Customer Reviews

An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal

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As one of the characters in the book, I am grateful to Andrew Schneider and David McCumber for portraying what has happened to Libby, Montana and its residents so thoughtfully and thoroughly.

The book is a "must read" for everyone.

The story is far from over in Libby and around the country, but if what has occured in Libby serves as a lesson to other communities, it will be worth it.

People can make a difference, if they don't give up and are surrounded by people that believe in them.

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.

Minneapolis author Neal Karlen's sixth book, "Unchosen," a religious memoir about returning to faith, will be published in October.
© Copyright 2004 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

I want you to read this book. It is important to you and your family. I consider myself a knowledgeable person and I don't remember this scandal when it came out in 2000-2001. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I live in southern CA, but 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.

I must have read a review or heard one of the authors in an interview...but somehow this book made it onto my "Must Read" list. When I received the book, I questioned why I had gotten it, having forgotten what motivated my interest in the first place. But I started reading and have found this book to be a treasure.

The story is one of deception, corruption and greed on the part of Big Business, in this case the mining business. The owners and executives misled their workers, investors and the government agencies that regulated them into turning a blind eye to the dangers of asbestos in their products.

While the deception of the miners in Libby was unconscionable, the book goes on to document the Bush White House withholding information that the air in and around the World Trade Center was not healthy! Can you imagine, after a tragedy like the WTC disaster, that your own government, that you rallied round to give support, would turn on you and withhold information that the air that you breathe is full of cancer causing dust? Which tragedy is worse?

The book is truly a must-read.

Lastly, I want to point out the courage of the reporters, editors, doctors and the outstanding EPA field workers that fought to get this story out. Whistle-blowers, whose main motivation is to right a wrong, are oftentimes rewarded by getting fired and branded as outcasts. This book is ultimately a story of courage and perserverance of those determined to overcome the obstacles of standing out and doing what's right.

Authors McCumber and Schneider spent five years researching
this story, with much of their time spent interviewing
Libby residents. They write emotionally, but with what
can best be described as an objective passion.

Their facts are well-researched and corroborated. This is
the true story of the death of many Libby residents, the slow
death of an entire community, of corporate lies, and of partisan
politics which continues to block any medical help reaching
the victims (the conflict breaks down along
typical conservative vs. liberal firing lines). The partisan
sniping is found amongst Libby's residents, but it goes
all the way to the Whitehouse and into the halls of the
U.S. Congress, from which most of Libby's aid must
eventually come.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in
environmental health issues and environmental politics.
It would make an excellent college text book for
Environmental Science classes and for Environmental Law classes.

Unfortunately, this story is not yet finished. Very
little has been done to provide adequate medical
care or *individual* financial aid for the victims. An
Asbestos Disease Research Center will soon be built in Libby.
Its goal is to study the townspeople and to study how
asbestos-related diseases progress in this population.
Not surprisingly, many Libby residents now believe that
they are being viewed as "human lab rats".
Many victims have no health insurance, and so far, no
one is offering to help them. Some of the Federal money that
will be used to build the new Asbestos Research Center
could have been used to pay the medical bills of these people.

Therefore, Libby's last chapter has yet to be written.

You would think a little town in Montana, named Libby could not possibly be interesting or draw the attention of the nation (and the world). Yet it does, and will continue to do so. These two newspaper journalists do an excellent job of pulling together all the various threads of the story of Libby. The corporations involved, the miners and their families, the government agencies that did nothing, and the ones that finally got around to it (only to be told to back off by the Bush administration). It's one thing when men were mining way back in the forties and fifties, and even if it was thought or known that the variety of abestos were dangerous if breathed in, not enough was known to control or stop it, and the miners back then may not have taken the information seriously as they needed the jobs for the care of their families.

But it's a whole different ballpark, when it's their kids who are being impacted by lung disease...because they played in a ballpark, where Grace & Company dumped their waste/tailings. Or when the men know their wives will die of the same thing through bringing their clothes home to be washed.

How very presient of Grace to put itself into bankruptcy, just before this information became widely known, through Libby's activist, Gayla and Les. But wait a minute, wasn't Grace one of the companies written about in A Civil Action? They did not care much about killing a bunch of little children with leukemia in their drinking water, so why would anything in LIbby conern them.

It would really help if someone put on the Internet, known companies that are placing their workers at risk, so that we can all look at them from time to time and decide whether we want to do business with them or whether we want to buy their products. We have fiberglass in our 1950's made home, but now I wonder what that fiberglass replaced and where it is in my home. I am sure that many will feel the same after reading this book.

Kudos to Gayla and Les, as well as the two reporters/authors...

Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh

As a former resident of Libby Montana, this book brought home to me the deceit, greed and simple cruelty of Corporate America. I remember playing on those piles of Vermiculite when I was a kid and W.R. Grace telling us we could eat it and it would not hurt us. I have not cried while reading a book in my entire life but I cried while I read this book.
I hope there is a special place in Hell for the people who had such a blatant disregard for the safety of an entire town and in fact the entire country.

Read this book and write your Congressmen afterwards. This is a tragedy and an outrage

The author Andrew Schneider tells the story of uncovering a scandal of major proportions. It is a frightening, chilling story of hidden dangers allowed by government officials whose jobs are to keep us safe. It is the story of a mineral still used in our country whose lethal dangers were recorded by Pliny the Elder. Asbestos cannot be safely used in any manner.

I have just completed "An Air that Kills" by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber. I grew up in Libby, MT, the birthplace of this story. I was impressed by how the authors were able to capture the mood and the history of the town. Far more impressive, however, is the scope of their research and their ability to bring understanding to not only the devestation of Libby but the degree to which asbestos is still so prevalent in the United States. The obvious politics of protecting the corporations rather than protecting the health of our citizens is clearly detailed. I recommend the book highly. It's a great story about tenacity of regular citizens, and the integrity of a small band of government officials who worked together to create change....and yet an understanding of how far we have to go in order to write the last chapter of this book.

This book is a masterpiece of investigative journalism - well written, throughly researched and truly in the interests of the public.

The authors do a superb job of combining all the science and politics with a touching picture of the real Americans who ultimately paid and are paying the price for corporate greed and governmental push-overs.

If you read just one book this year, this should be it!

This book was truly stunning. I felt terrible for the residents of Libby, and just can not believe that this could have gone unanswered for so long. Even for a non-environmentalist, this is a superb book!