Trenton Times, Tracey L. Regan
Published June 25, 2005
HAMILTON _ For the three decades that W.R. Grace & Co. processed asbestos- tainted vermiculite at its plant here, little word of the ore's danger leaked out to the public. Regulators came and went, failing to detect its asbestos content. Sickened workers quietly took their claims to workers' compensation court.
And yet, internal memos show, Grace was well aware of the ore's dangers, conducting yearly audits of the plant to monitor asbestos releases, keeping records on failures to control them and fretting at the highest levels of corporate management about the consequences of regulatory inspections at its many processing plants nationwide.
Company memos written over 30 years show that while Grace managers carefully monitored the use of the asbestos-tainted ore at the processing plants, they said little about it publicly and communicated inconsistently with workers about taking protective measures.
Indeed, the company studied releases of tremolite asbestos fibers at the Hamilton plant as early as 1971. But more than a decade later, company managers still questioned whether the people processing it understood the hazards, memos show.
The Times obtained Grace records and memos from health and environmental regulators, court records and lawyers pursuing legal claims against the company.
The documents reveal that company managers recognized the health risks posed to workers exposed to the tremolite-tainted ore in the 1970s, finding in a 1977 study that 28 percent of long-term plant workers exposed to ore from the company's mine in Libby, Mont., had developed asbestosis, a lung impairment.
Over the next several years, however, memos show Grace officials weighed the company's potential liability to its workers and the people who bought its vermiculite-based products against the risk of losing business by being more candid about the ore.
`Adverse publicity'
A 1977 memo written by Elwood Wood, a general manager for the Zonolite division, put it bluntly: ``There is a risk that Grace will attract adverse publicity from national media concerning the presence of asbestos in vermiculite.''
In interviews over the last several weeks, Grace spokesman Greg Euston has asserted that company managers did not hide from employees the fact that the ore they were processing contained asbestos.
``In 1976, Grace initiated a training program that explained they were dealing with asbestos,'' he said, adding, ``Some may have used the term tremolite and others used the term asbestos.''
He said the company milled the ore in Libby to remove as much asbestos as it could, installed dust-control devices and ventilation systems and required workers to wear respirators.
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) officials say the first time the word asbestos appeared in a regulatory filing by the Hamilton plant was 1989.
State and federal regulators say that over the 2 1/2 decades they inspected the Hamilton plant, they never figured out that the vermiculite ore that workers heated, mixed and bagged there contained a dangerous form of asbestos called tremolite. They have come under fire in recent weeks for their failure to spot it and take action.
The company is now under federal indictment for allegedly concealing information about the dangers of the ore from the workers who mined it in Libby and from the town's residents.
New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey recently filed suit against Grace accusing the company of submitting false or misleading information to state regulators about the ore it processed in Hamilton.
Former employees counter Euston's assertions that the workers were informed about the dangers of the ore, saying they wore fiber-covered work clothes home and wore safety masks only after colleagues began to experience health problems. The company's own safety audits indicate that as late as 1989, some workers on the plant floor were not wearing masks.
The material they processed was not labeled as hazardous, workers say, though a 1972 Grace memo obtained from federal environmental regulators showed company managers were preparing to put up caution signs at all of its vermiculite expanding plants, warning of asbestos releases.
Euston has declined to return several recent telephone calls and e-mails for comment on the company's policy on those warnings and other matters.
Private worries
Internal memos show that top Grace managers were concerned about public acceptance of asbestos-tainted products, as well as the company's potential liability for selling them.
``This was the foremost question at Grace all along. The company recognized the possibility of liability all along,'' said Darrell Scott, a Spokane, Wash., attorney who has filed a class-action lawsuit against Grace on behalf of property owners in Washington state who bought and installed the company's attic insulation.
Internal reports show that despite the company's growing awareness of the dangers of its ore, unsafe working conditions persisted at the Hamilton facility until shortly before it closed in the 1990s.
A 1971 memo, in which company managers discussed their response to pollution citations at several processing plants, showed that Grace managers were reluctant to install emissions controls at the plants and determined to do so only if inspected and cited by health and safety regulators.
A decade and a half later, in 1987, one of the company's own inspectors remarked in an audit of the plant that housekeeping needed to be ``significantly improved'' to ``help prevent safety hazards.''
As late as 1992, state DEP regulators inspecting the facility found a ``brownish-gold particulate matter'' strewn over cars and on the plant's grounds.
The DEP never analyzed the ore, according to the agency's records of visits to the site.
Neither did federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors, according to that agency's records, though plants in other regions of the country that processed ore from Grace's Libby mine were cited for violations of asbestos rules.
While businesses such as W.R. Grace that know they are handling asbestos are required by OSHA to keep within the agency's exposure thresholds, they are not required to inform the agency about them.
Federal regulations established in the early 1970s ``put the responsibility on the employer to know what OSHA required and to comply,'' agency officials said.
More than 15 years of internal industrial hygiene reports by company inspectors, obtained by state and federal health regulators studying asbestos exposures at the plant here, reveal a mixed record of success in controlling emissions.
The tests often showed fiber levels, monitored by personal devices worn by employees as they walked about the plant, to be within safety thresholds in most instances.
But air tests in sections of the plant, such as the area where waste rock was collected and at the furnaces, showed higher dust and fiber levels. Inspectors found dust levels exceeding government thresholds at the plant on some visits and insufficient safety materials on hand to protect workers.
Former workers, who describe working in clouds of dust at times, say that they occasionally spent hours cleaning before outsiders visited the plant.
Public skepticism
Despite the company's frank internal discussions about its problems with tremolite, W.R. Grace publicly dismissed them, however.
In 1972, the superintendent of the Hamilton plant wrote the DEP a letter stating that ``W.R. Grace does not use asbestos in the producing of any product.''
Dr. James Lockey, a researcher at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, who in 1979 started gathering health data on plant workers in Ohio at the request of O.M. Scott, a lawn care company that processed the Libby vermiculite, said he confronted this skepticism after first publishing his report in 1980.
His report concluded that tremolite had caused lung disease in the Ohio workers, and Scott discontinued use of the Libby ore based on his findings, prior to the paper's publication.
``Grace would say _ `Are you sure these are asbestos fibers? They may not be,' '' Lockey recalled of conversations with company representatives at lectures where he presented his results.
When W.R. Grace shut its plant here in the mid-1990s, the company dismissed questions of contamination at the site, describing the amount of asbestos processed at the facility in its environmental assessment report to state regulators as too insignificant to even prompt soil sampling on the grounds.
Steve Picco, an attorney for Environmental Resources Management, the consultant that prepared the report, testified before state legislators last month that the firm relied entirely on Grace's information in preparing the report.
The federal indictment, which cites internal studies on disease rates in people and animals exposed to Libby ore that the company allegedly suppressed, does not include the company's actions at plants, such as the Hamilton facility, where longtime employees developed lung diseases and, in some cases, died of them.
Former workers at the Hamilton plant say they have been interviewed in recent weeks by criminal investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency and the FBI, who say they are conducting a probe of the company's actions at the plant.
NOTE: Contact Tracey Regan at
tregan@njtimes.com or at (609) 989-5687.
