LIBBY — The houses and yards and businesses are cleaned up. The so-called stigma of Superfund designation is fast fading. The Cabinet Mountains and the crystalline waters of the Kootenai River beckon visitors and even new residents. And if not for the slow-motion horror of the plague on this place, Libby, self-titled City of Eagles, would be soaring.

Instead, this beautiful town, doused every day for more than six decades with tons of asbestos-laden dust from a nearby vermiculite mine, still suffers the unthinkable — a steady stream of the sick and the dying.

Thanks to the latency period of asbestos-related disease, that won’t change any time soon.

The mine closed in 1990, and EPA’s cleanup has been in process since the agency quickly responded to the disclosure of the problem in news stories in late 1999. So exposure to the deadly mineral should now be far less than it was for decades. But because it can take 40 years or more after exposure for symptoms of the disease to develop, it means that another generation or two will be affected by the disease here.

https://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/in-libby-as-the-asbestos-cleanup-gets-done-the-dying/article_fcc5e555-2f38-5cbf-8c1d-b959871f7d9e.html