Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question. Today:
“What’s the story behind the asbestos mine in Eden?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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‘Something’s wrong here’
Burgess Brown: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Burgess Brown.
George Desch: So the purpose of the meeting that we have here tonight is really just to exchange information and get information …
Burgess Brown: This is from a video taken at a meeting in 2009. It’s the middle of winter. And we're in the gym at the elementary school in Eden, on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom.
And it’s packed in here. All the folding metal chairs are full, and the walls are lined with flannel-clad residents. More than 250 people are here.
George Desch: I noticed there's a lot of people queuing up out there. There's plenty of room in here to stand over …
Burgess Brown: In the front of the gym, six very stressed looking state and federal officials stand in front of a projector screen.
And no one in this room is happy with them.
John Farrar: EPA and all the other federal and state agencies, you do nothing but just sit in your desk.
Local resident: You’re making the problem. You people are stealing money. It’s time for you to get the hell out of there.
Burgess Brown: These officials have rolled into town to discuss an abandoned asbestos mine on nearby Belvidere Mountain. In its heyday, the mine was a sprawling operation that straddled the towns of Eden and Lowell.
After it closed in the early ‘90s, state and federal agencies began studying if and how the asbestos waste that was left behind was impacting local waterways and the health of residents.
They’re here tonight, in this crowded gym, to present their findings. It is not going well.
Leslie White: Again and again and again in your presentation, right here, things are not answered. I mean, something's wrong here.
Burgess Brown: Some people are mad that it took them so long to show up in town.
John Farrar: The mines closed in 1993, 16 years. Where were you then? You've done nothing.
Burgess Brown: But most of them are mad that they’re here at all.
Local resident: You people might as well get the hell out of there and stay out of there. And leave that pile alone and leave us alone. You guys are just looking for a job! (Applause)
Burgess Brown: The story of the Belvidere asbestos mine is about what happens when a toxic industry booms and busts, the mess that’s left behind — and the fight over how to clean it up.
Leslie White: I certainly don't like it when people of authority try to push something over on us that’s not true.
Burgess Brown: We’ll be right back.
_
‘Unquenchable rock’
Burgess Brown: The asbestos mine controversy is something of a third rail for a lot of the people I spoke to for this story. A common refrain that I heard was, “I don’t want to stir this back up.”
But the defunct mine is pretty impossible to ignore. It is massive. And it’s a source of curiosity for people who are passing by, or some who’ve moved to the area more recently. And when Brave Little State hosted an event last year in nearby Jeffersonville, not one but two people submitted questions to us about it.
They asked: “What is the story behind the asbestos mine in Eden?” And, “What is the history, current use and future plan for the asbestos mine on the Eden/Lowell boundary?”
So here we are. Stirring the pot.
Leslie White: I've been here 30 years. I moved here and on some raw land, built my house and barns.
Burgess Brown: This is Leslie White. We’re sitting in her car outside of the Eden Town Clerk’s office, just off Route 100.
There’s not much else around — a general store, a few churches and schools. And Lake Eden — a popular family spot for camping and swimming and fishing. Lowell, just up the road, is a pretty similar story. Except they have a bowling alley.
It’s bucolic Vermont at its best. And it’s what attracted Leslie to the area back in the 90s.
Leslie White: For the most part of the time, I was a farrier, so I trimmed horses' feet. And then did construction, and then whatever else came along to make it happen.
Burgess Brown: You’ve actually already heard from a younger Leslie in this episode.
Leslie White (at 2009 meeting): I mean, something's wrong here.
Burgess Brown: She was a prominent voice at that meeting in Eden 17 years ago. Now, she’s got short gray hair and she’s wearing a silver necklace with a horse pendant that she fiddles with as she talks.
Leslie moved to Eden in the mid-90s. She says it didn’t take her long to understand the significance of the mine, and of the Vermont Asbestos Group — known as VAG — that owned it.
Leslie White: I grew up in Rochester, New York, so Kodak was Rochester's, and the VAG mine was this area's. I mean, that was the place to work. They ran around the clock, there were good jobs, they paid well. People could raise a family working at the mine. And it was the only— I mean, that was it around here.
Burgess Brown: The mine has a long history in the area. Asbestos was discovered at Belvidere Mountain in the early 1800s. By the end of the century, mining companies had flocked to the mountain, and in 1910, the site was the largest producer of asbestos in the United States.
Now, asbestos has essentially become a dirty word these days. But that’s not always been the case.
Asbestos Information Committee: Asbestos, the unquenchable rock that burns and cannot be extinguished.
Burgess Brown: This is a propaganda film the Asbestos Information Committee put out in the 70s.
Asbestos Information Committee: What other rock has formed the funeral robes of emperors, the lamp wicks of the Vestal Virgins, being called undefinable, stone-flax, the wooly stone, the fine hair of gold?
Burgess Brown: Propaganda or not, asbestos is incredible. In its raw form, it looks like spider webs or silky hair. And when you separate them out, the fibers themselves are flexible and incredibly strong. They’re also fire resistant.
Which is why, for decades, asbestos was everywhere: heat resistant clothing used by firefighters, insulation in homes, siding on the walls, floor tiles in the kitchen and shingles on the roof.
And the source of this booming industry in the U.S. was Belvidere Mountain. By the early 30s, 100% of asbestos mined in the U.S. came from Belvidere. A decade later, during the Second World War, the mine employed 150 people, working three shifts around the clock to meet wartime needs. Asbestos was used in naval ships, barracks and protective gear.
By the 1970s, the mine’s workforce had more than doubled. It seemed like just about everyone in town was connected to the place in one way or another.
Cracks in the industry
But then, cracks began to form in the industry.
Something made its way into the public consciousness — something that doctors and scientists had actually known about for decades, and industry leaders had intentionally kept hidden: This magic mineral is terribly toxic.
1974 ABC News report: A mineral fiber once commonly used as insulation has been identified as a cause of lung cancer …
Burgess Brown: When it’s inhaled, asbestos can cause multiple forms of cancer and lung disease.
In the 1970s, the Occupational Safety and Heath Administration, or OSHA, formed in part to address this growing concern over asbestos exposure in the workplace. And it rolled out the first guidelines to address it. They were significant enough that in 1974, the owners of the Belvidere mine decided they were going to shutter the operation rather than invest in the safety equipment needed to meet new standards.
And then, in a move that may be hard for some of us to get our heads around in hindsight, the mine workers rallied together to buy the mine and keep it running. I mean, just remember, these were well-paying, local jobs. So, they formed the Vermont Asbestos Group, which became the largest employee-owned industrial operation in the U.S. at the time.
But regulations kept getting more strict and negative public perception continued to mount. Eventually, the industry collapsed. The VAG mine closed for good in 1993.
What was left behind was a scarred mountain face and more than 30 million tons of tailings. Piles and piles of ground up rock and dust contaminated with asbestos.
And that’s how Leslie White found it when she arrived in town two years later.
Leslie White: I had a friend who was helping me look for land in this area, who knew the area, had worked at the mine, and we kind of drove up this road and we got to the kind of a ledge. And I could look up and see the waste pile, and I said, “What's that?” And they said, “Oh, it's the old asbestos mine.” And I just kind of like, said, “OK,” and went from there. Never really thought about it again.
Burgess Brown: As Leslie tells it, the mine loomed large in the history of the area and people understood that miners had gotten sick — and some of them had died — but the piles of crushed up contaminated rock really weren’t a concern.
They were a popular spot for ATV riding, for instance. And in the winter, a clandestine “backcountry” ski destination.
But then, in 2004, things started to change, again. And it started with a fish.
‘Lunar landscape’
Shannon Morrison: I remember it distinctly. It was a brook trout.
Burgess Brown: This is Shannon Morrison. She’s a district wetlands ecologist with the DEC.
Twenty years ago, at the start of her career, a package came across her desk. Inside was a photo of this brook trout.
Shannon Morrison: It was on an eight-by-ten print out, and it was laying in a bed of, you know, this kind of sparkly material.
Burgess Brown: A bed of asbestos tailings. At first, she thought it might be a threat.
Shannon Morrison: I was like, is this, like, a mafia warning or something? Because it was, it was just bizarre.
But it was a very— there was a very sad note accompanying it, you know, along the lines of, "I don't know if there's anything that you can do to help me, but, you know, there's basically some bad things going on." And that's how it all started.
Burgess Brown: A landowner near the mine had sent the photo to Shannon. Asbestos tailings — gobs of them — were suffocating the wetlands on his property.
Shannon paid the landowner a visit to see for herself.
Shannon Morrioson: You know, it looked like a lunar landscape. It was just so much material in these wetlands. And the destruction of it was just incredible,
John Schmeltzer: The wetlands program, they had a person there that went out there and saw it and said, I think we need to see this.
Burgess Brown: John Schmeltzer is the former deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same agency where Shannon works. He remembers visiting that same site.
John Schmeltzer: And some of the trees that you could see, there was asbestos fibers that was hanging from the trees.
Burgess Brown: State regulators were starting to clock something that they hadn’t before: The asbestos tailings were leaving the mine. The piles were eroding and washing into the nearby waterways.
And so Shannon and her team set to work cleaning up the clogged wetland. And John Schmeltzer went up to the mines to look at the source of the problem. The state called in the EPA for assistance and hatched a plan.
John Schmeltzer: We were trying to look at things that that could make a difference and be as cost effective as possible. And probably the most important thing was to turn off the spigot of all that sediment that was going down to to the wetland.
Burgess Brown: Teams dug basins, water-bars, diversion trenches, and built berms to redirect clean water away from the piles and then keep contaminated water from leaving the site.
Botched study
Meanwhile, the discovery that the tailings piles were on the move caught the attention of another agency, the Vermont Department of Health. Asbestos was already known to be a threat to the miners who had worked there. And now that they knew asbestos was leaving the site, they wondered, could it be a threat to the people that live near the mine, too?
So, they studied datasets and looked at death certificates and hospital discharge records within a 10-mile radius of the mine.
In November 2008 they released the results of their study. They concluded that, yes, living close to the mine increased people’s chances of asbestos-related health concerns, like lung cancer and lung disease.
Burgess Brown: Do you remember how that made you feel? Do you remember talking to other people in town?
Leslie White: Everybody was furious. It was just kind of out of the blue.
Burgess Brown: Leslie White remembers the anger and fear that the release of the study created in the surrounding communities.
Leslie White: I mean, it was just, here you go. You guys are all going to die.
Burgess Brown: People were worried about their health and the health of their kids. But they also worried about the reputation of their towns, their property values and the local economy. Who would vacation or buy a home here if it might give you cancer?
The study felt like a death sentence for these communities. But …
Wendy Davis: If people did not hear me say this at the beginning of the meeting, I could not be more sorry that we made an error.
Burgess Brown: ... the study was wrong.
That’s after we come back.
_
‘Yelling fire in a theater’
Burgess Brown: After the Department of Health released its study saying that people around the mine were at higher risk of contracting lung cancer and lung disease, people were furious and concerned.
And then a few weeks later, something extraordinary happened: The department put out a statement admitting they had made a mistake.
Wendy Davis: And one of the things I want to say very clearly tonight is that I sincerely apologize. We very much regret that there was an error in that original report.
Burgess Brown: We’re back in the Eden Elementary school gym and hearing from Dr. Wendy Davis, who was the state’s commissioner of health during all of this.
When her department went back and took another look at its data, it found errors that undermined one of its major conclusions. And it released a statement that, in fact, residents in towns within a 10-mile radius of the mine did not actually face a significantly higher risk of lung cancer than residents in any other part of the state.
Wendy Davis: And we do, from the Department of Health, sincerely apologize for that error.
Burgess Brown: The 250-odd residents packed into the gym are confused and upset and ready to give these officials a piece of their mind.
Burgess Brown: What's your recollection of that? I mean, it's one of the more tense ...
Leslie White: People were f****** pissed, if you want me to tell you.
David Nephew (at meeting): You guys put out these news broadcasts and stuff, and scared the hell out of everybody around here.
Betty Jones: I own 200 acres that abuts the mines. This makes my land worthless.
Matthew Noah: The cost is all these hard working people who, once you let that out, they had no control over their futures as how this place was going to be thought of by people from other places.
Dave Stevenson It's like yelling "fire" in a theater. Is it justified? Yes, when there's a fire. But I don't think you've established that there was a fire.
Betty Jones: What are you going to do about it? Are you going to tell everybody that you made a mistake? (Applause)
Burgess Brown: Even though the health department did admit they had made a mistake about the link to lung cancer in the meeting, there was another finding from the study that they defended — that the community was at a higher risk of dying from asbestosis, another lung disease that can come from inhaling asbestos fibers.
Wendy Davis: I do want to say that despite that error, I remain, and my colleagues at the Health Department remain extremely concerned …
Burgess Brown: The risk assessment was based on three death certificates citing asbestosis as the cause of death. After the meeting in Eden, a group of concerned residents decided it was going to fact check those death certificates.
Leslie White was among them.
Leslie White: And so that's when I personally went to all the towns and looked through all the death certificates.
Burgess Brown: When she learned more about who these people were — where they lived and worked — Leslie was able to link two of the deaths the department cited to occupational exposure — meaning the deceased hadn’t contracted asbestosis from living near the mine, but from working directly with asbestos, one at the mine and another at a shipyard in Florida.
She took those findings and testified before the state Legislature, which then demanded that the Department of Health revise the study.
And ultimately, researchers found that every asbestosis death they had cited in the study could be linked to some kind of occupational exposure.
So, the updated study concluded no increased risk of lung cancer or other lung disease for those living near the mine.
I reached out to the Department of Health, and a spokesperson said they haven’t studied the health effects of the mine in the years since.
Leslie feels like the study they did do, revisions or not, caused lasting reputational damage.
Leslie White: The facts that you're using, and that you're sinking us with, are not true. And you're you're going to sink us. You're going to sink us as a town.
Superfund controversy
Burgess Brown: When it was time to figure out what to do next, there wasn’t a whole lot of trust left.
The DEC and the EPA wanted a full-scale, permanent clean up of the site. They were concerned that the stopgap measures they’d taken to limit the spread of the tailings wouldn’t be enough long-term to keep the environment and local communities safe.
Preliminary estimates put a job like that in the ballpark of $200 million. To cover most of that, environmental regulators pushed to designate the mine as a “Superfund site.”
Superfund is a program run by the EPA that cleans up the nation’s contaminated and hazardous sites: manufacturing plants, landfills and mines.
And it is literally a super fund. A big pot of money partially taken from the parties responsible for creating the hazards in the first place.
But then-Gov. Peter Shumlin said he would only sign off on the designation if there was buy-in from Eden and Lowell.
And you can probably guess how that went. In 2012, three years after that heated meeting in the Eden gym, residents in both towns overwhelmingly voted down the Superfund resolution at Town Meeting.
Between a study that showed no increased health risks to the community, an eye-watering price tag and the stigma that comes along with living next to a superfund site, it was an impossible sell.
John Schmeltzer: I mean, they were very, very forthright with us. And and very direct. But, you know, I think that's okay,
Burgess Brown: Former DEC Commissioner John Schmeltzer again. He was part of the team of state officials pushing the Superfund designation at the time.
But he says he respects the towns’ decision to reject it.
John Schmeltzer: From my perspective, I realized that, you know, this is their, their home. Yes, I have a job to do, and I'm going to do the best I can to advocate what I think needs to be done. But I also respect where they're coming from.
It was a process that I was hoping we would convince people that this is the best way to go. And we lost.
Burgess Brown: Wow, is that how you think of it, that you lost?
John Schmeltzer: Well, I mean, we lost, we lost that part of it, yeah. But, but again, I get back to OK, now, what do we do?
A fragile peace
Burgess Brown: It’s been nearly 20 years since the DEC and EPA dug their trenches and made other upgrades to keep asbestos from leeching into the surrounding environment.
And so far, so good. The state is keeping eyes on the site and working with the property owners, to make sure it stays that way.
They monitor the perimeter of the site and make sure it’s hard to get in since the most dangerous thing that can happen is for the asbestos to be disturbed, according to the Department of Health. And for several years, the EPA monitored air quality near the mine, and they didn’t find significant levels of airborne asbestos leaving the site.
The idea is if they can keep the asbestos in and keep people out, it is safe. So, I should say here: Do not go play on those piles! The community is safe because the piles are undisturbed.
Kasey Kathan, current site manager for the mine, wants it to stay that way.
Kasey Kathan: As long as we keep kind of our the infrastructure, those sub-basins and structures that the EPA put in, and we keep the asbestos on property, we’re protecting public health. Is that a forever solution? I don't know.
Burgess Brown: “Forever solutions” are complicated. Over the last decade proposals have cropped up for ways to make the site useful in some way. Like turning it into a solar farm. But how do you do that without disturbing the piles? It would take a lot of time and money— more than likely, a cleanup at the scale the EPA was pushing for all those years ago.
Kasey Kathan: So I don't know what happens next. I think it's going to take some creative problem solving to change things from where they're at right now. And I don't know that that necessarily means a big pool of Superfund money. But it does … it's a unique site.
Burgess Brown: Are we close?
Leslie White: Oh yeah. So, this is Belvidere mountain. Oh, great. And then you can start to see the …
Burgess Brown: Oh!
Leslie White: So that's the old waste pile …
Leslie and I are driving toward the mine. It’s my first time seeing it in-person.
Leslie White: So then this is where you begin to see …
Burgess Brown: Oh.
Leslie White: The other pile.
Burgess Brown: Between the trees we can see what look like snow-capped mountains.
Burgess Brown: It goes all the way over there, like, I could—yeah, wow, alright.
Burgess Brown: But they’re not mountains, even if now, they seem just as permanent. They’re the remnants of a century of industry. Thirty million tons of tailings. Just looming, quietly, over the houses that are tucked below.
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Credits
Thanks to Morgan Pratt, Ann Fano and Carol Fano for the great questions.
This episode was reported by Burgess Brown. Editing and additional production from the BLS team: Sabine Poux and Josh Crane. Our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Abagael Giles, Matt Kierstead, Gary Lipson, Arti Shuckla, Marjorie Gale and Kyle Casteel.
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