Killer In Town

ABC Nightline, Ted Koppel and Dave Marash
Published November 3, 2005

LES SKRAMSTAD, ASBESTOSIS PATIENT There's no other way to sum it up except that it was done to us by many people. TED KOPPEL Hundreds of people dead or sick, victims who blame the W.R. Grace Mining Company. Victims of asbestos. LES SKRAMSTAD People knew the dangers of asbestos and was silent about it. GAYLA BENEFIELD At that time, Grace knew how toxic this material was. TED KOPPEL Tonight, "killer in town," the poisoning of Libby, Montana. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Did you ever hear of vermiculite? Even of you don't recognize the name, you're almost certainly familiar with the product. It's a mineral that's mined and when it's heated, it expands into featherweight pieces that have a hundred different applications. Plant nurseries use it. It's been used for decades to insulate walls and attics. It's used for fire-proofing. It's all over the place. You may very well have some in your home. That may or may not be a problem, depending on where the vermiculite was mined. The vermiculite ore that was dug out of the ground in Libby, Montana is contaminated with Tremolite asbestos fibers. Exposure to those fibers has already caused hundreds of documented cases of asbestosis and lung cancer in Libby. It may have caused many, many thousands of cases at hundreds of other site across North America, where the ore mined in Libby was later processed. We're going to focus tonight on Libby, Montana. My old friend and former ABC News colleague, Tom Jarrell, first covered this particular story for "20/20" five years ago. There have been some major developments over the intervening years but the central actors in this human tragedy are still the same. The victims and the W.R. Grace Company, which bought the Zonolite vermiculite mine in 1963. People were already dying of asbestosis and lung cancer back then and the company knew why. But it has taken more than 40 years before a determined US attorney in Missoula, Montana, finally called the W.R. Grace Company to account. This story was produced by Phil Maravia, and reported by "Nightline" correspondent Dave Marash. DAVE MARASH, ABC NEWS (Voice Over) Some people call what happened to the northern Montana town of Libby, one of the great tragedies of American industrial history. The US attorney in Missoula calls it a crime. LES SKRAMSTAD If they'd just come out and said, "hey, you're dealing with a deadly product here, it's going to kill you," then it would have been up to me. If they would've even hinted that, I would have quit before I even started. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) In February 2005, a Federal grand jury indicted the W.R. Grace Company and seven of its executives for alleged conspiracy, wire fraud, three counts of clean air violations and four counts of obstructions of justice. The heart of the case, allegations that W.R. Grace knew back in the 1970s of the dangers of the vermiculite being mined in Libby, but covered them up from state and Federal officials and from their own workers and neighbors. LES SKRAMSTAD Because nobody in their right mind would do a job that involved taking a product home that they were working with and infecting their family. I mean, that's -that's unbelievable for anyone to do something like that. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) W.R. Grace and its indicted executives pled not guilty. If convicted, they would face sentences that could add up to many decades in jail. A trial is not expected until next September. ANDREW SCHNEIDER, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Grace bought the existing mine in 1963. Documents that we have from Grace show that they were aware of the problem with the contaminated ore before they bought the facility. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) The problem was the vermiculite ore contained Tremolite, an especially lethal form of asbestos. Early on, the problem was that asbestos fibers from the ore were making its miners sick. LES SKRAMSTAD You know, like hell, I used to just get out here and dig a hole. But now, I Can't. So, I have to think, how can I do this? DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Les Skramstad didn't work long on Zonolite Mountain. But he has lived the lest of his life in Libby. And some combination of those two factors, his doctors say, led to his asbestosis, which will kill him very soon. ANDREW SCHNEIDER Grace clearly knew by the mid-'60s because they had done pulmonary function tests. How well does your lung work? And X-rays of its workers. And they knew that a large number of workers were coming down with this asbestos-related disease. This is in the '60s. GAYLA BENEFIELD Zonolite Mountain is right up in there. My dad worked in the mine. My dad died five days before he had his 20 years in. He didn't even make the 20 years. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Gayla Benefield first figured out Libby's Vermiculite disaster after her father died and she noticed how many neighbors were living, as her dad had, tied to an oxygen tank. GAYLA BENEFIELD They would just be sitting out in the yard or they couldn't get around. And I was seeing over and over and over, these people who were sick. And all of them had been employees that had worked with dad. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Much of what journalists have reported about Libby they learned through Les Skramstad and Gayla Benefield. The same for EPA investigators who arrived on the scene in Libby in 1999. And the same for us. DOCTOR ALAN WHITEHOUSE, CENTER FOR ASBESTOS RELATED DISEASE In medicine, you educate yourself inch by inch sometimes. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) In a way, Alan Whitehouse has educated himself about the Libby Vermiculite disaster by inching down Gayla Benefield's family tree. DOCTOR ALAN WHITEHOUSE I'd been seeing miners that worked for the Grace mine for a number of years. And my assumption was that these people had asbestos disease related to the vermiculite mining but that it was confined to the miners. And I didn't see any real family members with that until maybe the late '80s. GAYLA BENEFIELD My mother was diagnosed in 1985. I think that was the telling. That was one of the red flags. Because she was the first family member to be diagnosed of secondary exposure. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Gayla's mother and father were both killed by the vermiculite fibers mined on Zonolite Mountain, even though her mother never worked at the mine. But the two of them were only the beginning of the family history of asbestosis. GAYLA BENEFIELD My husband has it. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) You have it. GAYLA BENEFIELD I have it. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) Your children have it. GAYLA BENEFIELD My children have it. My sister has it. My brother-in-law died of it, her two sons have it. 65 members of our extended family, I believe, have either died of the disease, have the disease or are high-risk. Everyone over the age of 42 in my family now has been diagnosed. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) People who have studied the vermiculite asbestos plague in Libby say it spread several ways, but most commonly like this ... LES SKRAMSTAD I started in 1959. My first day on the job was at the dry mill as a sweeper, which was a horrible job. In fact, you couldn't even catch up much less stay ahead of it, you know, because the dust was that great. Everyday that I worked there I went home with a coating of dust on me. And I give it to Norita, my wife here and my kids. NORITA SKRAMSTAD, ASBESTOSIS PATIENT It just wouldn't come off. You could beat yourself, you know, like you do and stomp and stuff. But it just stayed wherever it was at. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) So, you have also been diagnosed ... NORITA SKRAMSTAD Yeah, and our two older children. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) And your two older children. NORITA SKRAMSTAD Uh-huh. So far. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) But the asbestosis has not been limited just to mining families. DOCTOR ALAN WHITEHOUSE In the mid-'90s, somewhere I started to see environmental cases. Those were people that didn't work for the mine. They didn't have family members there. And it was sort of a little bit of a trickle. And then all of a sudden, we got a blossoming of asbestos cases. And I saw, you know, a couple hundred over a few years' period of time. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) The EPA warns the same asbestos that's killed so many in Libby, threatens others across America, including the buyers of consumer products like Grace's Zonolite insulation. ANDREW SCHNEIDER Grace documents are fairly explicit about the conversations going on between the Grace legal department and the marketing department. The legal department said, you have an obligation to warn the consumer. The marketing department would say, it'll gut out our sales. We'll lose money. We'll lose our place in the market. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) W.R. Grace made money out of Libby vermiculite into the 1990s. And then, as the human toll from the ore became apparent, the company declared bankruptcy in 2001, leaving behind a mountain of problems. graphics: abc news: nightline ANNOUNCER This is ABC News "Nightline." Brought to you by ... commercial break GAYLA BENEFIELD Here's the chart right here of the workers with disease and exposure. This is the court document right here. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) When Gayla Benefield's mother died of asbestos-related disease, Gayla sued W.R. Grace. And out of that litigation, she mined a digital mountain of documents showing some of the things the company knew and when they knew it. GAYLA BENEFIELD And Grace itself knew, 92 percent of their men. And if you've got severe lung abnormalities, you're going to die. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) In a study of workers' health done in 1969, Grace found that 92 percent of men who worked past 20 years on Zonolite Mountain showed the characteristic signs of asbestosis. GAYLA BENEFIELD The biggest problem with the whole situation is that they - they didn't tell the men. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) But the same study told Grace something even more frightening. One out of every six mine workers already showed placquing in their lungs after working just one to five years at the mine. Dr. Alan Whitehouse, the physician who is best versed in Libby's lung disease, says the health effects from short-term exposures were not evident to him until fairly recently. DOCTOR ALAN WHITEHOUSE I've seen patients that are quite ill at a fairly young age, whose exposure you would consider to be almost negligible. Or you wouldn't have expected it to be -create disease at all. DOCTOR BRAD BLACK, CENTER FOR ASBESTOS RELATED DISEASE If you look over here on his curves, he's got a very thick white band of scarring. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Dr. Brad Black works with Dr. Whitehouse at Libby's Center for Asbestos-related Disease. He is treating more patients like Jeff, younger patients who have had no connections to the mine. DOCTOR BRAD BLACK I want you to take a couple of good breaths, in and out through your mouth. JEFF, ASBESTOSIS PATIENT I've been diagnosed with asbestosis. And I have the plural thickening in my lungs. And it's getting painful. DOCTOR BRAD BLACK We have a large number of people that are simply have been inhabitants of Libby, living in the downtown area, playing in the ball fields, showing up with abnormalities in their lungs and progressive lung disease. JEFF I was a little boy when I lived in Libby. We lived here from 1961 through '72. I was exposed to this stuff through just playing ball as a little boy. I've never worked at the mine, nor been around anybody that worked at the mine. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) Let's walk over toward where's the ball fields were. GAYLA BENEFIELD They don't know why all of this toxic material was found underneath these ball fields, unless -nobody has any real idea. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) For decades, W.R. Grace dug millions of tons of vermiculite ore out of Zonolite Mountain. And everyday, sent tons of toxic Tremolite asbestos up its smokestack and across Libby, downwind. Still more of the dangerous fibers were loosed around the expansion plant downtown that processed the vermiculite. And still more were scattered around town by unknowing, uninformed citizens who put vermiculite on gardens and used it as a base under ball fields and an ice rink turned into a playground at Plummer Elementary School. GAYLA BENEFIELD The day I found out about the playground, I was -have never been so angry in my life. Nine out of 11 of my grandchildren went to school here. My children went to school at Plummer. My grandchildren went to Plummer. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Vermiculite was used on the running track at the local high school. Grace's own files show they learned it was dangerous. GAYLA BENEFIELD I found a confidential memo of W.R. Grace that discussed a test that had been taken on this running track from two Grace employees, with a man running ahead of his wife, both with monitors. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Graced tried to fix the problem by paving over the track in the 1980s. But just five years ago, the EPA tested the track and the football field it circles and they found asbestos almost everywhere. GAYLA BENEFIELD It had leeched on to the football field. It had leeched under the bleachers. It had leeched up into the announcers booth. Into the bathrooms, the change rooms, everything. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) And literally, the jerseys, the shoulder pads, the cleats. GAYLA BENEFIELD Everything. Everything. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Vermiculite containing asbestos has been found in Libby's attics and foundations, its soil and its pavements. When the EPA did its original area-wide lung tests, more than 1,100 of the 6,000 people, that's 18 percent of the local population, showed the kind of lung scarring considered a sign of asbestosis. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) The environmental professionals at EPA wanted to issue a public health emergency declaration about the crisis in Libby. But they were overruled by Bush Administration political professionals at the office of management and budget. And as a result, both the guarantee of long-term health care for everyone here in Libby and a planned national alert to warn people of the dangers of vermiculite asbestos in American homes, both were short-circuited. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Then-EPA director Christie Whitman told angry Democrats, the decision was hers. But EPA staff insist it was the budget office that shot down the emergency declaration. ANDREW SCHNEIDER This public health energy would've enforce HHS to develop a health program to take care of all of those people who were contaminated. They don't have that now. So, they're sort of at the mercy of what they can get from Medicaid or Medicare of the small program that Grace is running for them. It hurts. JEFF We're on W.R. Grace's so-called medical program. They pick and choose what they want to pay for. I have severe chest pains and I was prescribed some anti-inflammatories through Dr. Black here to help with those pains. And they denied them. They wouldn't pay for them. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) We asked W.R. Grace for comment. They refused, citing the ongoing criminal case where they have categorically denied all of the charges. But if you go to their web-site for information on Libby, Montana, asbestos and its impact on human health, you'll find that much of what is offered dates back to the year 2000, leaving out most of the more recent news that you've just heard and will hear more of when we get back. commercial break DAVID LATHAM, "THE MONTONIAN" I would like the EPA to explain the new gag order so the public here will know. WENDY THOMI, EPA COMMUNITY COORDINATOR There were some comments made by Judge Molloy in Missoula regarding the criminal case that he was afraid that the Libby case would be tried in the press. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) According to their interpretation of orders given by the trial judge in the Federal criminal case in Missoula, no one in the Environmental Agency could talk to us about Libby or asbestos or anything. In Libby, residents wanted to know why. WENDY THOMI We've been directed, at this point, to refer media inquiries to our headquarters press office. And so, we will be doing that. CLINTON MAYNARD, LIBBY RESIDENT I'm a little confused here. We're in America, right? And, and did I just hear right that the news media is no longer allowed to ask questions at this public meeting and get an answer? WENDY THOMI Clinton, I'm directed not to answer media questions. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) EPA biting its lip means that lessons hard-learned in Libby are not being taught elsewhere. DOCTOR BRAD BLACK The very low exposures causing significant disease, that's been something we've observed here. That knowledge is not out there. And somehow, that -the experience we've had in Libby, medically, is not getting out to the people that need to know that. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) And if lower, infrequent doses of Tremolite asbestos fibers from vermiculite are dangerous, practically all America needs to know about it. DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) Although Libby is almost certainly the worst case, it is also certainly not the only vermiculite-poisoned place in America. In its 30 years of operation here, W.R. Grace shipped out over these very rail tracks, tens of millions of tons of this dangerous material all across America and the rest of the world. And those railroad tracks led almost everywhere. Dearborn, Michigan, is one. DOCTOR MICHAEL HARBUT, KARMANOS CANCER INSTITUTE The bulk of the patients who I care for, I made the diagnosis of asbestosis and in a lot of cases couldn't figure out where it was came from. And then, as the understanding that the vermiculite mine in Libby is contaminated with asbestos, the source became clear. ANDREW SCHNEIDER 236 cities, in 42 states, received billions of pounds of this tainted vermiculite to be processed into consumer products. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Gardening supplies, swimming pool pads. Above all, Zonolite home insulation, still believed to be in 15 to 30 million American attics. MAYOR ANTHONY BERGET, LIBBY The big is to, you know, be aware of, you know, how deadly it is and let all of your staff and people know. I go out and, you know, work on some pub jobs and stuff. And somebody will say, oh, I've got some of that, I'm gonna vacuum it up. Well, that's one of the worst things you can do. DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) The vermiculite from Zonolite Mountain has left a lethal legacy all across America, well beyond Libby. We will track trouble spots in Michigan and New Jersey and Colorado. And we'll look at how you can best protect yourself and your family tomorrow. I'm Dave Marash, for "Nightline," in Libby, Montana. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) When we come back, I'll have an update on an explosive charge. commercial break TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) And here's a note just to keep the record straight. In September, I interviewed Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, arch- enemy of the Bush Administration. He claimed that he had documented proof that the United States planned to invade his country. The plan, he told me, is code-named Plan Balboa. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Can I ask you now, on camera, will you make that documentation available to me? PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELA I can send to you -I can't send all that documentation. I can send part of it to you. I can send it to you. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Please. PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ I can send you maps and everything. And you can show it to the United States citizens. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) We need to report that after many requests, over more than two months now, we have received nothing from President Chavez or any of his people. I did, however, receive a letter from the former Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN, who says he's very familiar with Plan Balboa. It was, he says, a plan prepared not by the United States, but rather it was a war game designed by the armed forces of Spain. TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at ABC News, good night.