Libby

For most of the twentieth century Libby's other industry, after timber, was the vermiculite mine in the hills outside town, worked from the 1920s and owned by W.R. Grace from 1963 until it closed in 1990: at its height the largest vermiculite mine in the world. The ore went out by rail to be expanded into Zonolite attic insulation across the country, and it was laced with an especially toxic form of asbestos, now called Libby amphibole. It came home on miners' clothes, and children played in the piles of raw vermiculite at the export plant beside the town's ball fields.

The deaths came slowly, as asbestos deaths do. Federal investigators arrived in 1999 after news reports of rising illness, the site went on the Superfund list in 2002, and in 2005 Grace and seven former managers were indicted on charges of hiding the danger; they were acquitted in 2009. In June of that year the EPA declared Libby a public health emergency, the first in the agency's history, so that residents could receive federal medical care. Asbestos disease has killed hundreds of people here and sickened thousands, and because it can take decades to appear, the count is not finished.

By late 2018 crews had completed more than 2,600 property cleanups in Libby and Troy, digging out yards and stripping attics, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars. The old export plant is a town park now. Libby is also the jumping-off point for the Cabinet Mountains, and Kootenai Falls is twelve miles west on US-2.