Officials meet to discuss Superfund concerns

Officials from the City of Libby and Lincoln County joined with public health officers, congressional staff and representatives from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality in Helena Nov. 19 to discuss the future of the Libby asbestos Superfund site and the ongoing operations and maintenance once the Environmental Protection Agency closes the active phase of the remediation.

Lincoln County Commissioner Mark Peck said the point of the meeting was to start laying the ground work for the operations and maintenance phase of the project and to begin crafting the institutional controls that will be left in place to help manage long-term exposure to asbestos left behind once the agency leaves Libby.

“We’re the ones who are going to have to live with this in perpetuity,” Peck said. “I want to know that we’ve done everything we can at this level to make sure it’s taken care of.”

In addition to Peck, Commissioner Mike Cole made the trip to Helena, along with Libby City Councilwoman Peggy Williams, Lincoln County environmental health director Kathi Hooper, Asbestos Resource Program manager Nick Raines, Rep. Jerry Bennett and Dr. Brad Black of the Center for Asbestos Related Diseases. Staff personnel from each of Montana’s three members of Congress were also in attendance, with representatives from the Department of Environmental Quality.

The primary focus of the discussion, Peck said, was on the pending release of the final Record of Decision for the project, which is expected for sometime next month. The Record of Decision will outline the final remediation plan for Libby, which project manager Rebecca Thomas said will look very much like the current cleanup activities.

“The risk assessment concluded that cleanups to date are protective, so the final remedy decision, expected in December, will be very similar to past cleanups,” she said “There will be flexibility to leave some small areas of low concentration asbestos undisturbed to accommodate property owner preferences. And EPA and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality look forward to working with the community to develop a program to help manage any future encounters with asbestos.” 

The finality of the Record of Decision is not the end of the process, however. Once the record is signed, the agency will complete active remediation in accordance with the decision and then the site will enter the long-term operations and maintenance phase, which will include institutional controls being left in place to manage exposure.

“The finality of the Record of Decision is about the cleanup remedy itself,” Peck said. “It’s a closure for the emergency remediation. It doesn’t close the door on the long-term management. It doesn’t close the door on the public health emergency.”

The institutional controls piece of the plan is something still being developed and something that has created some concern among residents and government officials alike. The agency’s proposed remediation plan, released earlier this year, was “intentionally vague” regarding specific controls, Thomas said when unveiling the proposal. The controls, she said, would be developed with input from the community and adapted as needed to suit the ongoing needs of south Lincoln County.

Peck said he was given assurances that the final structure of the institutional controls would be, at least in part, driven by the needs of Lincoln County residents.

“I left the meeting much more comfortable than I went in with regard to the long-term management,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go and the devil’s in the details, but I left with assurances that the public health emergency will remain in place after the Record of Decision and the community will be one of the main drivers of the institutional controls program and long-term management.”

The public health emergency was declared by the agency in 2009, in response to rising numbers of people reporting asbestos-related medical ailments. The declaration of a public health emergency triggered a number of health benefits for area residents suffering from asbestos-related conditions, such as Medicare eligibility for those afflicted. Never before has a public health emergency been declared in relation to a Superfund site, so there are no established protocols for the abatement of the public health emergency and what happens to the benefits provided area residents based upon it in such a case.

The biggest uncertainty related to the operations and maintenance and the institutional controls program, Peck said, revolve around the costs and who will be responsible for paying them, especially in relation to properties cleaned by the agency but with contamination left in place. The agency decided early in the project to leave contamination in place if it was sealed in walls, ceilings and in other unexposed areas. Exactly how many of the more than 1,000 structures cleaned in the site still have asbestos sealed inside is a number Thomas said was unknown. What is known, however, is that the contamination will not remain sealed indefinitely. Simple construction and remodeling work can open walls, disasters such as fire can consume the outer seals and release toxic Libby amphibole asbestos into the air and time and decay will lead to more contaminated material being potentially released into the environment.

Peck said the key to management will be determining exactly what’s being left behind once the agency completes active cleanup operations.

“The starting place is an in-depth analysis of the number of structures with Libby amphibole asbestos in place,” he said. “The funding is still up in the air, but we have to do that analysis to determine what’s left behind and what it’s going to cost. We have to know what we’re managing.”

There are three established sources of funding for the long-term maintenance of the Libby site. The W.R. Grace bankruptcy settlement netted $5 million to be used long-term, as well as an additional $11.8 million earmarked in the initial settlement. Sen. Chas Vincent spearheaded SB20 during the 2015 Montana Legislature, which diverts some $600,000 per year from the Zortman-Landusky fund to the Libby site, beginning in 2018.

The meeting was far from conclusive, Peck said, and much work remains to be done to implement and manage the institutional controls for south Lincoln County. Time, he said, will tell the tale.

“The ultimate test of the effectiveness of institutional controls is whether or not we’re healthier than we were before,” he said.