Trial starts up against BNSF Railway over asbestos cases

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HELENA, Mont. — Jury selection began Monday in a lawsuit against Warren Buffett’s BNSF Railway over the lung cancer deaths of two people who lived in a small Montana town near the U.S.-Canada border where thousands of people were exposed to asbestos from a vermiculite mine.

For decades, the W.R. Grace & Co. mine near Libby produced the contaminated vermiculite that exposed residents to asbestos, sickening thousands and leading to the deaths of hundreds.
The estates of Thomas Wells of La Conner, Oregon, and Joyce Walder of Westminster, California, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in 2021, arguing that BNSF and its corporate predecessors stored asbestos-laden vermiculite in a large rail yard in town before shipping it to plants where it was heated to expand it for use as insulation.

The railroad failed to contain the dust from the vermiculite, allowing it — and the asbestos it contained — to be blown around town without warning residents about its dangers, the lawsuit states. People who lived and worked in Libby breathed in the microscopic needle-shaped asbestos fibers that can cause the lung cancer mesothelioma or lung scarring called asbestosis, the lawsuit argues.

BNSF is expected to argue that there’s no proof Wells and Walder were exposed to asbestos levels above federal limits, that if they were in the rail yard they were trespassing and that Wells’ and Walder’s medical conditions were not caused by BNSF.