5.
WILFUL BLINDNESS
“Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.”
Libby is a charming town in a northwest corner of Montana, near the border with Canada. The community of 2,600 sits in the narrow Kootenai River valley carved by glaciers and surrounded by forested mountains. If you passed through Libby your first impressions would be of quaint cafes, old-world shops and “I love Libby” signs at every corner. It is a typical US country town, but there is nothing typical about Libby. Among the breath-taking scenery and quiet streets, a tragedy has been slowly unfolding.
For more than 50 years, the community of Libby has been battling with an epidemic of asbestosis and asbestos-related diseases, which have killed hundreds of people and have affected three generations of families in the town. The mortality rate for Libby is 80 times higher than for the rest of the US, and new cases are continuing to be diagnosed all the time. The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) has called this “the most horrific environmental disaster in US history” and Libby has become known as “ground zero.”
The disaster is linked to a vermiculite mine near Libby that was acquired by the WR Grace Company in 1963. The problem is not vermiculite itself, but the fact that it is found in rocks laced with tremolite, the most toxic form of asbestos. Under a microscope, the long tremolite fibres appear as barbed hooks, which when inhaled, grab onto the lung tissue and wreak havoc.
By the early 1960s it was known that asbestos caused lung disease. An internal company memo, written in 1955, referred to “the dangers of exposing our employees to asbestos” and many employees’ chest X-rays were showing early signs of asbestosis, though the affected people were never informed.
The residents of Libby have also been exposed to the toxic dust. “It was everywhere. It was so fine you couldn’t see it in the air, but you could see it settling in your coffee,” said former miner, Bob Wilkins, in a radio interview. People in the community started to become ill and die from asbestosis in the early 1960s. By 1990 one in four families was being affected by respiratory illnesses and there was a funeral almost every week. In spite of mounting evidence that there was something terribly wrong going on in this community, the local, state and federal authorities did nothing about it. They and the community turned a blind eye for more than 30 years and the mining company responsible rejected the idea that they had anything to do with the illnesses and deaths.
Then a local woman named Gayla Benefield spoke up. Described as “a bit older than Erin Brockovich, but with the same smart mouth.”23 Benefield has become an icon for the fight to raise awareness of this tragedy, and to bring those responsible to justice. Over the past 40 years, more than 30 members of Benefield’s family have died from lung-related illnesses, including both her parents and others close to her are affected by it, including her daughter and her granddaughter.
You would think that such a large-scale disaster, with such tragic consequences, would be hard to ignore. But this is what the town’s residents did, in spite of overwhelming evidence and direct, personal contact with the epidemic. Most lost friends, neighbours and family, but they went about their daily lives as if nothing was wrong. Libby was a town in mourning, a community gasping for air, literally, but nobody was prepared to admit it; Libby is a classic case of wilful blindness.
When Benefield tried to talk to people about what seemed obvious to her, she received a variety of reactions. They ignored, avoided, ridiculed, marginalized, resisted and denied what she said. It was those residents whose health was unaffected that were most sceptical about the health consequences for others. They argued that if the situation had been that dangerous, then surely someone would have done something about it. The doctors would have spoken out or the authorities would have intervened. What would Benefield, a middle-aged local, know about asbestosis anyway? Many insisted that Libby was fine; they thought it to be a perfectly safe place to live and raise a family – “everybody knows there’s nothing wrong with this town.”24 Some people even made a bumper sticker, which said: “I am from Libby Montana and I don’t have asbestosis.”
The community became split between those who believed in Benefield’s claims and those who didn’t even want to talk about it. In spite of general perceptions of Libby being a caring and supportive community, sufferers of the disease were given the cold shoulder at best, and met with anger and resentment at worst. It was as though the whole world had conspired to ignore the plain truth. Even the EPA initially met the news with scepticism. Like everyone else before him, Paul Peronard’s (the EPA team leader called to investigate the Libby situation) initial reaction was “If something this bad had happened, we’d know about it. Hell, everybody would know about it. It’s got to be bullshit.”25
But Benefield did not give up. Eventually cleanup teams wearing protective clothing started appearing in the town, cordoning off toxic sites with tapes, lifting tons of contaminated soil and trucking it away, moving whole families out of their homes and covering the houses in plastic. But even then some townsfolk refused to accept the reality of the situation. When an asbestosis clinic opened in Libby, people initially went in through the back door, hating to admit that Benefield had been right all along.26
The mining company, WR Grace, continued to deny that there was a problem until it was proven otherwise in court. The company was ordered to pay compensation to the families affected by the disease. Slowly people started to come to terms with the enormity of their town’s tragedy. The bumper stickers changed and now read “We’re doing asbestos we can.”
What would have happened if the townsfolk, the authorities and the politicians, when they first heard of the possibility of asbestosis, had said “I don’t know what’s going on?” What would have happened if they had opened the issue up to investigation? Their reliance on what they already “knew,” that Libby was a safe place to raise kids and a wonderful community, was unshakeable. Their holding on to what they knew left no space for doubt, for Not Knowing and this had led to disastrous consequences.