Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
Industrial firm W. R. Grace and Co. and seven top executives were charged last week with deliberately concealing health risks posed to workers and residents of a small Montana town.

Grace is accused of concealing knowledge that the company’s mine near Libby, Montana, was producing vermiculite contaminated with asbestos, which produces fibers that can cause severe respiratory illnesses and death when inhaled.

A newspaper study claimed that about 200 deaths and hundreds of illnesses in the town have been linked to asbestos.

According to the 10-count indictment handed down last week by a federal grand jury, Grace officials allegedly hid the asbestos contamination since at least 1976, lying about what they knew for decades.

The indictment accuses Grace of deliberately endangering its employees, their families, and people living in Libby, where asbestos-laced vermiculite was used for a junior high school running track and as a base for an ice rink.

Despite internal company warnings about the dangers, Grace also leased contaminated properties to the city and to local residents for use as homes, businesses, baseball fields, reported the Associated Press.

“This wasn’t something that happened to us. This was something that was done to us,” a former miner who, along with his wife and two children, is now ill, told the AP. “They should have to pay. They will never have to pay like we did, because it won’t cost them their lives.”

Grace last week issued a statement, saying it “categorically denies any criminal wrongdoing.”

Taxpayers have spent more than $55 million cleaning up Grace’s Libby mine, which was declared a federal Superfund site following its closure in 1990. Grace has appealed a federal judge’s order to repay the cost.

If convicted of last week’s charges, Grace faces maximum criminal fines of $280 million, with its executives facing prison sentences ranging from 5 to 70 years.