MISSOULA – A former environmental engineer for W.R. Grace & Co. says he collected asbestos-tainted air samples at Libby’s high school track by running laps for half an hour while wearing a monitoring device.
Randy Geiger testified Monday in the Grace environmental crimes trial in Missoula. The Missoulian newspaper reported his testimony on its Web site.
Geiger told jurors he enlisted the help of his wife to assist with the impromptu sampling project, which he undertook because Grace had donated waste from its Libby vermiculite mine for the base layer of the running track.
“I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with a method,” Geiger said. “I can remember putting on my track shoes from my high school days and going out. I was in front and my wife was behind me and I tried to kick up a little dust.”
Geiger said he ran for half an hour while wearing the air pump around his “breathing zone.”
The engineer then submitted the results to a lab, where researchers discovered high concentrations of harmful asbestos fibers. Based on those results, Grace supervisors asked Geiger to assess the cost of removing the asbestos or replacing the track, which was ultimately paved over with blacktop in 1981.
The Columbia, Md.-based chemical and building materials company and five former company executives are charged with a federal conspiracy involving Clean Air Act violations and obstruction of justice.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy told jurors not to consider Geiger’s testimony as proof of an asbestos release, or as proof of whether the release caused endangerment. Because the Clean Air Act’s criminal provision did not exist prior to 1990, Molloy said the evidence could only speak to whether or not Grace lied about the extent of its knowledge about the asbestos hazards in Libby.
The prosecution’s argument is that those misrepresentations, which were made during the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund investigation, are evidence of criminal obstruction.