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On September 17th, 1954, Gayla Benefield turned 11 years old, in addition to her birthday, her family celebrated her father's new job working in the local vermiculite mine. It promised to be a lucrative opportunity. He even joked that he'd gotten the position as a present for Gaila.

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Nine years later, a chemical production company called W.R. Grace and Company purchased the mine production of vermiculite immediately increased, creating even more jobs for the residents of Libby, Montana.

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But as the town rejoiced in their newfound prosperity, a thin layer of asbestos containing dust blanketed their homes.

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By 1996, Libby Montana had become a ghost town. Lung diseases caused by exposure to the asbestos claimed the lives of many residents, including gateless father. Now it was about to kill her mother.

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DLO watched as the woman who raised her coughed, wheezed and struggled to breathe. As death loomed, Gulas mother pulled her close, looked her in the eyes and asked her daughter for a favor.

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She said, Gaila, I want you to promise me one thing. I want you to promise me that you will get them. You'll get the people who did this to me.

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Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify original from past every Monday and Wednesday, we dig into the complicated stories behind the world's most controversial events and search for the truth. Carter Roy. And I'm Molly Brandenberg. And neither of us are conspiracy theorists, but we are open minded, skeptical and curious. Don't get us wrong. Sometimes the official version is the truth, but sometimes it's not.

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You can find episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Park asked for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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This is our second episode on Asbestos Fibres Mineral that was once popular for its heat resistant and insulating properties.

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Last time we detailed the rise and apparent fall of the asbestos industry and how asbestos exposure impacted the health of millions of people around the world. With so many people affected, there are countless conspiracies about asbestos. Today, we're going to touch on the three most official theories in chronological order because they may or may not be connected.

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Conspiracy theory number one. The asbestos industry illegally kept employees health records from them, pay doctors and laboratories to conceal damning research and knowingly misinformed the public about the dangers of the mineral conspiracy theory. Number two, after the dangers of asbestos came to light, regulations and bans were intentionally overturned by the United States government to benefit major asbestos manufacturers.

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And conspiracy theory number three. To this day, asbestos continues to impact the health of the global population. But the extent of the ongoing damage is overlooked, buried or concealed by state and federal powers to save face. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. Humans have used asbestos as a building material for centuries, records indicate as early as 300 BCE, but demand for the fibrous minerals surged in America at the beginning of the 20th century as new techniques were developed to incorporate it into more products.

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Capitalizing on its heat and water resistant properties, manufacturers wove asbestos into household items. The United States Navy even sprayed it onto their ships. But as production increased to meet demand, so did the number of health problems and deaths in factories and towns where asbestos was produced.

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Mounting evidence showed a connection between the mineral and lung related diseases.

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Doctors even coined the term asbestosis to refer to an illness common among laborers.

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Still, perception of asbestos in America remained largely positive until 1964, when Dr. Irving silico presented research at a medical conference in New York conclusively linking asbestos exposure to cancer and other fatal diseases.

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But our first conspiracy theory suggests that major asbestos corporations might have known about these dangers.

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Long before 1964, they covered up the truth about its risks and gambled with their employees lives so they could continue to turn a profit. On December 10th, 1966, two years after silico published his research, Texas attorney Warde Stevenson filed a lawsuit effectively stating as much Stephensen represented Clode Tom play, a man who had worked as an insulator for over 20 years for the entirety of his career. Tom DeLay applied asbestos products to steam pipes, boilers, turbines and more.

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Now he was dying of asbestosis. Rather than bring charges against one company, Tom DeLay and Stevenson boldly sued 11 different manufacturers of asbestos containing products. The lawsuit claimed these corporations had knowingly created deadly goods and failed to warn anyone. Armed with research, Stevenson detailed to the court how Tom DeLay's exposure to the defendant's products had caused his terminal illness on the stand, Tom DeLay delivered testimony about living with the asbestosis, how it felt like a thousand needles pierced his lungs every time he coughed.

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The defense's argument was unsurprising. They claim they had no idea of the health risks of asbestos until Dr. Cilacap published his research in 1964.

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Therefore, they were not liable for prior health issues. In the end, the court ruled in favor of the asbestos corporations.

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But for Stephensen, the fight wasn't over. Three years later, he returned to court representing one of Tom DeLay's co-workers, Clarence Burrell. After installing insulation for years, doctors had diagnosed Parul with mesothelioma, a lung cancer predominantly caused by exposure to asbestos at 57 years old.

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Burrell didn't know how much longer he could expect to live. He was so sick that he delivered his pretrial deposition from his bed. Describing his initial reaction to the dust and insulation products, Birrell's said he thought it was bothersome he'd had a hard time removing layers of filth from his work clothes and had to use water to clear the compacted dust from his nostrils. He'd suspected that the dust wasn't good for him, but at the time he had no idea that it was killing him.

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Nobody told him. When asked if he knew that the insulation he worked with contained asbestos, he replied, Yes, but I didn't know what asbestos was. Clarence Warrell died shortly after his deposition. Burrell's family continued to press charges when a district trial began, the defense's story hadn't changed. They didn't know about the dangers of asbestos until 1964. Therefore, they weren't liable.

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But in the three years since his last case, Stephenson had found new evidence. He presented more than 50 different reports about the risks of asbestos, many of which were published before 1940. Twenty four years before Dr. Zelikow's conference in New York. If asbestos was such an integral part of the defendant's business, it seemed likely that they had known more than they let on in 1971.

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A Texas jury found the asbestos manufacturers guilty of creating unreasonably hazardous products without proper warnings. But celebration was short lived for Stevenson and liberals. The asbestos companies almost immediately appealed the verdict.

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This posed a problem for Stevenson, although nobody suspected it. From his appearances in court, the attorney had been battling a cancer of his own. And as the appeal process wore on, he grew weaker by the day on September 7th, 1973.

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He passed away three days after his death, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury's original verdict. Burrell and Stevenson posthumously won the first lawsuit against manufacturers of asbestos containing products in the United States, though neither survived to see the conclusion.

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Clarence Burrell and Ward Stevenson inspired thousands of others to speak out.

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American courts became flooded with successful litigation against asbestos manufacturers, but not one lawsuit proved that the asbestos industry had covered up the health risks associated with the toxic mineral court's delivered their ruling based on overwhelming evidence that showed they should have known or that they likely knew.

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Nobody found a paper trail to definitively confirm that asbestos manufacturers hid the dangers of asbestos from the public until 1977. As we mentioned in the last episode in the 1930s, two different asbestos corporations, Ray Business, Manhattan and Johns Manville, hired a research company called Saranac Laboratories. They wanted Saranac to study asbestos effects on animals. The results of those studies were never made public.

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In 1977, attorney Carl Ashe represented one hundred and sixty three former employees of Ray Bestest Manhattan in a three hundred and twenty six million dollar damage suit against the company. During the trial preparations, the Ray bestest Manhattan CEO, William Simpson, gave a deposition detailing the partnership between Saranac and Sumner Simpson, the company's founder, and Williams father.

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Ash asked William about the whereabouts of Clarinex results, expecting a vague, noncommittal answer he could hardly believe when William replied, saying that they were kept in a closet in his Connecticut office.

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Eventually, officials procured the documents from Simpson's office. They were filed under the name Dust, now known as the Sumners Simpson papers. They included memos, letters, meeting notes and correspondences that contained conclusive proof that asbestos manufacturers had participated in a cover up deeper than anyone had ever anticipated.

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Documentation showed in 1932, 32 years before Dr. Cilacap published his report, Re Bestest Manhattan and Johns Manville persuaded researchers from metropolitan life to minimize the dangerous effects of asbestos. They removed any mention of the fatal effects of asbestos from the report.

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In 1947, Ray Bestest Manhattan, Johns Manville and several other companies learned that asbestos could cause cancer. They didn't release the information to the public because they claimed the research was objectionable. In a letter addressed to a Johns Manville attorney, Sumner Simpson wrote, I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.

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And the companies didn't just conceal the truth about asbestos, they also buried information about their employees existing health problems. Johns Manville refused their workers access to the X-rays researchers had taken of their lungs.

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The greed and corruption were self-evident, but in many ways, the Sumners Simpson papers woke up Americans who otherwise assumed their employers weren't capable of prioritizing profit over their lives. As of this recording, over 600000 asbestos related lawsuits have been filed in America to hold corporations responsible for their actions. Many more are expected. This is the rare case on this show where the conspiracy theory isn't really a theory, it's the truth today. It's only considered a conspiracy theory, insomuch as some people don't want to believe it's true or others have forgotten.

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But the burden of proof has been met. This theory, it's a ten out of ten.

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I agree.

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It's not every day we can say that asbestos manufacturing companies knew about the dangers of their products, hid the truth from the world and let their workers die so their businesses could succeed.

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And that's just private corporations. We've yet to discuss the United States government. Coming up, the United States government's role in asbestos regulation. Listeners, do I have a mystifying new show for you, it's called Superstitions, and it explores the varying beliefs people around the world fear and follow. It's so eerie. I know you'll love it. Every Wednesday, step inside stories that illustrate the horror, weirdness and truth behind humanity's strangest codes of conduct. Why shouldn't you say Macbeth in a theater?

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What evil gets triggered when you walk under an open letter?

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And how come certain films seem cursed and others don't? Each new episode of Superstitions presents a story that unlocks the mysteries of unorthodox traditions and surreal phenomena.

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They may seem cryptic or illogical or completely insane, but then again, do they follow the Spotify original from perkiest superstitions free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts?

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Now back to the story. In 1977, company files from Ray Busters Manhattan were made public, now known as the Sumners Simpson papers. They proved that asbestos conglomerates had known that exposure to their products could be fatal for decades, and they concealed the information from the public. But by the time the public learned about the Sumners Simpson papers, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, had already made strides towards establishing proper asbestos regulation in America. They banned spray applied asbestos containing material for fireproofing or insulating purposes, as well as all pipe and block installation that contained asbestos.

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They also trained individuals to remove asbestos from buildings or how to seal the fibers in place so they wouldn't become airborne.

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In addition, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, set workplace limits for how much time employees could be exposed to asbestos products. And they established a limit for what was considered an acceptable amount of asbestos in the air.

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Then the EPA launched an ambitious 10 year study on asbestos. This fact finding mission had three primary goals to learn how much asbestos was circulating in the United States to find out what working conditions were like in the industry, and to continue monitoring the toxic minerals impact on public health.

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After compiling a decade's worth of damning information, the EPA released the results of their study in 1989. Essentially, they found that no amount of asbestos was considered safe.

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They used their research to finally pass legislation that banned asbestos in almost every product in the United States for so many Americans who had needlessly lost loved ones. It seemed like a necessary regulatory measures were finally being put in place.

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But two years later, in 1991, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals suddenly overturned the EPA's phaseout and ban, the official ruling was that the EPA had not presented sufficient evidence to justify banning all commercial uses of asbestos.

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But our second conspiracy theories suggest that maybe even after the summer, Simpson papers came to light. Members of the state and federal government fought against health and safety regulations on behalf of major asbestos corporations.

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Now part of the EPA's ban was still upheld. This prevented manufacturers from creating new asbestos products. But the appeal meant that more than 3000 existing products could continue to freely circulate in the market. Two years after the most comprehensive and well-funded asbestos study to date, a federal court still ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to ban production of a cancer causing mineral. But why?

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To understand the answer to that question, let's jump back in time to discuss a man named Peter Grace.

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In 1945, Grace became the CEO of W.R. Grace and Company, his grandfather's specialty chemical company, under Grace's leadership. The company sold more than 16 million tons of vermiculite like asbestos.

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Vermiculite is fireproof and lightweight in its purest form. It's safe, however. Asbestos fibres often grow on vermiculite or in are released when mined. And yet vermiculite mine still managed to evade much of the bad press associated with asbestos.

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By the 1970s, W.R. Grace and Co. had grown into one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, and its young CEO, Peter Grace, soon found himself in political circles in time.

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Grace sat on President Eisenhower's international advisory board, as well as President Kennedy's Commerce Committee for Alliance in Progress. He even took on a leadership role in a group called the Knights of Malta. Though not political in its mission, this elite Catholic organization had a long roster of politicians and CIA members past and present. Using his wealth and influence, Grace launched major lobbying efforts in the early 1970s to soften regulations on asbestos.

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He wanted to ensure that he could continue selling his products.

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For example, his most controversial product, an extremely successful spray on insulation called Monocoque that contained 12 percent asbestos. His lobbyists even managed to create a loophole that stated any product with less than one percent of asbestos would be exempt from EPA or OSHA regulations.

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This threshold, which ignored health experts, became known as the Grace Rule. By the 1980s, after the Sumners Simpson papers were made public, W.R. Grace was still generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenues.

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Fighting asbestos regulation became even easier when President Reagan put Grace in charge of a task force to minimize government spending. He ultimately recommended 2500 ways to trim the federal spending. Naturally, many of those recommendations included cuts for environmental and occupational safety regulations.

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By 1989, when the EPA passed their ban on asbestos in almost every product in the United States, they did so in spite of the lobbying efforts of men like Peter Grace.

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And though we can't say for certain that men like Peter Grace were directly responsible for the ban being overturned just two years later, it's difficult to turn a blind eye to the power and greed of special interest groups. The asbestos industry didn't stop their efforts in 1991, the push to keep the cancer causing mineral on the market continued well into the early 2000s.

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In 2002, Senator Patty Murray from the state of Washington proposed a bill that would create a total ban on the importation, manufacturing, processing and distribution of all asbestos products.

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While writing the bill, Murray was presented with an entirely new problem. Many Americans didn't realize that asbestos was still legal. So she worked with the EPA and OSHA to educate her colleagues.

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In 2007, the bill passed in the Senate, but it came to a halt in the House of Representatives. And some theorists suspect this was because of a particularly influential politician, the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, four years prior to stepping into the White House.

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Cheney served as the CEO of Halliburton, an energy company who dealt primarily in oil, as is standard protocol. He distanced himself from the company while serving as vice president to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

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Though Halliburton never manufactured asbestos, three of their acquisitions did. By the early 2000s, Halliburton was at least tangentially involved in almost 500000 asbestos claims, in part due to the costs incurred. They filed for bankruptcy in 2003, shortly after their asbestos costs were estimated to be more than three billion dollars, which is to say that Halliburton had more than enough motivation to want to stop Senator Murray's proposed ban. We can't say that Dick Cheney used his influence to stop the bill from passing, but we can say that Halliburton gave at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to members of Congress around the same time.

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Whatever the case, there's enough evidence to suggest that members of the government acted out of self-interest to squash potentially life saving regulations on asbestos, but it wasn't a shadowy government conspiracy. Lobbying is considered a legal and recognized way for organizations to influence law. Were ethical lines blurred? Maybe. Did any politicians break the law? It's impossible to say for sure, all things considered, and give her second conspiracy theory. A six out of 10 I don't know.

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The United States government continue to protect the bank accounts of the corporations that knowingly killed American citizens. Legal or not, it was a failure, even if it was technically done, quote, above board.

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I'm going to give this theory an eight out of 10. And after all, lobbying efforts are part of the reason people are still dying from asbestos today.

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Coming up, the town of Libby, Montana, is left to die. Now back to the story.

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By 1989, medical experts concluded that no amount of asbestos in the air was considered safe. But despite a few victories, the EPA, OSHA and the United States government struggled to regulate asbestos production in the 80s, 90s and into the 2000s.

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Today, some suspect that state and federal powers are still intentionally overlooking the ongoing damage of asbestos.

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Their suspicion is our third and final conspiracy theory. But to fully explore it, we have to once again travel back in time.

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In the 1920s, Libby, Montana, became a mining center for vermiculite, which is used in building insulation and as a soil conditioner, as we mentioned earlier, in its purest form, vermiculite is perfectly safe and the vermiculite industry made the small rural Libby thrive.

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In 1963, W.R. Grace and Co., the company owned by Peter Grace, who we discussed earlier, purchased the Libby mine and expanded it. In time, the mine produced 80 percent of the world's supply of vermiculite.

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This success came at a cost. Threated among the harmless vermiculite was a type of asbestos called tremolite. As production increased and dust containing millions of razor-sharp asbestos fibres floated through the town. W.R. Grace never told its workers or their families that vermiculite contained asbestos. So for the most part, the dust didn't bother anyone. It became part of everyday life.

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In March 1979, members of an organization called National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health traveled to Libbey to inspect the mines working conditions. Employees of W.R. Grace assume this was just a routine inspection.

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One of the inspectors struck up a conversation with a miner named Bob Wilkins. During their talk, Wilkins made an offhanded remark about how glad he was that there was no asbestos in Libby, only tremolite. After a long pause, the inspector went to his truck to locate a book, he returned with it in hand and opened it to show Wilkins a page. It read, Tremolite is the most dangerous form of asbestos. After the inspection, medical experts and scientists flew into Libby to examine the town's residents in the 1980s.

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The EPA arrived in Libby, but achieved little to nothing. Then, one month after President Reagan took office, the EPA was told to stop research on the dangers of vermiculite in Libby in 1982. The EPA drafted a report about contaminated vermiculite, but the final version was never released. When asked for this document later, the EPA couldn't locate it. It had gone missing.

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As a result, the mines in Libby remained open and running. The miners continued to work in their minds. The experts didn't deem the mine worthy of closing, so it must be safe. One worker said had we known the truth, none of us would have worked there.

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W.R. Grace closed the mine in 1990, partly because the partial ban of 1989 made vermiculite less profitable. But residents of Libby, Montana, continued to get sick as the death toll climbed.

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W.R. Grace vowed to help the EPA clean contaminated areas and pay the medical expenses of those suffering from asbestos related issues.

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In addition, they agreed to donate 250000 dollars to Libby's health care center every year, though a quarter of a million dollars may sound like a lot.

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That no shakes out to about half the average cost of someone diagnosed with an asbestos related disease.

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Few people understood the cost of asbestos better than Gayla Benefield. Gaila was a lifelong resident of Libby. By 1999 nine, she had lost both of her parents to asbestos related diseases, as well as many more family members, friends and neighbors.

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In addition, both she and her husband suffered from poor lung health, as did four of her five children.

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One day, while drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, Gaila had a thought W.R. Grace had lied for decades about the asbestos. Why were they trusted to clean up the mine that they closed nine years ago?

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Possessed by a wave of anger, Gaila jumped in her car when she arrived at the old mine. She found the area untouched. Piles of abandoned minerals, including asbestos, sat out in the open, waiting to be blown away in the wind. W.R. Grace negligence was still killing the people of Libby.

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Outraged, Gaila called state inspectors and health regulators after weeks of being dismissed. She turned to reporters and journalists eventually. Over the course of years, her persistence caused Montana state officials to call in the EPA once again. When they arrived, the EPA found that the town still contained dangerously high levels of asbestos. A preliminary medical exam showed that 30 percent of residents tested had abnormal lungs. The office of the inspector general investigated the EPA's initial involvement in the mines in Libby to see what caused the oversight.

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The report concluded that miscommunications, procedural errors and a lack of funds were at fault for the town slipping through the cracks.

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But an anonymous source who worked in the EPA at that time later came forward to journalist Michael Borkur with a different story.

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He believed the real source of Libby's struggle was a friendship between President Reagan and Peter Grace, the CEO of W.R. Grace.

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If the EPA's work in the 1980s hadn't been cut short by the Reagan administration, countless lives could have been saved. It all could have been avoided. But the ongoing impact of asbestos in Libby, Montana, paled in comparison to an event that occurred just two years later in lower Manhattan. On September 11th, 2001, two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, killing almost 3000 unsuspecting victims after such an immense tragedy. Asbestos wasn't at the forefront of many people's minds, but the North Tower had been built with insulation that contained the toxic mineral hidden within the ash and dust that plumed over the financial district, where countless needle sharp fibres, thousands of tons of crushed asbestos in the EPA's response to 9/11 confuses experts.

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To this day, as the dust cloud lingered in Manhattan, the EPA declared the air quality was safe just days after the attack. New Yorkers began moving back into their homes from evacuation zones in Staten Island and New Jersey. And there's evidence to suggest that they shouldn't have. It's a bit complicated, but the EPA field investigators used a method called polarised light microscopy, or PLM, to sample dust and soil after 9/11. However, this method has been phased out of emergency asbestos testing, transmission, electron microscopy, or TVM, was far more advanced and accurate for reasons that aren't clear and still baffle asbestos experts.

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The responding EPA branch in New York chose to use PLM despite having the resources for TVM.

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So two scientists at a private Virginia based firm decided to run their own tests when they use TPM to sample the air. They found that the air contained elevated levels of asbestos far above the EPA safety threshold in the majority of their samples.

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These scientists shared their results on the American Industrial Hygiene Association's website, thinking they were doing the right thing. But within a few hours of posting, their report had vanished. The next day, the two men received orders. They were no longer allowed to work at Ground Zero.

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The scientists found out later who erased their study from the Internet. W.R. Grace and Co., the very same company that owned the mine in Libby, Montana.

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We mentioned their product monikered earlier, a fireproofing spray.

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Well, it had been used in at least 40 floors of the north tower and they couldn't afford any more lawsuits.

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The EPA's actions following 9/11 drew criticisms from many experts, a former chief investigator for the EPA went on CNN to make a statement. He believed the agency had purposefully used incorrect techniques to conceal the severity of the situation.

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Whether that's true or not, we know that the EPA's misrepresentation of asbestos levels in the air wasn't just negligence. They chose outdated testing methods and they ignored help. Could it have been at the behest of asbestos corporations?

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Nobody really knows. In 2004, the World Health Organization reported that asbestos related illnesses killed approximately 170000 people worldwide.

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In 2009, the EPA declared a public health emergency in Libby, Montana.

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Today, over thirty nine thousand American lives are lost every year due to asbestos related disease. This number includes those who worked in asbestos factories several decades ago and are just now falling ill.

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As of this recording, approximately 125 million people are currently being exposed to asbestos through aspects of their job.

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But are government officials continuing to cover up these realities to help major corporations? If we were to draw conclusions from the tragedies on September 11th, 2001 in New York and the events in Libby, Montana alone, I'd be more convinced. But progress has been made.

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In 2013, the EPA passed something called these significant new use rule. This prohibited companies from bringing back old asbestos products without EPA inspection. These recent victories close many of the loopholes previously used by the asbestos industry. Yes, W.R. Grace used its weight and wealth to protect itself and its product, given new health regulations. I'd like to think that the EPA's past errors truly were a result of being understaffed and underfunded. I give this theory a seven out of 10.

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I am inclined to rate this theory higher, but I hope you're right and I hope it doesn't take another tragedy to learn whether or not the United States government has decided to put the profits of corporations before the health of its citizens. Thanks for tuning into conspiracy theories, we will be back next week with a new episode, you can find all episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from our guest for free on Spotify.

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Until then, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.

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Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify original from podcast. It is executive produced by Max Cutler Sound Design by Scott Stronach with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Travis Clark. This episode of Conspiracy Theories was written by Kit Fitzgerald with writing assistance by Nick Swart and Connor Samson, fact checking by McAloon and research by Brad Kline and Brian Peatross. Conspiracy theory stars Molly Brandenberg and Carter Roy. Bad omens, good fortune, pure luck. Take a closer look at what you believe in and follow the Spotify original from Past Superstitions, new episodes, Air Weekly every Wednesday.

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Listen free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.