Ex-Grace Officials on Trial in Asbestos Poisoning

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LIBBY, Mont. — A reckoning in one of American history’s worst industrial disasters, which unfolded here over seven decades as an asbestos-tainted mineral was dug from the ground and processed, begins Thursday when five former mine executives go to trial on federal criminal charges.

The case is highly unusual in that prosecutors have generally avoided criminal charges in the broad arena of asbestos law, leaving the issue to the civil courts.

But the story of the now-closed mine and its adjacent mill is different, because it involves not only miners but also their families and neighbors, many of whom became ill just living in this remote northwestern corner of Montana.

At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine’s billowing dust clouds of vermiculite, which by dint of geological bad luck was layered millions of years ago with naturally occurring asbestos.

Prosecutors say that the mine’s owner, W. R. Grace & Company, which is also a defendant, and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos was mixed with the vermiculite and that this posed a risk to their workers, but that they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19asbestos.html?th&emc=th