conducted for the purposes of making people who visit or move to either community, feel safe. The results of ambient air measurements are a foregone conclusion, as even the statement itself indicates, and new arrivals could very easily be at just as much risk as at any previous time in Libby’s history, under the correct circumstances, from environmental exposures leading to disease or premature death.

Even with favorable air monitoring results, EPA has also decided that it is not in the best interest of a scientific pubic health organization to allow people who have been victimized again and again to suffer further at the hands of certain ambiguities in the scientific method and a near total break in the paradigm that represents EPA’s philosophy on asbestos measurement and risk.

I feel this would be an immensely cathartic and accurate statement for EPA employees to put forward, and would give most everyone involved a breath of fresh air.

— Terry Trent is a biologist and asbestos researcher