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Deadly ore was shipped around U.S., Canada
Wednesday, December 22, 1999
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
©1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved.
The asbestos-tainted ore that killed and sickened hundreds of miners and their families in Libby, Mont., didn't stop there.
Millions of pounds of the ore were shipped from a mine near Libby to at least 60 processing plants throughout the United States and Canada, causing workers at many of those plants to become ill and die, a Post-Intelligencer investigation has found.
As they did with the miners, the W.R. Grace Co. and the earlier owners of the vermiculite mine on Zonolite Mountain kept information about the lethal nature of the tremolite asbestos fibers from the men expanding and processing the brownish-pink vermiculite into insulation, potting soil, fireproofing, cement mixtures and dozens of other products.
The number of workers and family members killed by asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma at these vermiculite plants will probably never be known, because of the transient nature of the work force and because in many cases, as in Libby, the deaths were attributed to a litany of other diagnoses.
Even Grace had a difficult time pinning down the number of employees affected.
"Among expansion-plant employees, the high employee turnover and a variety of past exposures make conclusions difficult," says a May 1977 internal report on tremolite in vermiculite.
However, one fact in that Grace report did offer an alarming indication of the possible scope of the danger:
"Among 14 employees with 10 or more years of service in expanding plants which have used Libby ore, 28 percent exhibited asbestosis."
Most of the workers and their families never suspected that asbestos was making them sick, because they were not told there was asbestos in the vermiculite ore they worked with.
A P-I investigation published last month documented the devastation to miners and their families in Libby, a small northwestern Montana town. The stories showed that Grace, the Zonolite Co. before it and government regulators ignored the signs of widespread asbestos contamination that doctors and health officials say will be killing people for many years to come. The mine was open from 1924 to 1990.
"The enormity of the atrocities committed by Grace on the citizens of Libby is too great to fathom," said Donald Judge, the head of the Montana AFL-CIO.
"As we're just now discovering, it not only happened to the citizens of Libby, but dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of workers throughout the nation are also dead or dying because no one told them about the danger they were breathing."
Judge, who earlier this month apologized before an emotional, packed town meeting for the union's failure to do enough to protect Libby's miners, said Grace could have protected its workers without major effort.
"By simply telling the workers what they were handling and then taking appropriate safety measures, it wouldn't have happened," Judge said. "It didn't have to happen. The cover-up perpetrated by Grace is not only immoral, but should be criminal, as well."
Grace's vice president of corporate communication declined requests to answer questions for this story. In a letter responding to the P-I's detailed request, William Corcoran said that Grace personnel were too busy "helping the people of Libby" to address the questions.
"The only one left"
Information gleaned from worker compensation offices, health departments, death certificates, government archives and thousands of court documents shows that workers at many of Grace's Zonolite processing plants died or became ill from exposure to asbestos contained in the Libby ore, or from asbestos added to the products they were making.
Hundreds of company documents, letters, memos and reports collected by the P-I show that the Zonolite Co. and Grace, which bought the mine from Zonolite in 1963, knew that workers were at risk. Workers and managers at the expansion plants say they weren't told.
"We never were told a thing about that ore being dangerous or having asbestos in it. Nobody never told me nothing about this stuff being able to kill you," said Arland Blanton, a plant manager and superintendent of the vermiculite plant in North Little Rock, Ark., from 1951 until 1963.
When asked how he knew the ore from Libby was dangerous, Blanton's normally strong voice dropped to a whisper.
"I'm about the only one left," the 82-year-old man said. "Most of the rest of them are dead. The asbestos got them. All of them."
"You wouldn't believe the dust from that vermiculite. It was so thick that you couldn't see your hands at times," Blanton said. "Had a boy that worked for me that lived in a house nearby and he used to say that he would have to shake his sheets out every morning to get the dust off.
"All of them, Zonolite and Grace, just said there was nothing in that dust that can hurt you. There's a lot of people dead today who would still be alive if we were told the truth about that ore."
Blanton says he does not know how many Little Rock workers were exposed to the asbestos.
"We usually had about a dozen workers a day, maybe up to 30 when we ran three shifts," he said. "A whole bunch of men moved through there over the years. I wonder how many of them are still alive."
Not all of Grace's managers criticized the company.
"It was a good company," said Courtland Lowe, a former Grace regional manager in the Southeast.
"Grace did everything they could to comply with all the laws and regulations at the time," Lowe said, declining to discuss it further.
The company provided the P-I with a list of 51 plants the company either owned or contracted with to process the vermiculite ore (see map). Several independent firms that processed the raw ore were identified from court documents, and former Grace managers say there were dozens of other such high-volume customers.
For example, an old gypsum plant on First Avenue South in Seattle received large amounts of Zonolite, but like so many others, does not appear on Grace's list. At least 59 plants in 29 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and four provinces of Canada are known to have processed Zonolite ore from Libby.
The bulk of the ore shipped to the expansion plants, usually about 300 million pounds a year, came from Libby. A much smaller percentage came from Grace's mine near Enoree, S.C., which is still in operation. Grace officials say there is little or no tremolite in the ore from the Enoree mine.
The heart of most of the expansion plants was a furnace or oven, where the vermiculite ore was baked at about 2,000 degrees. The microscopic amount of water between the layers of the vermiculite boils and expands or exfoliates each piece of ore into a puff 12 to 15 times larger.
The material was then bagged and sold as roof or wall insulation or soil expander or mixed with clay, gypsum, commercial asbestos and pigments to produce fireproofing and various construction products. They also made a product called Verxite, an ingredient for animal feed.
"They never told the workers"
Stephen Sheeran worked for Grace for 22 years. He began as a salesman in the Dearborn, Mich., plant and wound up in 1991 as sales manager for the Dallas operation.
Some of Grace's vermiculite products sold like mad, he said.
"Millions of bags of that stuff from Libby was sold in Michigan as attic fill insulation," he recalled. "They couldn't get it fast enough. Most of the homes in Flint are filled with it."
While he may have liked selling the products, he had little positive to say about the management.
"They never told the workers the vermiculite was hazardous, or even the pure asbestos they were adding to some products, never said a word, absolutely not," Sheeran said. "It was purely economics. It would have cost them money to make the operation safer."
The Dallas plant, he said, was in an area called Little Mexico and bordered a large black neighborhood. Most of the workers were transient blacks or Hispanics who crossed the border to work, Sheeran said.
"The Grace management has had a stonewall attitude all their lives and they don't think much of little people," Sheeran said. "The way they treated their workers was a huge injustice."
Sheeran recalled that at one point, the Libby plant started shipping the raw ore to Dallas with a coating of soybean oil, to avoid the railroad having to put a skull and crossbones on the bulk cars. "It all smelled like french fries when they expanded it," he said.
Robert Junker was the treasurer and superintendent of the Dallas operation where Sheeran worked. In court documents filed in 1991, he said that he had discussions with Grace about asbestos, "but we didn't discuss it with the men that worked in it" because Junker didn't want to "get them all shook up about maybe nothing."
"Some guy says you get asbestosis from asbestos, but that doesn't necessarily mean you do," he said. "I didn't want to cause a lot of uproar because nothing was official. Nothing."
"You can't go out to a couple of black men on the line and tell them that they're going to die tomorrow from asbestos breathing and expect them to even come into the plant tomorrow. You just don't do it," Junker said in a deposition taken in a civil suit against his company.
Junker worked for Zonolite and Grace for 31 years. He began as a bookkeeper for Zonolite in Chicago and in San Antonio and wound up running the Texas Vermiculite Co.
Junker had equally strong views about a company's need to warn consumers about a potentially dangerous product.
"To tell the public about a potential hazard -- that's what this is, a potential hazard -- is kind of asinine," the plant superintendent said in his deposition. He added, "It's bad for business."
He said he mourned the day in 1973 Grace managers ordered the company to stop marketing products containing added asbestos.
"We thought we had a good thing until they said it was not," Junker said. "It broke all of our hearts because it cut profits."
"A serious health hazard"
Grace documents show that the company knew there was a significant health hazard to the workers handling the ore.
In 1969, R.M. Vining, the head of the company's construction products division, wrote a detailed report on vermiculite to the company's president, Peter Grace.
A major program was needed to "eliminate a serious health hazard caused by the presence of vermiculite and asbestos dust in the mill and expansion plants," he wrote.
"The dust problem is particularly serious since the vermiculite ore from Libby contains tremolite asbestos. This material is difficult to separate from the vermiculite in the mill and is usually part of the rock remaining in the concentrate when shipped. Tremolite asbestos is a definite health hazard at both the Libby operation and at the expansion plants using the ore."
Yet documents show that managers from plants using Zonolite as far away as Australia and Winnipeg were told there was nothing harmful in the ore. Grace frequently responded by talking about "nuisance dust."
In 1976, seven years after Vining's memo to Peter Grace, the company told the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration that tremolite was not hazardous and did not cause cancer.
Health questions had surfaced in the 1960s from private companies licensed by Grace to use the vermiculite.
Robinson Insulation in Great Falls, Mont., used ore from Libby for more than a half century, from the early 1930s through 1986.
The ore would arrive in 40-foot-long boxcars, each containing 50 tons of vermiculite. As the demand increased, 100-ton cars were added. About 2,000 tons a year was delivered to the small plant.
"It would take two men a day to unload and it was extremely dusty," Floyd Gebert, the plant's general manager, said in court documents.
"There's always dust around vermiculite, whether it's expanded or unexpanded."
While the workers may not have known what they were handling, Gebert said he knew there was asbestos in the vermiculite.
"I knew there was asbestos in the mountain and they were trying to mine it and sell it," he recalled, admitting that he was puzzled about the hazard labels on the box cars hauling the ore to Robinson's plant in North Dakota.
"There was a sign on the boxcars warning the ore may contain asbestos," Gebert said. "You know, I never saw a sign on any of the cars that came to Great Falls."
Gebert said the first official notice of dangers of asbestos from Grace was in January 1973. He was told by his doctors in the early 1980s that he had asbestosis.
Out of the small work force at the Great Falls plant, four have died of asbestos-related diseases and four others currently have the diseases.
At least four former employees of the Burlington Northern railroad who say they handled the ore from Libby have become ill with asbestosis. Another died last year of mesothelioma, said two lawyers in Dallas and Houston who are representing the former railroad workers.
"We just dropped the ball"
In 1978, one of Grace's largest customers, The Scotts Co., makers of potting soil and lawn products, documented health problems among its workers using the vermiculite ore from Libby. Severe respiratory problems among 12 workers at the Scotts plant in Marysville, Ohio, led to an investigation by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to study the impact of tremolite. During the 1960s and '70s, Scotts often received as much as 25 percent of the vermiculite produced by the Libby mine.
Kerry Bierman, vice president for corporate relations for The Scotts Co., said, "We don't use that product any more." Bierman added that he had no other information about the ore and workers' health because it all occurred before he started working for the company.
While the NIOSH study documented the hazards from the tremolite, the federal government agency did nothing to inform workers using the material of the risk.
Dr. Anthony Robbins, who headed NIOSH during this period, says his agency made a mistake not informing the Libby workers and those at Grace's expansion plants.
"There was a mindset among some in the agency that their responsibility was just to publish their finding," Robbins said.
"We were working very hard to change that philosophy to let the workers know what risks they were facing. When it came to this study on vermiculite, we just dropped the ball," said Robbins, who was fired by President Reagan early in Reagan's presidency because of his zealous and vocal stance on worker safety.
For years, Grace's answer to those who questioned the safety of their vermiculite ore was that it was only "nuisance dust" and presented no other health problems.
But in many cases the company stalled in even addressing the dust problem.
At one point, in 1971, 20 of the expansion plants were in violation of pollution control laws in their respective states, according to a Grace internal document.
In a September 1971 memo, Grace's Construction Products Division said it could not afford to fix all the plants: "They plan to tackle them singly, as they are forced to comply, and buy as much time as possible," the memo said.
Grace documents present a puzzling picture of what the company told their plant managers when it came to keeping their operations safe.
"It is safe to say that I have procrastinated on answering this notice of violation," F.W. Easton of the Zonolite plant in Weedsport, N.Y., wrote in November 1971 to his superiors about a pollution violation from the New York state investigators.
In August 1971, the operator of a California Zonolite plant in the San Francisco Bay Area told headquarters he was nervous when pollution inspectors questioned him on how much #4 Zonolite ore -- a particularly dusty grade -- they were processing.
"I think our "friendly inspector" will be by frequently for the next few weeks" he wrote, and added that the plant will be "getting as much #4 out at night as we can." When the inspector wouldn't be around.
Questions from Canada
While U.S. health and environmental agencies largely ignored the problem, the Canadian government was questioning the health hazards from the Libby ore as early as 1964.
Grace documents show that between 15 million and 40 million pounds of ore was shipped from Montana to contract plants in Canada each year. About 8 million pounds usually went to Europe and the Far East.
In 1964, the health department in the Canadian province of Alberta raised concerns about the content of the heavy quantities of vermiculite dust coming from a Grace-licensed plant in Calgary using the ore from Libby. They reported that in examinations of nine workers, seven had breathing problems.
"This number of men with breathing abnormalities is most unusual and puzzling," wrote Dr. H. Siemons, director of Alberta's division of industrial health, who asked Grace if there were any other similar reports from other Western Canadian plants expanding vermiculite.
The next year, investigators from the same department found asbestos in the dust, but their report was discounted by Grace's local management.
Three years later, in December 1968, N.F. Bushell, Grace's Zonolite manger in Vancouver, wrote headquarters about a worker in their Winnipeg plant that had asbestosis.
"There is asbestos in the ore we receive from Libby. I'm afraid that we may still be exposing our employees to an unnecessary health hazard," Bushell wrote and asked if the company had measured the amount of asbestos in the air where the Zonolite was bagged. If not, he asked, when was Grace going to do so?
In his letter to Grace, he urged the company to test for asbestos.
"Get someone on this subject before we get closed down or slapped with some pretty large claims from employees or their heirs. It won't take many more biopsy reports before we get fingered," he wrote.
Another early warning
In 1964, Dr. W.E. Park of the Minneapolis City Health Department voiced concerns about the death of a worker at a Minnesota vermiculite plant.
He wrote to C.A. Pratt, the head of Western Mineral Products in Minneapolis, saying the death of a worker "who had long exposure to vermiculite dust has renewed our interest in the importance of vermiculite dust in the causation of lung disease."
He asked for specific information about asbestos in the vermiculite.
Documents show that Pratt had been concerned about the contamination for years.
In August of 1961, he wrote to Earl Lovick, the manager of the Libby mine.
"If an effective improvement can be made at the mine, in reducing the asbestos dust, this will of course benefit every plant that receives the ore and will minimize the hazards to hundreds of employees in the various plants," Pratt wrote.
Edward Moody, a Little Rock lawyer who has handled the lawsuits of dozens of workers at Grace expansion plants, said, "Grace had no interest in protecting their workers. None. The documents prove it.
"Soon after Grace took over they started giving annual physicals and X-rays to these workers," Moody said. "Not one, and I've handled almost 50 cases, has ever been given a report from Grace on what the X-rays, breathing function tests, indicated.
"Even if they knew they were sick, they never told them a word."
P-I senior national correspondent Andrew Schneider can be reached at 206-448-8218 or andrewschneider@seattle-pi.com
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