Agencies to model asbestos mine fire
Members of the City-County Board of Health voted unanimously Tuesday afternoon to participate in a joint Environmental Protection Agency-United States Forest Service project to model the potential risks of forest fires in Operable Unit 3 of the Libby Asbestos Superfund Site, the W.R. Grace mine site.
The project is scheduled to begin today, with five members of Diane Hutton’s incident management team coming to Libby to model the anticipated behavior of fires in the area of the W.R. Grace asbestos mine. Hutton’s team was in the area during the 2015 fire season, tasked with management of the Clark Fork Complex of fires. The goal is to provide information about potential area-wide contamination from the release of asbestos in smoke caused by wildland fires in the area.
Lincoln County Asbestos Resource Program manager Nick Raines presented the idea to the board. He said the team would be studying the potential release scenarios from various types of fires and use the information to model smoke and particulate contamination as well as the possible impacts on the area’s ambient air quality.
The project is scheduled to last two weeks, concluding on Feb. 4, 2016, at a cost of roughly $50,000. Neither Lincoln County, the City-County Board of Health nor any other local agency pay any portion of the cost. The money, although paid to the United States Forest Service and a contracted employment agency by the Asbestos Resource Program, will come entirely from an increase in the ARP grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The board of health’s participation was requested by EPA officials in order to overcome bureaucratic hurdles between the two federal agencies. Due to regulatory barriers, the EPA and Forest Service did not have adequate time to complete an appropriate interagency agreement, so the board was brought in as a mechanism to essentially pass the funding from the EPA to the Forest Service. Ultimately, the funding should come from a new settlement between W.R. Grace and the EPA with regard to the clean-up of Operable Unit 3, but the details of that settlement have yet to be determined.
Canoe Gulch ranger Nate Gassman said no actual fires will be set during the modeling, just “theoretical” fires to take things such as weather patterns, topography and fuels into account. The team, he said, uses the most advanced technology available to determine the behavior of fires using all available variables. The data from the theoretical fires will be crunched and then analyzed to determine the probable path of smoke, which could potentially carry Libby Amphibole Asbestos particles with it into populated areas.
The information gleaned from the modeling will assist local fire responders and emergency management personnel in allocating resources and establishing priorities in the event of a forest fire around the old mine site.