A sign on top read "Free Crushed Rock," a boon for those in the working-class neighborhood who needed fill for their yards and driveways. The piles drew children, too, many on their way to or from the nearby schools. The rocks were fun to run around and climb on and, on cold Minnesota mornings, were often still warm to the touch.

"We all played over there," recalls Kevin Reich, who moved to the neighborhood as a sixth-grader in 1979. "It baffles the mind, but it's true." What baffles Reich, decades later, is the knowledge that those rock piles were the by-product of processing vermiculite ore mined by W.R. Grace & Company in Libby, Montana--vermiculite that is now known to contain asbestos, the fiber linked to a host of serious health problems, including asbestosis, mesothelioma and lung cancer.

The Libby mine was closed in 1990 in 1999, media coverage sparked an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigation that found high levels of asbestos exposure among the town's miners and residents. Now, federal and state agencies are trying to track down the millions of tons of vermiculite shipped from Libby over the mine's 65-plus years of operation and determine who else might have been exposed. The search has led them to Kevin Reich's neighborhood and more than 200 other sites around the United States that processed Libby vermiculite.

Tracking the ore has been anything but easy, says Barbara Anderson, an environmental health scientist with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's (ATSDR) National Asbestos Exposure Review, which is using company documents, community complaints about air emissions, visual inspections and computer modeling to lead the national search. "This material wasn't classified as hazardous waste," Anderson says. "There are few records to document where it went."

Anderson and her colleagues have focused their initial efforts on 28 "Phase 1" sites--the processing facilities, scattered from Santa Ana, California to Beltsville, Maryland, that received about four-fifths of the vermiculite mined in Libby from 1964 through 1980. Thus far, the agency has published seven site reviews (Anderson says the remaining Phase 1 assessments will be complete by early 2005), in each case concluding that employees of the facilities, and possibly members of their households, were exposed to elevated levels of asbestos.

William Corcoran, vice president for public and regulatory affairs at W.R. Grace, the Maryland-based chemical and materials company, told E, "Any asbestos found in material shipped from Libby was in trace amounts." The company filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in 2001, citing "a sharply increasing number of asbestos claims."

At Minneapolis' Western Mineral Products plant, which operated for 51 years, raw vermiculite was "popped" or heated until the moisture inside exploded, turning the mineral into a lightweight, porous material commonly used in attic insulation, soil additives and other consumer products. The ore that didn't "pop" was often left outside: the rock piles that Kevin Reich remembers from his childhood. From there, it spread into the community, a shovel-full at a time.

READ MORE AT http://better-asbestos-testing.info/asbestos_bill_asbestos_bill.php

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