Commissioners given update on area asbestos sites
Representatives from the EPA, DEQ and W.R. Grace attended the Lincoln County Commission meeting on Wednesday, June 7 to update the commissioners and public on asbestos sites around Libby, including the forested area and contaminated dam around the W.R. Grace mine.
Mike Cirian, Libby site manager for the EPA, also gave an update about residential and commercial asbestos testing and clean up in Libby and Troy.
He said that although the EPA still has 300 refusals of testing from landowners, they were surprised that 225 owners changed their minds after initially refusing and have gone ahead with testing their properties.
“We thought maybe we’d get 150 who would change their minds,” Cirian said in the meeting.
In the last rush for homeowners to access free testing and treatment from the EPA, Cirian said, “I’m a little concerned about our labs being able to keep up with samples.”
Cirian also reported he is working with some homeowners who had soil replaced last year, after a “bad winter with lots of snow and a fast thaw, some homeowners had lawns sliding and found their new grass was not working.”
Christina Progess, remedial progress manager with the EPA, spoke at the June 7 meeting about the fire mitigation plan for the site of the former W.R. Grace mine.
“This is the time of year we start going over a plan in the case of fire at the site [known as operable unit 3],” she said. “This year we had an exercise in communication between all of the agencies who would be involved — the EPA, the county and the Forest Service. It was a tabletop exercise over two days.”
A representative from W.R. Grace, remediation manager Tony Penfold, spoke at the meeting about the Kootenai Development dam at the mine site, which holds back contaminated tailings.
“We’ve got more water in the dam than we have for the last 20 years but we’re still no way near capacity,” he said.
Jennifer Harrison, community involvement coordinator with the EPA, said in a phone interview that there are some structural concerns with the dam which are being monitored and planned for and that a clean up plan for the entire mine site will be presented to the community in 2019.
In a statement, the EPA said, “Under normal conditions, the risks to the integrity of the dam structure are low. However, it is uncertain how the dam would perform during an extreme weather event such as a major flood, or an earthquake.”
Progess made it clear in the meeting that the public are free to recreate on the forest around the mine site.
“The more research we do, the more we realize that recreational exposures are fine,” she said. “Hiking, biking or skiing are considered safe, just not around the mine itself.”
“That would be trespassing,” Penfold noted. “And as a property owner it’s really annoying to find people who ignore warning signs. I’ve seen people on ATVs up there who disappear pretty quickly when we show up in full protective suits. We just don’t want anybody getting hurt up there.”