News Coverage
Asbestos, What newspapers don't always tell you
Published March 14, 2004
These days, you read a lot about asbestos in the newspapers.
Usually, the refrain goes something like this: Asbestos litigation is out of control. Greedy trial lawyers are keeping truly sick people from being compensated. Companies that never had anything to do with asbestos are being driven out of business.
Just last week, USA Today (circulation 2.25 million) repeated the cry in a front-page story headlined "Robin Hood is alive in court, say those seeking lawsuit limits."
The 2,000-word story, published March 9, relied heavily on a report from the American Tort Reform Association, which condemned West Virginia, especially Kanawha County, as having courts that are "overly friendly to consumers lawsuits and too hostile to business."
"Kanawha County is known as a popular forum for injury claims related to asbestos," said a sidebar on the nation's alleged "Judicial Hellholes."
If USA Today's reporters had bothered to read a report that came out just four days before, they might have had a little different insight into why many asbestos cases end up in the courts here.
On March 4, the Environmental Working Group published a study - funded in part by plaintiffs' lawyers - that found an "epidemic" of asbestos illnesses and deaths across the United States.
Between 1979 and 2001, an estimated 43,000 Americans died from the signature asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, and from an often-fatal, noncancer disease of the lungs called asbestosis. Over the next decade, another 100,000 deaths are expected in the U.S. alone, the study said.
In its report, the group ranked Kanawha County 66th among U.S. counties in terms of total asbestos deaths between 1979 and 1991.
If you account for population, West Virginia ranked 3rd in the country in terms of the most asbestos deaths per 200,000 people over that period.
Those kinds of numbers don't often make headlines - unless you read the right newspapers.
Take the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
In November 1999, the P-I started what would become one of the most important journalism projects of the last 25 years. The simple headline said, "A town left to die." The dateline read "Libby, Mont."
Andrew Schneider, the Seattle paper's national correspondent, told the world that at least 192 people had died from asbestos in a W.R. Grace Co. vermiculite mine.
What was incredible wasn't just that miners were dying. Their families were dying. Their neighbors were dying. The whole town was dying.
Through dogged investigative reporting, Schneider revealed that W.R. Grace knew what was happening. So did various regulatory agencies. And nobody did anything about it. Schneider talked to residents, lawyers, environmental experts, and staffers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and even conducted his own soil and air sampling.
With "An Air That Kills," Schneider brings even more of that story to life. We meet the federal inspectors who were charged with cleaning up the mess and trying to be honest with the town, despite the efforts of their bosses to cover things up. Of course, we meet people like Gayla Benefield, a Libby resident and bartender who watched 40 of her friends and family die of asbestos exposure.
Schneider co-wrote the book with his Seattle managing editor, David McCumber. He had stumbled across the story almost by accident, through a rumor picked up by another reporter who was working with Schneider on a hard-rock mining series.
McCumber put up with Schneider going off in another direction and running up expenses for lab tests, travel and who knows what else.
When Schneider's probe turned up evidence that asbestos was still widely used in many consumer products - from brake shoes to crayons - McCumber backed up his reporter and published it all.
At one point, when a reader wants Schneider to investigate asbestos at a mine in Virginia, Schneider tells his boss, "We can't be the asbestos cops for the whole country."
McCumber replies, "But if we don't do it, who will?"
Schneider has since left the Seattle paper for a job running investigations for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There, he has continued to dig into asbestos, with reports on contamination of lower Manhattan following the World Trade Center collapse and the most complete coverage of the congressional debate on asbestos "tort reform" legislation.
In those stories, Schneider debunks an often-repeated myth: That asbestos is banned in the United States. In 1991, a federal appeals court threw out EPA's effort to ban the material.
And in the book, Schneider and McCumber detail how the Bush White House thwarted EPA's efforts to warn the public about dangerous asbestos insulation in millions of American homes.
The book isn't all good news for trial lawyers. It has harsh words for the litigation factories that many large law firms that represent asbestos victims have become.
During a visit to a union hall in St. Louis, Schneider sees how lawyers do quick X-rays and look for workers whose job "might have put them, at any time, anywhere near asbestos in furnaces, boilers, pipes, or production lines or in any operations where asbestos was being stored, used or removed."
But not all lawyers use such tactics, Schneider and McCumber say.
"But these aren't the lawyers clogging the courts across the country with tens of thousands of suits filed on behalf of clients who feel fine, who have no symptoms of illness and may never become ill," they write.
"Frail old men hooked to oxygen, awaiting death in small communities around the Vanderbilt talc mines in New York and near the taconite mines along the Iron Range in Minnesota and Michigan, are the losers in the litigation sweepstakes," they continue. "And, in 20 years, so may be the emergency workers from the World Trade Center attack, and those who lived and worked in lower Manhattan, and an unknown number of people exposed to the deadly fibers from the tainted Zonolite insulation in their attics."
In the late 1980s, Schneider won two Pulitzer Prizes at the old Pittsburgh Press for his reporting on failures in the U.S. organ transplant system and inadequacies in the Federal Aviation Administration's medical screening of pilots.
His reporting on asbestos for two different papers is exactly what investigative reporting - and newspaper publishing - should be all about.
With "An Air That Kills," Schneider and McCumber have written a worthy successor to Paul Brodeur's classic 1985 work, "Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial."