August often means peak wildfire season in Northwest Montana, as thunderstorms spin off lightning strikes into forests that are dried out by a summer’s worth of heat.
And wildfires are especially concerning east of Libby, where the former W.R. Grace asbestos mine sits, surrounded by the Kootenai National Forest.
Chris Savage, forest supervisor on the Kootenai, says they’ve been aware for years that fighting a fire on and around the mine site could be especially hazardous to firefighters.
"That started back in 2009," Savage says, "when EPA was moving forward with looking at some of their survey plots and finding the higher concentrations of asbestos in the bark and duff."
The EPA found asbestos concentrations high enough to be of concern to firefighters across an approximately 73 square mile area centered on the former vermiculite mine.
And that’s meant that the Kootenai National Forest has taken extra measures to be ready to quickly hop on any fire that breaks out in the area.
"We have one of the national helicopter contracts that gets stationed here in Libby," Savage says. "That helicopter, during higher preparedness levels, preparedness levels 4 and 5, if there is a lightning strike the helicopter is assigned to attack that fire. We have done that, and we’ve also done other measures as well."
That includes having a crew of specially-trained firefighters on hand to follow up an initial aerial attack. Those firefighters have to wear respirators to protect themselves, especially from the dust that’s thrown up when they dig fire lines or mop up after flames are extinguished. They also wear special clothing and have to be decontaminated when they leave the scene so they don’t carry asbestos fibers off site. Those fibers can lodge in peoples’ lungs and cause dangerous respiratory conditions.
All that preparation is expensive. Savage and the EPA’s Christina Progess put the tab at $2.1 million for 2016 alone.
That money has been coming out of theKootenaiNational Forest’s budget, but a couple of weeks ago the EPA and the Forest Service signed a memo that says that this year, the EPA will take on $300,000 worth of the fire preparedness expense.
Christina Progess, the EPA’s project manager for the portion of the Libby Superfund site that includes the former mine, which was operated by the W.R. Grace company, says: "Those costs may be reimbursed byW.R.Grace. In the event that they don’t reimburse them, then the Forest Service and EPA would have to take on those costs."
Who gets stuck with the bill for the special fire preparations around Libby is only part of the challenge, though.
Kootenai National Forest Supervisor Chris Savage says he’s having trouble finding firefighters who are willing to be deployed on the ground should a fire break out on the mine site.
"We were hoping to get a crew of 10, we were only able to get four. So, yeah, it has been difficult," he says.
Savage says that if a fire ever did get bad enough in the mine area that it couldn’t be controlled from the air, he could probably get a maximum of 30 firefighters who are specially trained and willing to attack it on the ground. But even that crew would be limited in what they could do, because working while wearing respirators would slow them down. And a crew of 30 is often just a fraction of the size fire managers request when fires get big or spread quickly.
And that’s why the Forest Service stations one of the biggest firefighting helicopters available in Libby when fire danger gets highest, so crews don’t have to go in on the ground.
"The best way to minimize exposures under these fire scenarios would be to keep fires small," Progess says.
The Forest Service has generally been able to do that, even last year when several big fires around Libby raged for weeks, and there were several lighting strikes that started fires in the 73-square mile area of special concern around the former mine site.
When it comes to the question of whether a fire in the mine area might pose a health risk in Libby, Progess says scientists are still very early into work to figure that out.
"We’re evaluating what kind of modeling capabilities we might have," she says, "to model how asbestos moves through the air as a result of fire. How fire behavior affects those kinds of things. How ash is transported, either eroded into waterways or across the landscape, or aerially deposited, but as of right now we don’t have any way of quantifying the exposures that nearby residents might be exposed to."
Progess says test burns EPA did last year of vegetation around the mine site showed high concentrations of asbestos. She says that when it comes to health risk, EPA is primarily concerned with chronic, or long-term exposures, like, over a working lifetime somewhere where there are elevated levels of asbestos fibers.
"So, in the case of a fire scenario," she says, "where it doesn’t happen very regularly, that reduces the chance that the exposures would be above a level of concern."
Next week the EPA and U.S. Forest Service are holding an exercise with state agencies and Lincoln County officials to work through how to best respond to a fire on or near the former vermiculite mine site.
The EPA is also taking public comment until August 19th on its new agreement with the Forest Service about fire preparedness. You can find a copy of that agreement by clicking here.
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