Toward the end, there were no good days for Erling Storbeck a mesothelioma patient who just screams in the night as the tumors ballooned inside him, snapping his ribs.

During four decades as a mine worker in northeastern Minnesota, Storbeck had never taken a sick day, and the well-paying job helped put his four children through college. Six years into his retirement, his family believes, it also left him on his deathbed.

By July 4, 2003, the day the 68-year-old Aurora grandfather died, his family suspected that asbestos fibers Storbeck breathed on the job may have caused his cancer. But for other Iron Range residents and the agency responsible for protecting the health of Minnesotans, a troubling mystery remains.

Across the Iron Range, men who worked in paper mills, warehouses, taconite mines and elsewhere continue to die of the same rare and incurable cancer that killed Storbeck. No one knows why the disease is striking men in northeastern Minnesota at a rate 70 percent higher than the state average. And despite more than a decade of warnings, Minnesota lawmakers and others have done little to find out, a Pioneer Press investigation has found.

The cancer, called mesothelioma, almost always is caused by breathing asbestos, usually in the workplace. As early as 2005, a panel of international experts determined that some Iron Range men had been exposed to asbestos and urged the state to pinpoint the source of the deadly fibers.

But scores of interviews and thousands of pages of documents and correspondence reviewed by the newspaper reveal that politics, economics and public health concerns have collided for more than 10 years. As a consequence, no one knows where or how the men were exposed to asbestos or what risk, if any, remains.

"Here was a warning sign and nobody took action," says a professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and member of the 2005 panel. "It is a matter of great regret ... that nobody decided to do anything." Not until last week, after the newspaper questioned Gov. , Iron Range lawmakers and other state officials about its findings, did policy-makers promise action.

The dean of the Iron Range legislative delegation now says he is willing to sponsor a bill providing money for a state Health Department inquiry into the cancers - something he admits he hadn't done since the problem first surfaced in 1985.

But Carlson, whose own appointee twice blocked money to help pay for a study, beat Johnson and other DFL lawmakers to the punch, pledging $300,000 in next year's budget. Their support last week for a Health Department study comes a full 23 years after the first evidence of asbestos exposure to a mesothelioma patient on the Iron Range was documented.