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We are going next to Libby, Montana. The Census Bureau marks its population at 2,775. The nearest big city is hundreds of miles away. So it is the kind of American place that you can mainly learn about on NPR. People in Libby spent about 70 years mining vermiculite, a mineral used in everything from home insulation to garden soil. Most of the world's supply came from that one town. The town later learned that vermiculite was contaminated with asbestos. Thousands of people would get lung cancer and other diseases. Now a lawsuit has shut down a clinic set up to help them. Montana Public Radio's Aaron Bolton reports.
AARON BOLTON, BYLINE: Gayla Benefield lives just outside of Libby along the picturesque Kootenai River, surrounded by snow-capped peaks.
Nice to meet you.
GAYLA BENEFIELD: OK. You just wait here, and I'll be right back.
BOLTON: Inside her home, the 81-year-old is tethered to an oxygen machine with dozens of feet of tubing so she can walk from room to room. Like many here, Benefield's lungs are scarred by asbestos.
BENEFIELD: That scarring will totally surround your lungs and slowly strangle you.
BOLTON: Benefield's father was a vermiculite miner. Dust on his work clothes exposed his family to asbestos. Everyone thought vermiculite was harmless. It was even used in the dirt at local baseball fields.
BENEFIELD: I would take my younger kids down and they would play in the piles outside the fields - the piles of vermiculite. Every child that went down there probably has been exposed.
BOLTON: The mine closed in 1990. A decade later, a special clinic funded by the federal government would open to diagnose and treat victims of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would declare a public health emergency. This spring, that clinic, the Center for Asbestos Related Disease - or CARD - was still helping Benefield's family.
BENEFIELD: Four out of five of my children have been diagnosed. My oldest daughter, with the heaviest exposure, has got to go in for a CT tomorrow.
BOLTON: But this month, a lawsuit shut the clinic down. It was filed by BNSF Railway a couple of years ago, using a whistleblower law designed to stop Medicare fraud. The railroad said the clinic was erroneously diagnosing people with asbestos-related diseases and billing Medicare for treatment. Why would the railroad care?
TIM BECHTOLD: So, in this case, obviously, the railroad felt that the CARD clinic was harming its business because it had been found strictly liable for environmental asbestos claims in and around the town of Libby.
BOLTON: Tim Bechtold represented the clinic in the lawsuit. Courts have said BNSF is liable for spreading asbestos. Its trains hauled vermiculite away from the mine. In a statement to NPR, BNSF denied its lawsuit is an attempt to avoid liability for people suffering from poisoned vermiculite. The clinic is appealing the court settlement that forced it to close. It denies it was defrauding the government and now, federal prosecutors have also stepped in to help defend CARD. In the meantime, patients will have to look elsewhere for care.
JENAN SWENSON: There's going to be probably a lot of people just lost out there with no place to go.
BOLTON: Jenan Swenson is Gayla Benefield's only child without an asbestos-related disease. For now, the 62-year-old is in the clear, but she'll need screenings for the rest of her life because diseases tied to asbestos have such a long latency period.
SWENSON: There's no way I could even swing getting this done out of my own pocket if I didn't, you know, have the CARD clinic.
BOLTON: Swenson fully expects to eventually develop breathing problems from her asbestos exposure as a child. She's crossing her fingers the clinic here will reopen in time. For NPR News, I'm Aaron Bolton in Libby, Montana. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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