 This is Libby Montana. From the outside it looks like just any other small U.S. town. The best part of 3,000 people live here. The nearby Kutenei Falls has even made it to the silver screen. But its normal looks are a little bit deceiving. This small town's population has been slowly poisoned for over 60 years, with clouds of asbestos that have descended upon its residents. One of the population's most important exports would turn out to be its worst import of death. My name is John and welcome to Plainly Difficult. Today we'll be diving into the Libby Montana asbestos clouds. A little town. So our story begins and we'll end here, in Libby Montana. Consettlers began to inhabit the area in the early 1800s. Before this area, where Libby is today, was part of the vast areas covered by indigenous peoples. In the 1800s, the town or more really a settlement had the name Libbysville. The area had seen hard rock mines during the 1880s. Around this period, gold miners digging around the area discovered vermiculite. Not much would be done to exploit it until the 1910s. Now I should say here that the dates of when the vermiculite was discovered and exploited vary from source to source, with even the EPA seeming to contradict itself in at least two of its publications. But it seems that mining operations for the material started to begin between 1916 and 1921. Parts of Rainy Creek were brought up, and the Zonolite Company formed to begin mining and exploiting the vermiculite at Libby. What is it anyways? Well, it's a naturally occurring material and is useful for many purposes. It's highly heat resistant and due to its ability to be highly absorbent, it's found its way into many peoples homes. The vermiculite, over the early part of the 20th century, became a product used in insulation, feed additives, fertiliser and soil amendments, construction materials, absorbance and even packing materials. This is great and all, but sometimes, but not all times, the vermiculite can appear alongside tremolite asbestos, which is what happened at the mines just outside of Libby. But in the 1920s, the risks of tremolite wasn't really known or at least cared about. As such, the Zonolite Company found great success in becoming the supplier of over 70% of the US's vermiculite home insulation and soil additives products. This was also the case in and around Libby. The readily available vermiculite went into the walls and lofts of the buildings within the town. Gardens were spread with material essentially contaminating the whole town. But this wasn't particularly different from any other early to mid 20th century town. You know, even my house when we moved in had vermiculite insulation. It was a bit of a tradition of the time to asbestos everything up. But what made Libby unique in its cancerousness was that the vermiculite was being prepared and shipped from the town, which was the source of rolling dust clouds, which was made up of very unsafe fine particles of asbestos. Not only was it in the walls and lofts, but it was wafting around the air for all to breathe. For the town, the epicentre was the shipping plant, a 17 acre site, right near the centre of the town next to the Kutenai River. Baseball games being held next to the loading area would sometimes need to be postponed due to excessive dust clouds created by the loading of railway carriages at the export centre. Operations of the mine and shipping facility changed hands in 1963 to the WR Grace and Company Company. Mining operations expanded and shipping to every corner of the country carried on. This increased productivity. It would turn out to be a bit of a double-ended sort. Mining work made many in the town proud of the industry at Libby, but it would come at a cost. Of course, mining work was known to be dangerous and a miner's life expectancy was short as the working environment was known to be very unhealthy, but it was not just the workers who would have a short-lived, average life expectancy. Those who had never even set foot in a mine would come down with severe lung conditions. Waste materials from the mining processing and shipping operations were given out to schools and the city for any type of landscaping, as the rocky wastes were perfect for hard fill. Two baseball fields were built using it as well as a couple of running tracks. Over the period between the 1960s and 1990, many would contract asbestosis. Over a 50-year period, the population of Libby of around 2700 would have roughly 400 deaths linked to asbestos. Interestingly, 25% were mine workers, which was kind of expected. 25% were from their families, but the largest share would be of people were not directly linked to the vermiculite operations. Many of the victims showed symptoms in their 40s and due to asbestosis, taking some time, in some cases many decades to show its ugly head meant that they must have been exposed during their childhood. A number of legal cases have been brought against W.R. Grace from families of the deceased miners in around the 1980s, but the conservative society of Libby often backed the company, understandable as it was the major source of income. But to not only was Libby deadly, the company operating the mine would be hit with hard times in the late 1980s. In 1989, the EPA banned most uses of asbestos products, which would not be great. The vital income source of the town would dry up when the W.R. Grace mining operations closed its doors in 1990. Although no new vermiculite was being dug up, Libby residents were still treated to contaminated soil being kicked up by the wind and dust blowing across the closed export plant. The numbers of residents exhibiting signs of asbestos related illnesses kept on racking up. Needless to say, this created a bit of a media storm and with public pressure building, the EPA would eventually get involved. Enter the EPA. Now it was hardly a surprise Libby was a contaminated asbestos nightmare, as even as early as 1956 a state inspector took air samples of the vermiculite mine and processing mill, and they found that the asbestos in the air is of considerable toxicity. Environmentalists, lawyers and the Seattle Post intelligentsia launched the Libby asbestos disaster into the national consciousness, forcing the EPA to dispatch a cleanup team in 1999. The EPA started to work with the community in assessing and cleaning up the mess. Two years after arriving in the town, it was declared a superfund site. Hundreds of millions of dollars over the following decades would be funneled into the cleanup to make Libby safe again, with the town and its surrounding areas being subdivided into things called operable areas. This included 2600 houses and over 7600 properties in the surrounding area. This would result in over 1 million cubic yards of contaminated soil needing to be removed and disposed of in a special landfill site. But although work was underway to clean up the town, its residents were struggling with the health ramifications of living in an asbestos hellscape. In 2009, the EPA declared a public health emergency. This was the first time one had ever been called by the agency up until that point. It allowed federal healthcare assistance for the victims of asbestos related diseases. But what about the company behind the lion's share of the town's contamination? Well, W.R. Grace got off pretty lightly. In 2001, it declared bankruptcy to shield itself from lawsuits filed by asbestos victims nationwide. Pretty sadder stuff for a company in a planning difficult video. A court ordered the company to pay $54.5 million to help cover the cost of the Libby cleanup, but of course they appealed and got out of it due to the bankruptcy filing. However, in 2008, W.R. Grace agreed to pay a $250 million sum, which was the highest sum in the history of the Super Fund program in assisting the cleanup. Some of the company's executives were charged with knowingly contaminating Libby, but to no surprise of anyone, they were acquitted in 2009. Officially in 2018, the cleanup program in the town was complete, leaving the area known as OU3 left to be done. This is the property in and around the former mine impacted by Libby asbestos, including a tailings dam and the impoundment of amiculite mine waste. $425 million would be spent during the cleanup, but thankfully the town's levels of asbestos have been significantly reduced, although victims will still be affected by asbestosis as it is irreversible, and many more residents are likely to succumb to asbestos related illnesses due to the amount of time it takes to show symptoms after prolonged exposure. This is a planning difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons attribution share like license. Planning difficult videos are produced by me, John, in the currently mild corner of southern London UK.