LIBBY - Michael Otte woke last week to a darkening world.

"It just kept getting worse," he said. By afternoon, much of his property was lost in a deepening gloom.

"I have a barn about 200 yards away," he said, "and I couldn't see it."

Otte lives not far outside Libby, and he couldn't see his barn because a thick pall of smoke - plumes rising from loggers' slash fires - had settled on the valley.

Down in town, where inversions are notorious for trapping bad air, residents were being asked to snuff out their woodstoves.

"And up in the woods," Otte said, "Plum Creek was burning thousands and thousands of cords of wood, all at once."

Asking people to put out their heating stoves while the slash fires burned, Otte said, was akin to asking a fellow to put out his cigarette amid a raging forest fire.

"It just doesn't make sense," he said, "especially in a place where so many people have lung disease."

Libby, home to a now-defunct vermiculite mine that also unearthed asbestos fibers, is a federal Superfund site, home to hundreds with asbestos-related lung disease. If for no other reason, Otte said, regulators and those doing the burning should take particular care to make conservative decisions here.

And generally, they do.

"We have a pretty good system," said Kendra Lind, at Lincoln County's environmental health offices. "Most of the time it works quite well."

The system, though, involves a hierarchal patchwork of jurisdictions - local, state and federal - all working together to manage the town's airshed. It is, by all accounts, no easy task.

"We have pretty poor ventilation in this area," said Eric Leigh, an environmental technician with the county. "The particulates tend to accumulate in Libby."

And so county officials have created an air-quality zone, in which they have the authority, for example, to ask people to snuff out their stoves.

Otte, unfortunately, lives just beyond that zone. At his place, south of town, burning decisions are made by state and federal officials, who are often located far from the Libby area. It was those officials, Lind said, who authorized last week's slash fires.

Usually, she said, they do a pretty good job of assessing regional air quality and forecasting smoke effects. But, as with all meteorologists, sometimes they miscalculate.

"It happens to all of us," she said. But it's more complicated when it happens in Libby.

Libby comes with lots of air quality rules. You can only burn a wood stove certified by the Environmental Protection Agency, and particulate levels are carefully monitored.

If they get too high, county officials can mandate that all fires be squelched, including those in residential wood stoves. More often, they ask people to voluntarily find an alternative heat source.

That's that they did last week, when particulate levels approached critical thresholds.

But even as residents flipped on electric heaters, Plum Creek Timber Co. crews were sparking up huge burns, not far beyond the air quality zone borders.

Company representatives did not comment on the fires, but Leigh said "we certainly think it had a negative effect on our air quality."

At Otte's place, "I was in the thick of it."

In the past, Lind said, county officials have expanded the air quality district, to try to gain more control over outlying fires. And although there is no formal attempt to do so again, the possibility is not off the table.

"If that's what people want," she said, "then there are avenues to make that happen."

Otte, for one, thinks the zone should be broadened, "because right now we have two classes of citizens. We have people who are guaranteed clean air, and people who are not. Why can Plum Creek burn like that when locals can't even use their woodstoves? Why am I not subject to equal air quality protections? This selective enforcement doesn't work."

Leigh said that more local control might help to eliminate events such as the one that darkened Otte's world, because local control would, presumably, be more finely attuned to Libby's unique air patterns.

Whether the public will demand that, however, remains as hazy as Otte's barn. After all, the smoke has passed, Lind said, "and today we've had blue skies all afternoon."

Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at (406) 862-0324 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.