An Air That Kills: Uncovering National Scandal in Montana

An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal
by Andrew Schneider, David McCumber
Hardcover: 440 pages
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Book Description

The horrifying true story of the decades-long poisoning of a small town and the definitive exposé of asbestos in America-told by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who broke it.

In a valley in Montana, the U.S. has spent millions of dollars removing toxic residue from a town that had lain pristine for ages. Until the last century, when the dust came down like a snowstorm. That dust turned a paradise into the worst of America's killing fields, a name at the top of the list that includes Love Canal and Woburn. A place now known to be deadlier than all the rest: Libby.

An Air That Kills is told through the eyes of the men and women who fought back-among them, a woman who watched more than forty members of her family succumb to asbestos; a miner who worked there and carried the poison home; and an EPA investigator who battled not only one of the world's most powerful corporations but also his superiors in Washington. It is the first book to reveal how deeply asbestos has embedded itself into the texture of America: how many people have died or are dying; how the industry and government repeatedly ignored the danger; and how, for many Americans, the dying is not over. It is a suspense story with real American heroes at its heart and one of the most importants works of environmental journalism in years.

The problems with asbestos effects all of us in the US. Attic insulation, talc products and even gardening/soil products have asbestos risks that have been used and available for sale up into the 1990's and beyond.
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly:

As part of a year-long investigation into the impact of the General Mining Act, which let corporations buy land cheaply from the government, Schneider, senior national correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, met with Gayla Benefield, a resident and activist in Libby, Mont. Benefield's extensive knowledge of the area and the number of people suffering from asbestos-related illnesses impressed Schneider. He began his own digging, talking to lawyers, residents, environmental experts and staffers at the EPA, and even had tests conducted. This book chronicles his inquiry into an enormous coverup by Grace Corporation, which ran the Zonolite factory.

Schneider and McCumber, managing editor at the newspaper, have written a compelling and frightening story about the victims-the people who worked in the factory and other local residents who weren't employees-suffering from life-threatening ailments. The authors focus on the individuals rather than the legal wrangling, court cases or scientific research. For example, in describing the matter-of-fact way employees handled the asbestos dust, they compellingly write: "Each floor was worse than the last. Les' battle with the never-ending blizzard of dust was truly mythical in proportion, like Hercules cleaning the Augean stables.... When he got on the bus to ride back to town that night, he was covered in dust, just like everybody else. His hair was coated, his ears and his nose were plugged up. His throat felt like sandpaper. The dust in his mouth and nose felt like thick brown syrup...."

With Benefield-who's reminiscent of Erin Brockovich-at the center of the story, the authors have written a first-rate book about a contemporary American tragedy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* News media take a lot of criticism these days, often deservedly, but sometimes the fourth estate comes to our aid when all other institutions fail. Here, Schneider and McCumber build on the story they broke in 1999 for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Vermiculite miners in remote Libby, Montana, were dying. Worse, their spouses and children were dying, too. Vermiculite is used in construction materials, insulation, gardening, and elsewhere. The vermiculite found in Libby is contaminated with tremolite, a particularly lethal form of asbestos, which dusted the workers and the town and which companies Zonolite and W. R. Grace said was harmless.

This is a tale of chilling employer cynicism, of government collusion, and, fortunately, of an alert reporter, a committed community activist, and an EPA worker who fought his own agency to do what was right. Still, Libby's environmental catastrophe is worse than Love Canal's--and because asbestos still hasn't been banned, citizens weren't and won't be the only ones to suffer.

In this remarkable book, the authors construct a rich, compelling narrative that includes both hard science and touching stories. Schneider and McCumber have clearly chosen a side, but to take the other is to value money over human life. An essential entry in the annals of corporate amorality. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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What one newspaper said, February 12, 2004

Reviewer: A reader from St. Paul, MN
Review: 'Air That Kills' exposes fibers of mass destruction
Reviewed by Neal Karlen
Special to the Star Tribune

Just because you're paranoid about the environment doesn't mean they're not out to poison you. So we learn in spellbinding, horrific detail in Andrew Schneider and David McCumber's "An Air That Kills," a jeremiad that does for the still-immediate peril of asbestos what Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" did for the Corvair.

Of course, that sports car could simply be pulled out of production. Yet where does one even begin to deal with the ongoing fallout of generations worth of systemic, unregulated poisoning of our country by an industry that churned out uncountable tons of fibers of mass destruction, in a business most people wrongly think was brought to its knees around the time young Dubya was pledging Skull and Bones at Yale?

Schneider (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes) and McCumber center their exposé on Libby, a small town in the northwest corner of Montana that was mined from the 1920s to 1990 for asbestos-laden vermiculite ore, known commercially as Zonolite. W.R. Grace & Co., which bought the mine in 1963 and ramped up production, hid the risks of the toxic dust that by 1969 was being released into Libby's air at the rate of 2 1/2 tons a day.

It would be bad enough if the astronomical fatality rates of asbestos-related cancers had been localized in Libby. Unfortunately, Grace had sent billions of pounds of its tainted ore to more than 750 processing plants throughout North America, including two in Minneapolis; it's estimated that between 15 million and 35 million homes remain insulated with the product that the company always contended wasn't hazardous. Minneapolis alone received more than 192 million pounds of the poison over the years.

Schneider and McCumber pile conspiracy upon conspiracy, and if their evidence wasn't so compelling, one would think they were talking of Dealey Plaza and gunmen on the grassy knoll. Yet here it all is, up to and including the Bush White House blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's declaration of a public-health emergency in April 2002, as well as the attached warning to millions of citizens that they still might be exposed.

The authors wisely focus not just on deciphering the meaning of the wealth of related secret corporate and governmental memos they unearthed, but on the faces, names and particulars of the suffering. Take Les Skramstad, who worked at Grace's Libby mine for just three years in the 1950s, and got hit with asbestosis in 1995.

"It's hard to sleep when your lungs aren't pliable enough to breathe in the air needed to live," they write. Les's wife "Norita gets even less sleep worrying about him. When he finally lies still, she lies there listening to hear that he's still breathing. His breaths are so shallow that she can barely feel his chest rise."

As to why he refuses bottled help, he tells the authors: "Dragging a tank of air behind you is like admitting that you're dying. Everybody I know who started on oxygen died a few months later. It's like giving in to Grace and saying 'yeah, you killed another one.' "

It gets worse. Yet despite the revulsion one feels reading of the calculated destruction of a once-beautiful town that now makes Love Canal seem like a pristine Big Sur, Schneider and McCumber have woven a galvanizing, human tale as entrancing as it is loathsome.