The dangers of "willful blindness"

In the Northwest corner of the United States,

right up near the Canadian border,

there's a little town called Libby, Montana,

and it's surrounded by pine trees and lake

and just amazing wildlife

and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.

And in there is a little town, called Libby,

which I visited, which feels kind of lonely,

a little isolated.

And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman

named Gayla Benefield.

She always felt a little bit of an outsider,

although she's been there almost all her life,

a woman of Russian extraction.

She told me when she went to school,

she was the only girl who ever chose

to do mechanical drawing.

Later in life, she got a job going house to house

reading utility meters, gas meters, electricity meters.

And she was doing the work in the middle of the day,

and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was,

in the middle of the day she met a lot of men

who were at home, middle aged, late-middle aged,

and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks,

It struck her as strange.

Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59,

five days before he was due to receive his pension.

He'd been a miner.

She thought he must just have been worn out by the work.

But then a few years later, her mother died,

and that seemed stranger still,

because her mother came from a long line of people

who just seemed to live forever.

In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day,

and learning how to waltz.

It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother

should die so young.

It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies.

And as she did, other ones came to mind.

She remembered, for example,

when her mother had broken a leg and went into hospital,

and she had a lot of x-rays,

and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense,

but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't.

She puzzled and puzzled over every piece

of her life and her parents' life,

trying to understand what she was seeing.

She thought about her town.

The town had a vermiculite mine in it.

Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners,

to make plants grow faster and better.

Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts,

huge amounts of it put under the roof

to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters.

Vermiculite was in the playground.

It was in the football ground.

It was in the skating rink.

What she didn't learn until she started working this problem

is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.

When she figured out the puzzle,

she started telling everyone she could

what had happened, what had been done to her parents

and to the people she saw on oxygen tanks

at home in the afternoons.

But she was really amazed.

She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something,

but actually nobody wanted to know.

In fact, she became so annoying