The criminal trial against W.R. Grace & Company began Monday in Missoula, Montana, and is continuing this week. The company is charged with knowingly exposing workers at its Libby, Montana, vermiculite mine, and residents of the nearby town of Libby to asbestos. The asbestos is found in vermiculite. Exposure to asbestos causes diseases including asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs, and mesothelioma, a deadly cancer.

Hundreds of people in Libby have died as a result of asbestos exposure, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established the town as a Superfund site, undertaking a number of cleanup efforts.

The trial is taking place in U.S. District Court in Missoula before a federal grand jury.

According to The Missoulian, which is offering daily coverage of the trial as well as a web site dedicated to the history of W.R. Grace and Libby, federal prosecutors called their first witnesses yesterday. The news source says U.S. District Judge Don Molloy has ruled that testimony about asbestos releases must be limited to incidents after 1990, when the relevant criminal provision of the Clean Air Act was established, but the same year the Libby operation shut down.

However, the Missoulian says, prosecutors are working to show that even after the mine’s closure, “normal human activity” in the town stirred up asbestos-laden vermiculite that now permeated the town.

On Tuesday there was some dispute about allowing Paul Peronard to testify as a government expert witness against Grace. Peronard was the EPA’s on-site coordinator in 1999, when the asbestos contamination situation in Libby broke into the national news. He coordinated the asbestos remediation in Libby.

However, the Missioulian says, defense objected to qualifying Peronard as an expert witness, saying he didn’t have much experience with asbestos prior to his work in Libby.

Today the judge said he will allow Peronard to testify, but is limiting his testimony and expert opinions to his role in coordinating the Libby cleanup, barring him as an “expert scientist in risk assessment, toxicology or mineralogy,” the Missoulian says.

Federal prosecutors had hoped to use Peronard as a key witness.

Grace and five former company officials are charged with federal conspiracy involving Clean Air Act violations and obstrcution of justice, related to whether or not they knew they were endangering their workers and the community of Libby by mining asbesos-contaning vermiculite, and whether they were violating federal law.

Tags: asbestos, Judge Don Molloy, Libby, mesothelioma, Montana, W.R. Grace & Co.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Events, Legal, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.