In a lecture hall filled with fresh-faced, attentive University of Montana students, the question was asked: What’s next for Libby?

Libby’s future was the focus of a panel discussion, a town-hall style discussion staged Thursday night by the university’s environmental justice students. Some of the students covered the W.R. Grace & Co. criminal trial earlier this year and blogged about it; at least one student was going into nursing and wondered about health-care jobs in the asbestos-plagued town.

It was an appropriate time to look back, and to the future.

Ten years ago Libby’s widespread exposure to the deadly dust from Grace’s vermiculite mine was thrust into the limelight, first by the Daily Inter Lake’s breaking coverage of the extent of the asbestos exposure. Other national news media followed suit and within a year Libby had become a household word, and not in a good way.

Still, community leaders persevered, insisting that government agencies take steps to hold Grace accountable. They demanded health care and cleanup, and eventually got both.

“Ten years ago there was nothing,” victims’ advocate Gayla Benefield told the young audience. “The disease wasn’t even diagnosed. I look at everything we’ve gained.”

Benefield, a lifelong Libby resident who has asbestos disease, is hopeful that research will once and for all answer the question, “how safe is clean, and how clean is safe,” as it relates to the toxicity of Libby’s unique form of asbestos. She wants to one day be able to tell her grandchildren, “you’re not going to die from this.”

More than 300 deaths have been linked to asbestos exposure from the vermiculite mine, and the Center for Asbestos Related Disease in Libby currently serves 2,800 patients with various stages of asbestos disease. About two-dozen new cases of asbestos disease are diagnosed every month.

It’s nearly impossible to get an accurate count of the deaths, because 80,000 people came and went in Libby while the mine was operating, CARD director Dr. Brad Black said. With a 30- to 40-year latency period for asbestos disease, he predicts the last new cases will turn up somewhere around 2030.

Outside of the busy health-care arena in Libby, Superfund cleanup continues. To date the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has spent more than $206 million — roughly $20 million a year — to clean up 1,262 residential and commercial properties in Libby. The agency estimates there will be another three to four years of cleanup.

Ironically, health care and cleanup of contaminated homes and soil are bolstering the economy in Libby, replacing the money once brought to town by the timber industry and the mine.

Libby EPA Remedial Project Manager Mike Cirian estimates the cleanup generates $9 million a year in local expenditures for things such as portable toilets, topsoil and motel rooms.

Lincoln County Commissioner Marianne Roose acknowledges the economic boost.

“Our community would be in a world of hurt without the cleanup,” Roose said. “And in the end we’ll have one of the cleanest communities anywhere.”

IT HAS BEEN a pivotal year for Libby.

In early May, Grace and three of its former top executives were acquitted of federal criminal charges that they knowingly allowed human exposure to asbestos in Libby. It wasn’t the outcome Libby residents had hoped for, but it didn’t defeat them, Benefield said.

Andrew King-Ries, a UM law professor who organized the law students’ blog coverage of the trial, said it’s “important to recognize it was a different kind of defense.” Despite Grace being in bankruptcy, the corporation spent $140 million on an aggressive defense.

“Grace didn’t care where the money was going because it wasn’t their money,” he said. “W.R. Grace focused the case on the government rather than their own culpability.”

The corporation essentially put the EPA on trial and effectively hamstrung the government, he said. Grace argued that the federal agency dropped the ball and didn’t have the facts or the science to back up the criminal charges.

And pretrial rulings precluded “a lot of damning evidence that never got to the jury,” he said.

“This was a novel theory,” King-Ries noted. “A lot of environmental criminal law is in its infancy.”

Later in the discussion, King-Ries said he’s concerned that the outcome of the criminal trial will discourage the government from pursuing justice for environmental crimes.

Grace, now preparing to emerge from bankruptcy, has “had a consistent corporate culture from the beginning,” he said. “I anticipate that wherever they do business, there will be the potential for litigation because the corporate culture doesn’t recognize they’ve done anything wrong.”

IN JUNE the federal government took the unprecedented step of declaring a public health emergency in Libby. It was the first time the EPA has made such a determination under authority of the 1980 Superfund law that requires the cleanup of contaminated sites.

The declaration will open doors for additional resources to address Libby’s ongoing health-care needs. The first $6 million already has come through.

At the UM symposium, Helia Jazayeri, a third-year law student and former aide to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., told how Baucus relentlessly worked to achieve the public health declaration for the Libby people he’s championed.

In 2002, the year Libby was declared a Superfund site, EPA officials who had agreed the health declaration was warranted reversed their decision. Baucus blamed interference from the Bush administration and pushed even harder, taking advantage of new leadership in the White House this year, Jazayeri said.

WHERE TO go from here?

There’s movement on many fronts in Libby, not only with continued cleanup by EPA and more money for health care. Studies on the toxicology and epidemiology of Libby asbestos also are under way.

And crucial research into how asbestos exposure affects children is among many research efforts now percolating.

The Community Action Group that flourished in the early years of Libby’s efforts to deal with the asbestos aftermath had dwindled but now is being revived. The county commissioners recently designated the Lincoln City-County Board of Health as the point of contact for asbestos-related issues.

“You get a lot of splinter groups and we’re hoping the city-county group can be one voice,” Roose said. “It’s important to have concise, consistent information.

Roose praised the CARD clinic for its role as a lifeline for asbestos victims.

“It’s a very painful process to watch,” she said. “There’s so much suffering, anger and fear.”

But there’s also hope, she said, and the potential for economic development beyond the dollars driven by the cleanup. St. John’s Lutheran Hospital has plans for a new facility and the Libby school board has asked for a federal appropriation for a new elementary school.

“Libby is vibrant,” Roose said. “They haven’t let it get them down.”

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