Workers in white hazardous-material suits and face masks, endless amounts of orange mesh plastic fencing, excavators, dump trucks, ropes of plastic tubing through which attic insulation is sucked out: This is the landscape of Libby in cleanup mode.

Since 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its contractors have been grinding away at the cleanup of asbestos-contaminated homes, schools, public areas and commercial properties left in the wake of decades of toxic exposure from the former W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite mine near Libby.

Over the past decade, 1,262 properties have been cleaned and 877,310 tons of soil have been removed from a Superfund site so big it is broken into eight “operable units.”

The price tag to make Libby clean is $206 million so far — and climbing. The government spent $168 million through 2008, when a settlement from Grace kicked in. Roughly $38 million for 2008-09 cleanup has come out of the settlement fund so far.

This year’s cleanup wrapped up several weeks ago. Among the 159 properties cleanup was the Cabinet View Country Club golf course where asbestos was found in the greens, tee boxes and sand traps — all amenities that were built up with vermiculite, said Mike Cirian, EPA remedial project manager in Libby.

The fairways came up clean.

“We waited until August to get started at the golf course so they could get in most of the season,” he said.

A quick-response project at the Kootenai Business Park Industrial District — the former Stimson Lumber mill site where Stinger Welding opened its Montana operation earlier this year — also was on the 2009 cleanup agenda. The expansive mill site will be the focus of further cleanup in the future, said Victor Ketellapper, the EPA’s Libby team leader.

Removal and replacement of riprap along portions of Libby and Pipe creeks were done this year amid ongoing residential cleanup.

Next year, 80 to 100 properties in the neighboring community of Troy are on the cleanup schedule, according to Cirian.

“We’ve done some ‘Oh, my gosh’ properties there” that showed heavy exposure levels of asbestos, he said. “And we will continue to do more properties in Libby.”

To qualify for cleanup, a property has to show a concentration of more than 1 percent asbestos in the soil, with visible vermiculite in specific-use areas such as driveways, lawns and gardens. Building interiors must have vermiculite insulation in accessible attics or crawl spaces, or show evidence that it is sifting into the living space, Cirian said.

As part of the ongoing monitoring for asbestos dust, the EPA has conducted activity-based testing at sensitive areas such as schools, where contracted workers emulate students playing outside and janitors sweeping parking lots to determine the exposure risk for children and school employees.

In addition to about 1,700 properties that have been identified for cleanup thus far, there are 800 in pending status still being analyzed.

“Another 550 to 600 properties were refusals,” Cirian said. “These are property owners that either worked for Grace and don’t believe in the cleanup or they don’t trust the government.”

He estimates cleanup will continue for another three to four years.

“We’ve gone through most of the interior properties,” he said. “Now the property sizes are three to four acres because we’re hitting the outer edges of Libby.”

During the construction season, the federal agency is the third biggest employer in Libby, with some 200 workers involved in cleanup. St. John’s Lutheran Hospital and the U.S. Forest Service are the biggest employers.

“We don’t want to be the third largest,” Cirian said.

But the reality is that cleanup in Libby has been good for the local economy. Cirian estimated $9 million a year is spent on cleanup-related expenses, from hotel rooms to new top soil for yards.

There was a changing of the guard in EPA personnel in April, when a new site team was put in place to manage the transition from removal to remedial activity.

The agency currently is working toward a Record of Decision for operable units 1 and 2: the former export and screening plant sites that were part of W.R. Grace & Co.’s vermiculite mine operation. The sites were the first two properties cleaned in Libby in 2000.

Public comments on the proposed remedial-action plans for the first two operable units will be taken until Dec. 16, after which time the federal government responds to the comments and issues a Record of Decision that puts the sites into an operation and maintenance phase that continues in perpetuity.

Part of the process is completing a risk assessment for each unit.

Comments can be sent by e-mail to linnert.ted@epa.gov or by calling toll-free to 800-227-8917, extension 6119.

Other operable units include the vermiculite mine northwest of town, Libby homes and businesses, the Stimson Lumber campus, Troy and highway corridors in the Libby area.

As a pilot program, the federal agency has put in place a full-time environmental resource specialist who will be accessible even after all of the cleanup has been done. States generally manage the operation and maintenance of Superfund sites, Cirian said, so he assumes the resource specialist eventually will be funded with operation and maintenance money.

Anyone who finds vermiculite on his or her property can call the Libby area environmental resource specialist at (406) 291-5335 for free help in understanding and handling the situation.

Also yet to play out in the cleanup is the public health emergency declaration made earlier this year. The first-ever declaration by the EPA under the Superfund law is expected to ensure effective cleanup for Libby and Troy.

On its Web site, the EPA says the declaration will help the agency “to aggressively clean up the site with a renewed focus and collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services.

“EPA will proceed with the cleanup in the town at the fastest rate that the Libby infrastructure allows,” the Web site stated.

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