Sheldon Myrie used to steer clear of a back room at his Beltsville workplace after he learned that federal officials discovered trace amounts of asbestos that had traveled there from a Montana mine.
"They said there was nothing to worry about, but I thought hopefully there was nothing that could kill me back there because I have young children to take care of," said Myrie, who works for Atlantic Transportation Equipment Ltd., which has since moved to a nearby building.
The now abandoned shop in a Prince George's County industrial park was one of more than 200 sites from New York to Hawaii where asbestos-tainted vermiculite was shipped or processed and used for insulation, fireproofing and fertilizer. The vermiculite came from Libby, a Montana town that has been in the national spotlight since W.R. Grace & Co. was indicted Monday on charges that it knowingly endangered residents.
As Libby learns more about the asbestos spread from the mine to homes and schoolyards, communities across the country are waiting for answers about the extent of contamination and potential health risks in their own back yards. The unknowns radiate far beyond the northwest corner of Montana.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has been visiting the sites, focusing on Beltsville and 27 other processing plants that received most of the vermiculite from Libby. But the agency hasn't released reports on more than half of the sites, and they have yet to contact many of the former plant workers and their families who may have been exposed to the hazardous material.
"Libby is a tiny fraction of the asbestos disaster in this nation," Richard Wiles, senior vice president at Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, said yesterday. "People close to these sites for the years they were run should definitely be concerned. I'm not recommending panic, but this stuff is not to be messed with. It's deadly."
The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, concluded in 2003 that very little asbestos remained at the Beltsville site and that current workers weren't at risk. The back room where asbestos was discovered posed "no apparent health hazard," according to its report. However, the report noted that if someone disturbed dust in the area, they could be exposed to "significant amounts" of asbestos.
