Families of Workers Blame Deaths on Plant's Use of Asbestos
11/04/02
Stephen Hudak and John F. Hagan Plain Dealer Reporters
When his best friend, Ron Cogley, died on New Year's Day 1997, Billy Fugate knew his time was short.
The fishing buddies worked in the same asbestos dust on the same job during the same years at Foseco, an industrial plant south of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
Fugate remembered what his pal had said about the dust in their lungs:
"It's like livin' with a time bomb."
Fugate's exploded two years later. He was 60.
By then, five other men who had worked with them at the plant were dead of mesothelioma, a rare and strangling cancer linked to asbestos, the backbone of Foseco's industrial products.
Through its lawyers, Foseco said it never intentionally harmed anyone.
The company insists it took precautions to limit and eventually eliminate asbestos exposure, installing vacuums to collect the toxic dust and providing its workers with respirators. It also says it did not know - until it was too late - that asbestos was a killer.
Foseco's arguments today echo those of Johns-Manville, Raybestos-Manhattan and other asbestos makers who successfully pleaded ignorance when the first wave of lawsuits hit.
It was later discovered those first-wave companies had conspired to hide a deadly truth they had known for decades -the dust would kill one of every three men who worked in it.
Lawyers and family members of former Foseco workers, citing records filed in dozens of court cases in Cleveland, also say the company knew more than it claimed.
They say Foseco:
Never told its workers asbestos caused cancer.
Kept selling products with asbestos despite overwhelming evidence they could be dangerous. It sold them even as customers were clamoring for products free of the mineral.
Repeatedly violated health guidelines for air quality at its Cleveland plant during the early 1970s.
Did not enforce policies requiring its workers to wear protective respirators.
The company, which no longer uses asbestos in its products, has been named as a defendant 5,000 times in asbestos-related suits in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
Most were filed by steelworkers who used Foseco products in mills and foundries, but dozens have been lodged by its own employees, who say the company put profit ahead of safety.
"This is an intentional, nearly malicious action on the part of a manufacturer who didn't give a damn about people it put in harm's way," said lawyer Robert P. Sweeney, representing some of those workers.
But Foseco was as much a victim as its employees, uncertain of asbestos' potential for killing, said Robin Weaver of Squire Sanders & Dempsey, the firm's local defense counsel.
Richard Phoenix, Foseco president from 1967 to 1977, let his daughter intern at the company each summer - proof that company bosses did not realize the peril the fibers posed, Weaver said.
"You aren't going to put the people you most cherish in life at risk," Weaver said.
Foseco also has argued it shouldn't be blamed for injuring workers who did not wear respirators the company provided. "When you get to the point of trying to save someone from themselves, that's where I draw the line," Weaver said.
Nonetheless, Foseco has paid more than $13 million to settle claims filed by the families of eight workers who died from mesothelioma, asbestosis or asbestos-related lung cancer.
John Bennett worked at the company just nine months. Foseco paid his wife $2.5 million, one of four settlements at least that large.
"I don't feel like I hit the lottery," Sandra Bennett said. "It's not happiness. I don't like the reason I got it. I'd rather have John to grow old and ugly with."
Between 1962, the year Foseco began mixing asbestos into its industrial products, and 1976, the year it stopped, the company used 18 million pounds at its Sheldon Road plant.
"It was everywhere," said Lawrence Karpowicz, who spent 22 years there before taking a job with the International Association of Machinists, which represents Foseco workers. "They'd carry it across the aisle and throw the stuff into bags and the crap would fly everywhere."
He said that dust collection was inadequate and that the company said little about its danger.
"The workers weren't really aware of the dangers of asbestos because the company never told us," Karpowicz said. "We'd ask questions and were basically sloughed off."
Asbestos dust was so deep there, employees scooped it in handfuls and molded it into snowballs they would throw at one another, Ron Jesensky told his wife before he died.
Though he worked at the plant just 11 months and wore a paper respirator when he mixed asbestos slurries, Jesensky, 47, blamed the mesothelioma that would kill him on Foseco.
"By the end of the day this stuff would be all stuck in your beard," he said. "So, you know, you go to stop for lunch or whatever, you were pulling the stuff out of your beard."
The asbestos, a product of South Africa, arrived in 120-pound burlap sacks. The bags were sliced open and emptied into stirring machines, which mixed the asbestos with water, silica flour, resins and old newspapers, which added density. Dust flew.
Like Cogley and Fugate, Billy Hayes handled asbestos at Foseco. Like them, he complained about dust to union steward Greg Levan, whose brother also worked at Foseco.
Cogley, Fugate, Hayes and Levan's brother Clifford would die of mesothelioma.
Levan, who still works at Foseco, would not be interviewed for this story. But testifying in a deposition for co-workers, he said he regularly took their complaints to supervisors.
He said the company's response was: "We're working on it. Be patient."
Levan also accused Foseco of trying to hide its dust problems from inspectors.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspections "were always known in advance, and our supervisor would tell us to clean up our areas," he said. The company "always cut way back on production and use of asbestos on the day of inspection so as to minimize the dust normally created."
Although he was a member of Foseco's safety committee, Levan said he was never told asbestos could cause cancer until the company had stopped using it.
"I didn't know until the mid-to-late '70s what asbestos was, that it was going to kill me some day," he said.
Court documents suggest his bosses knew much sooner.
For example, company records include a 1964 letter received by Foseco's purchasing agent after he raised health concerns about asbestos the company was using.
The letter from North American Asbestos Corp.'s scientific adviser declared: "The medical world now appears to accept exposure to asbestos increases the risk of lung cancer."
In 1970, as Foseco's use of asbestos neared a peak of 3.5 million pounds, a newly created workplace watchdog, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, took aim.
The agency's first move restricted asbestos use. Another required warning labels.
By 1972, Armco Steel, Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel, three of Foseco's biggest customers, expressed concern about asbestos in products they bought from the company.
In reply to Republic, Foseco acknowledged their products contained asbestos but "these are not regarded as hazardous under conditions normally encountered in steel mill operations."
Foseco then told Bethlehem officials it was "actively seeking" alternative materials to asbestos but warned a product without asbestos would probably cost more and satisfy less.
The same year, the Hartford Insurance Group sampled the air inside Foseco's plant and found it too dusty. It recommended the company switch to "less hazardous" materials.
The company claims the Hartford report was its first indication that its manufacturing processes posed a danger to employees.
Customers vowed to find new suppliers and Foseco's insurer threatened to drop it unless asbestos was eliminated from its products. The company abandoned the mineral in 1976.
By then, plaintiffs' lawyer Sweeney said, death was searching for Fugate and his friends.
Nonetheless, Fugate sued reluctantly, said his widow, Fern.
"It wasn't to get revenge on anybody. He just wanted us to be taken care of," she said, thumbing through pictures of him.
"He was proud of what he did, proud of his plant."
She isn't. She cut the company logo off a jacket Foseco gave her husband. "He never took all his vacation, never missed a day in 38 years, never called in sick. If they called at 3 in the morning and needed someone, he went in," she said. "When I think of it, I get mad."
She held up her last photo of him. When he died, he weighed 92 pounds.
"I wanted them to know this is what they did," she said.
Tomorrow: A glut of asbestos lawsuits - many filed by people who are not sick - threatens to devour companies that stopped using the deadly fibers more than 30 years ago.
To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:
shudak@plaind.com, 1-800-683-7348
jhagan@plaind.com, 216-999-4169
News researchers Patti Graziano and Cheryl Diamond contributed to this report.
*** POSTED NOVEMBER 4, 2002 ***