Asbestos victims in Montana want Buffett's railroad company held responsible
small Montana town near the U.S.-Canada border where thousands of people were exposed to toxic asbestos dust. The railroad — now owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. — hauled asbestos-tainted vermiculite from a nearby mine through Libby, Montana, over decades.
How much BNSF knew about the health hazard from those shipments is it at the center of a weekslong civil trial that began Monday. Attorneys for the railroad said it was told repeatedly that the product it was shipping through Libby was safe. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 declared the first-ever public health emergency during a Superfund cleanup in Libby. It’s one of the deadliest sites under the federal pollution program. The W.R.
Grace & Co. mine that operated most of last century on a mountaintop outside Libby produced contaminated vermiculite that health officials say has sickened more than 3,000 people and led to several hundred deaths. The pollution has been largely cleaned up.
Yet the long latency period of asbestos diseases has meant people have continued getting sick with lung problems. The estates of Thomas Wells of LaConner, Oregon, and Joyce Walder of Westminster, California, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against BNSF in 2021. They argue the railroad and its corporate predecessors stored asbestos-laden vermiculite in a large rail yard in Libby — before shipping it to plants across the U.S.
where it was heated to expand for use as insulation in millions of homes and businesses. Plaintiffs' attorney Mark Lanier said the dangers of asbestos were well known by the industry yet BNSF never took steps to warn the people of Libby. He added that W.R.
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