LIBBY — When the pain started, Dean Herreid was fighting fires outside Elko, Nev., running uphill at full bore to extinguish flames in a patch of juniper brush.

“It was severe, like knives being shoved into my left side,” he remembers. “It took me forever to get up there.”

That was four years ago.

Today, Herreid climbs the stairs at Central School in Libby with a pace that’s normal for the first couple of steps, then slower and slower. He stops to gasp for air at the top, noting that walking stairs actually is good exercise for him.

At age 44, the lanky Libby native is in the throes of serious asbestos disease.

This is a guy who has fought fires on the front lines at home and out of state as part of helitack crews. He’s a guy who taught school in Eskimo villages near the Bering Strait, a guy who now motivates his alternative-school students every day to do great things.

“I’ve tried to live life to the fullest,” he said, shaking his head at the injustice of a disease that’s bringing him down in the prime of life.

He’s a victim of asbestos exposure from the former W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine near Libby.

“I went through a lot of anger issues. I wanted to find Peter Grace and castrate him,” he said, referring to the top executive of the corporate giant blamed for poisoning Libby miners and residents with asbestos dust.

“I was really pissed off for a long time.”

LIKE SO many of the neighborhood kids with whom he grew up near the railroad tracks in Libby, Herreid was exposed to the deadly dust everywhere he turned as a boy. It was on the railroad tracks, on the baseball fields, in the garden, in random piles the children jumped into and at the vermiculite export plant he walked past almost daily.

When he tagged along with his father on plumbing jobs, Herreid recalls vermiculite insulation everywhere as his father drilled through walls to fix or install pipes.

“It would rain down on us,” he said.

When the extent of asbestos exposure in Libby came to light in late 1999, Herreid signed up to get his lungs checked the following year.

“They found something wrong, but didn’t know at the time what it was,” he said. “I had a lung biopsy on my right side, which I wouldn’t wish on anybody. They didn’t really find anything.”

And while the government paid for the initial screening, Herreid was left with the bills for the biopsy and it made him mad.

He summoned his “tough guy” persona and quit going to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, known better as the CARD clinic.

By 2005, there was no denying the pain. More chest X-rays and a CT scan revealed his fate: obvious pleural thickening. Slowly, the disease is getting worse.

“The cold is terrible,” he said.

“You feel like you can’t breathe. I was at a meeting until midnight last night and when I walked outside the fire hall and took a breath, I couldn’t breathe.”

Herreid can’t fight fires any more, but has continued as fire chief of the Fisher River Fire District at Upper Thompson Lake where he, his wife, Vikki, and two sons reside.

At night, Herreid’s coughing is so constant he leaves the TV on for white noise so his wife can sleep.

IN THE classroom, his students are used to his shortness of breath and chronic coughing. It’s there, in the messy array of junk computers in various stages of repair, that Herreid can temporarily forget about his asbestos disease as he mentors students, sharing his vast knowledge of computer science.

Herreid is a Microsoft-authorized refurbisher. He and his students take in computers and upgrade them, then donate them to needy families. Last year they refurbished 143 old computers. Some are stripped down for copper and aluminum that’s recycled for cash for Kootenai Pets for Life.

One of his class projects was completing a Geographical Information System inventory of Libby’s critical infrastructure for emergency services.

It’s a resource that Flathead County’s emergency-services director would like him and his students to duplicate for the Flathead Valley.

On Wednesday, Herreid explained the latest project — a virtual fly-through of the entire Libby school system requested by Superintendent Kirby Maki.

In their spare time, Herreid’s motivated students do volunteer video work, taping weddings, funerals and things like a promotional piece for the animal shelter. Some of them restore old school photographs to hone their Photoshop skills.

“It’s all about giving back,” Herreid said.

A COPY of the indictment against W.R. Grace’s top executives, printed as a full page in the Montanian newspaper, is posted on Herreid’s classroom wall. It’s a reminder, perhaps, that asbestos always is hanging around.

Herreid was among the victims to testify at the Grace criminal trial earlier this year.

An eight-count indictment in 2006 charged Grace and several of its top executives with conspiring to hide health risks from asbestos exposure from the vermiculite mine.

With roughly 70 percent of the evidence not admissible in court, the plaintiffs didn’t stand a chance, Herreid maintained.

“They’d ask me a question and then a lawyer would shout ‘Objection, Rule 403,’” he said.

Rule 403 states that “Although relevant, evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading the jury...”

The trial (Grace and its executives were acquitted) is history now, though, and Herreid chooses to look forward, not back.

He’s thankful Libby is getting the cleanup it desperately needs, but wonders about other places throughout the United States that received big quantities of the 5.8 million tons of vermiculite shipped out of Libby.

“These other places won’t be cleaned up. What are other communities going to do?” he wondered. “Is it now tag, they’re it? The [asbestos] has been identified as killer stuff.”

Herreid admits he’s “kind of excited” to see Libby re-inventing itself in spite of its asbestos legacy.

“What will the caption be for Libby?” he mused. “I’m waiting for it and it will be fun, because we’re going to finally be clean.”

 Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com