Officials seek to protect residents from asbestos cleanup costs

The cleanup remedy ought not need a remedy.

That’s one premise of a plan drafted by the EPA to guide the monitoring and maintenance of two “operable units” of the Libby Asbestos Superfund Site where cleanup of the material is considered protective of human health and the environment.

Fibers from the asbestos, a legacy of vermiculite mining that began in the 1920s, can embed in lung tissue and cause fatal lung disease.

Lincoln County officials and others have an additional goal: that residents of Libby and Troy not get stuck with cleanup costs if additional remediation work is required to remove or contain asbestos on their properties. Lincoln County commissioners, in a Dec. 31 memo to Denver-based Dania Zinner of the EPA, raised the issue of personal liability.

“We are deeply concerned about and adamantly opposed to any actions that place financial or legal liabilities on property owners,” the board said.

Zinner and the EPA are seeking public comment on its Operations and Maintenance Plan for what they designated Operable Unit 4 and Operable Unit 7. OU4 includes residential, commercial and public properties in and around Libby. OU7 includes the same type of properties in Troy.

Together, they include a total of 8,112 properties that were evaluated and 2,628 that received cleanup, according to the EPA.

The EPA will accept comments on its proposal through Feb. 6.

The 86-page draft Operations and Maintenance Plan and an associated fact sheet are available for review in Libby at the EPA Information Center, 108 E. Ninth St.; the Lincoln County Asbestos Resource Program, 418 Mineral Ave.; and at regional libraries. It also can be downloaded from www.epa.gov/superfund/libby.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality will serve as the lead agency, responsible for the plan for the two operable units. The county’s Asbestos Resource Program will continue to work with property owners and contractors to provide information about “best management practices” that are relevant to work that might be performed on their properties.

The physical remedy for Operable Units 4 and 7 left contamination in subsurface soil and in “inaccessible areas where it does not present a risk of exposure,” according to the EPA.

Mark Peck, chairman of the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners, said last week that he is concerned about the potential future of more than 200 properties where owners refused access to the EPA for inspection and cleanup.

He said that if the EPA declines to pay for future remediation once the Operations and Maintenance Plan is final, the county could be stuck with abandoned properties if new owners balk at shouldering cleanup costs.

Money is available through the EPA, including funds from a settlement with former vermiculite mine owner W. R. Grace & Co., Peck said, to address those properties now. He would prefer to see it done sooner rather than later.

“We have the funds and the means to do these properties and ought to go ahead and do the cleanup on them,” Peck said.

Virginia Kocieda, director of the Asbestos Resource Program, said EPA officials in years past made assurances that property owners would not be responsible for future cleanup, but said she would like to see wording in the Operations and Maintenance Plan that reiterates those pledges.

DC Orr, a former Libby city councilor, is a longtime watchdog of the Superfund process in the region.

Orr said he tried and failed to get answers about how property owners might suffer in the years ahead if deemed responsible for remediating asbestos on their property.

“The big question I asked is, ‘What are going to be the costs to homeowners?’” Orr said. “No one will touch that question. No one will answer it.”

In 1999, EPA responded to citizen, local government and media concerns about exposure to asbestos from the vermiculite mine. EPA placed the Libby site on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List in October 2002. Approving the Operations and Maintenance Plan for Operable Units 4 and 7 will be the final step before these two units are delisted.