Libby had been a Superfund site since 2002. In 2008, Grace, bankrupt since 2001, agreed to pay $250 million toward the cleanup.
Crews dug up yards and cleaned out attics across town. By 2022, the cleanup had cost taxpayers about $600 million, and parts of Libby were coming off the Superfund list.
By one 2022 estimate, about 500 people in the area had died of asbestos-related disease. A local clinic was still monitoring almost 2,500 more.
Gayla's family was not spared. Her husband, David, who never worked at the mine, died in 2015. Four of her five children got sick. So did she.
Nine of her eleven grandchildren had gone to Plummer School, the one with the skating rink made from mine waste. When she and David were first diagnosed, her granddaughters asked her: "Are we going to die of this, too?"
"I may have been the least-liked person in all of Libby," Gayla said in 2019. "I've made peace with that."
The meter reader who noticed the oxygen tanks had been right all along.
