They Tore It Down, Left the Asbestos, and Walked Away

What It Means to Live Next to 812 Tons of Asbestos

Burley, Idaho is a small agricultural city of roughly 10,000 people in the southern part of the state. Overland Avenue runs through downtown. When the buildings at Lots 26 and 27 burned in January 2018, the fire was the kind of thing that gets covered in the local paper, neighbors talk about it, kids walk past the lot on the way to school.

What those neighbors did not know is that the charred wreckage contained asbestos-containing materials. They did not know this because nobody told them. The demolition contractor moved in on February 17, 2018, tore the buildings down without any asbestos survey or abatement protocol, and left the rubble sitting in a pile. Some of it went to a local gravel pit. The rest stayed right there, in the open air, downtown.

Asbestos fibers are invisible. They do not smell. You cannot taste them or feel them in your lungs in real time. That is the cruelest part of the exposure risk: the people who walked past that lot, who breathed the air near that debris pile, had no way to know they were being exposed to a substance that causes mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis. These are diseases with latency periods measured in decades. Someone exposed in February 2018 may not receive a diagnosis until 2040 or later.

The EPA received its first complaint about potential asbestos on February 20, 2018, just three days after the demolition. For the next six months, the agency communicated with Tibbets and Pilling, asking them to manage the site properly, clean it up, make it safe. Neither of them did. The debris sat. By August, when EPA inspectors showed up unannounced and found the site still presenting an imminent threat to human health, the window for preventing exposure had been open for half a year.

The people who lived and worked near that lot during those six months did not get a warning notice. They did not get a health screening. They did not get a phone call from Diconia LLC or Brek Pilling or Brian Tibbets. What they got was an open pile of hazardous demolition waste in the middle of their downtown, managed by no one, controlled by no one, for 180 days.

Straight From the Complaint: What the Government Documented

The following passages are taken verbatim from the verified federal complaint filed January 7, 2025, sworn to under penalty of perjury by EPA On-Scene Coordinator Stephen Ball.

“On August 10, 2018, EPA did an unannounced Site visit and determined that the Site conditions presented an imminent threat to human health and an emergency removal action under CERCLA was necessary.” United States v. Diconia LLC et al., Case 4:25-cv-00007-AKB, Para. 22

• This establishes that six months after the demolition, the site had received no meaningful remediation and still met the legal threshold for an imminent public health emergency. “Imminent threat” under CERCLA is not a vague characterization; it is a specific legal determination that triggered federal emergency authority.
• The unannounced nature of the visit matters. It means that whatever Tibbets and Pilling had been reporting or representing to regulators during those six months did not match the conditions on the ground when inspectors arrived without warning.

“Pilling was an organizer of, and the registered agent for, Curb A Peal. He had an ownership stake in Curb A Peal through an investment company he managed, and was listed as an authorized signer and ‘key executive with control of the company’ on Curb A Peal’s bank account paperwork.” United States v. Diconia LLC et al., Case 4:25-cv-00007-AKB, Para. 13

• This quote is the structural core of the government’s case against Pilling as a personal defendant. The argument is that Pilling did not simply hire a demolition contractor; he effectively directed demolition work through an entity he organized, owned a stake in, and controlled financially.
• When Diconia paid Curb A Peal $20,000 for the demolition, and Pilling signed that check, money flowed from a company he was operating to a company he was organizing. That arrangement is what the government argues makes him an operator of the site at the time hazardous substances were disposed of, which triggers strict personal liability under CERCLA.

“The removal action involved loading, wrapping and transporting approximately 812 tons of ACM debris off-site to an authorized disposal facility, as well as debris wetting and stabilization, debris pile management and materials sorting, decontamination and asbestos abatement on adjacent buildings and walls, and air sampling and monitoring.” United States v. Diconia LLC et al., Case 4:25-cv-00007-AKB, Para. 23

• This itemization describes the scale of the remediation that the defendants should have performed themselves. The debris had spread beyond the lot itself: adjacent buildings and walls required decontamination. The contamination had migrated.
• The phrase “authorized disposal facility” is doing heavy lifting. The original contractor, Curb A Peal, had hauled some debris to a local gravel pit. That is not an authorized disposal facility for asbestos-containing materials. The government had to go retrieve and properly dispose of that material too.

“Liability under Section 107(a) of CERCLA, 42 U.S.C. § 9607(a), is strict and joint and several.” United States v. Diconia LLC et al., Case 4:25-cv-00007-AKB, Para. 29

• Strict liability means the defendants cannot argue that they did not intend to cause harm. Under CERCLA, intent is irrelevant. If you owned or operated the facility when hazardous substances were disposed of, you are liable. Period.
• Joint and several liability means the government can pursue any one of the three defendants for the full amount. Tibbets, Pilling, and Diconia LLC each owe the entire $863,862, not just their proportionate share. If one cannot pay, the others cover it.

The Gap Between What the Law Requires and What Anyone Enforced in Time

This case did not happen in a regulatory vacuum. Federal rules governing asbestos demolition are specific and well-established, yet those rules did not stop 812 tons of ACM debris from sitting in a downtown Idaho lot for six months.

• The National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) for asbestos, found at 40 C.F.R. § 61 Subpart M, requires building owners and demolition contractors to conduct an asbestos survey before any demolition and to hire licensed abatement professionals before any demolition of ACM-containing structures. The complaint confirms the debris “contained asbestos-containing materials (ACM) as defined in EPA regulations at 40 C.F.R. § 61.141,” establishing that those rules applied. There is no indication in the complaint that any pre-demolition survey was conducted.
• CERCLA’s enforcement mechanism is cost recovery, not prior restraint. The law is designed to make polluters pay after the fact, not to physically stop them beforehand. That gap is structural: EPA can issue administrative orders and seek injunctions, but doing so quickly enough to prevent a harm that takes place in a single day of demolition work is practically very difficult. By the time the agency received its first complaint on February 20, the demolition had already happened three days earlier.
• The complaint notes that EPA spent March through August 2018 attempting to work with Tibbets and Diconia to perform the removal action voluntarily. That approach, consistent with how CERCLA enforcement typically proceeds, gave the responsible parties five months to act before EPA escalated. During that window, the asbestos debris remained accessible to the public.
• The gravel pit contamination illustrates a secondary enforcement gap. When Curb A Peal hauled some of the debris to a local gravel pit, that material crossed a property boundary and entered a new location outside EPA’s immediate oversight. The complaint confirms EPA had to collect samples from the gravel pit and ultimately address that contamination as part of the removal action. Tracking where demolition debris goes after an unpermitted demolition requires resources and legal authority that local authorities may not always have in real time.

How One Man Was on Both Sides of the Deal

The structure of the demolition arrangement is the kind of setup that, in other contexts, would be called a sweetheart deal. Brek Pilling did not simply hire an independent contractor to do demolition work. He arranged for demolition to be performed by an entity he helped create and financially controlled.

• Curb A Peal LLC was organized by Pilling. He was its registered agent. He held an ownership stake through an investment company he managed. He was listed as an authorized signer and “key executive with control of the company” on the company’s bank account paperwork. This is not a passive investment relationship. This is control.
• On the days that Curb A Peal was actively demolishing the buildings, Pilling communicated extensively with the demolition worker, Evan Carnahan, by telephone. The complaint does not characterize those communications as incidental check-ins; they are cited as evidence of Pilling’s operational involvement in the work at the site.
• Pilling then signed a $20,000 check from Diconia to Curb A Peal. Money flowed from the property-owning LLC to the demolition LLC, with Pilling’s signature on the transaction. The government’s theory is that this makes him an operator of the facility at the time hazardous substances were disposed of, triggering personal liability under CERCLA.
• The effect of this arrangement, regardless of intent, was to place a compliant, connected entity in the demolition contractor role while the property owner, Diconia, maintained formal distance from the day-to-day demolition decisions. That structure did not shield anyone from liability; the government is pursuing all three defendants jointly and severally. But it is the kind of arrangement that, in cases where the government does not pursue enforcement, could allow the responsible party to point at the contractor and walk away.

The $20,000 Decision That Cost the Public $863,862

The financial logic embedded in this case is stark: the defendants paid $20,000 for a demolition job that generated at least $863,862 in federally-funded cleanup costs because proper asbestos abatement procedures were not followed.

• Proper asbestos abatement before demolition, conducted by licensed professionals under federal NESHAP requirements, would have cost significantly more than a $20,000 unpermitted demo job. The complaint does not itemize what compliant abatement would have cost, but the $863,862 figure the government spent on the emergency cleanup is a floor estimate of the damage created by skipping it.
• The $20,000 paid to Curb A Peal represents the entire documented expenditure by the defendants on managing the asbestos hazard they created. The government’s response costs are documented at at least $863,862 as of December 12, 2024, a ratio of more than 43 to 1 between what the defendants paid and what the public paid.
• The defendants had a financial incentive to move quickly after the January fire. Every month a demolished lot sits generates no rental income, no development value, and ongoing carrying costs for the property. Speed was economically rational for them. The cost of that speed was externalized onto the public and onto the federal taxpayer.
• After EPA issued a Unilateral Administrative Order to Diconia on August 14, 2018, the defendants still did not perform the cleanup themselves. EPA contractors were mobilized three days later. The defendants allowed the federal government to absorb the full cost of an emergency response rather than acting on the order.