Asbestos exposure still claiming lives of shipyard workers

Oak Ridger

The Navy knew that asbestos exposure was hazardous as early as 1922 but did little to warn or protect shipyard workers until the 1970s - even as increasingly lethal asbestos diseases were identified and workers became ill and died, a newspaper reported.

Asbestos-related diseases have lengthy latency periods. By the time the full effects of exposure are tallied in the next 30 to 40 years, an estimated 100,000 shipyard workers and family members nationwide, including thousands of them in Hampton Roads, will have died from such illnesses, The Virginian-Pilot reported in a five-part series that began Sunday.

An estimated 850 people exposed to asbestos in Hampton Roads have died of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung, the newspaper said. Every 10 days, doctors diagnose someone in Hampton Roads with the disease, which occurs locally at seven times the national rate and kills swiftly.

At least 300,000 people worked in the region's shipyards during the peak years for asbestos exposure, from 1940 to 1978. About 4,200 of those workers could be expected to die of cancer caused by asbestos, based on a formula developed by researchers who projected a shipyard worker death rate of 1.4 percent, the paper said. That does not include family members who were exposed when workers carried the dust home on their clothes.

"The Navy looked at the shipyard workers as though they were front-line troops" during World War II, said Sheldon Samuels, a former U.S. Public Health Service official and a leading authority on asbestos disease in the workplace.

"In the highest levels of government, there was a conscious political decision to sacrifice lives of (shipyard workers) for the war effort," Samuels told the newspaper. He described the government's decades of denial, and the resulting deaths, as "moral homicide."

The Pilot based its investigation on reviews of court and medical records, medical journals and Navy and other government documents. The newspaper also interviewed more than 200 people, including victims of asbestos disease and family members of victims, government officials, doctors, industrial hygienists, asbestos victims' advocates, asbestos industry representatives, lawyers representing plaintiffs and defendant corporations and other legal, medical and asbestos experts.

The newspaper said it made repeated efforts to interview current and former Navy officials about the service's policies regarding asbestos use in its shipyards and all requests were turned down.

Officials at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth and Newport News Shipbuilding responded to questions regarding current asbestos policies, noting that all asbestos-removal work complies with federal regulations. Both yards conduct medical surveillance programs for employees who work in asbestos abatement and monitor air quality in asbestos work areas to ensure compliance with federal safety standards, according to spokespeople.

Shipyard officials, however, declined requests for interviews about asbestos practices and policies that were in effect at the facilities before 1980, the newspaper said.

The newspaper also said that Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not respond to repeated requests that he or a Defense Department spokesman discuss Navy asbestos policies and procedures. Warner was undersecretary of the Navy from 1969 to 1972 and secretary of the Navy from 1972 to 1974, when federal and Navy-wide asbestos restrictions were imposed.

Warner said Tuesday that he had not responded because staffers had been trying to find his records from 30 years ago and that some records may no longer exist.

"I don't have any specific recollection as to what I did or did not do in regard to asbestos and Navy shipbuilding," Warner said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. Warner also said he had "no base of knowledge on which I can comment" about the newspaper's main findings.

A Navy spokesman at the Pentagon referred questions to the Naval Sea Systems Command, which oversees the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth. Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for the command said it would be inappropriate for the Navy to comment immediately. "We're seeing the information for the first time," she said Tuesday.

Shipbuilding was the nation's biggest industry during World War II, and nowhere was the pace more frenzied than in the shipyard towns of Hampton Roads: Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News.

During World War II, 16.1 million Americans were called to arms, and the combat death rate was about 18 per 1,000 service members. About 4.3 million Americans worked in shipyards, and about 14 of every 1,000 shipyard employees died of asbestos-related cancer. An unknown number died of asbestosis, a disease caused when asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs, or complications from it.

During and after the war, workers toiled in the bellies of warships, installing asbestos as insulation and pipe covering, often amidst fogs of asbestos dust. They used no masks or respirators, and no one told them that they should, the paper said.

Louis Whiddon was 23 in 1942 when he began his career as a pipe coverer at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth. He said that the first time he learned that asbestos could make him sick was in 1969, when a supervisor read a memo informing workers that asbestos "could possibly be injurious" to their health.

In 1973, Whiddon was diagnosed with asbestosis, which diminishes breathing capacity. His wife and two of their four children also have the disease.

David Durham, who also began working in the pipe-coverers shop at the shipyard in 1942, was diagnosed with asbestosis in 1975.

Both Whiddon and Durham received worker's compensation benefits and later won settlement awards against asbestos manufacturers. As far as they know, there is only one other surviving World War II-era insulator from the shop. Durham said he saw 30 or 40 of his coworkers die agonizing deaths from mesothelioma in the 1960s and 1970s.

The newspaper also found that:

• A Navy medical bulletin published in 1922 included asbestos work on a list of hazardous occupations and suggested that respirators be used in the workplace.

• By the late 1930s, Navy medical corpsmen were issued handbooks advising them of the hazards asbestos workers faced.

• In 1941, in a letter to the Navy's surgeon general, Cmdr. C.S. Stephenson, the Navy's chief officer for preventive medicine, wrote of asbestos workers in shipyards: "I am certain that we are not protecting the men as we should."

• In 1943, the government issued standards intended to protect the shipyard work force, but more than three decades would pass before the government would begin enforcing those standards.

• More than 15,000 people, most of them shipyard workers and their family members, have filed lawsuits and legal claims in Hampton Roads for asbestos-related diseases that occurred on the job. Local victims have collected at least $800 million in damages from asbestos companies.

• The litigation has had little effect on the Navy, due to immunity doctrines that generally prohibit workers from suing the government while allowing them to file for worker's compensation. Legal efforts by asbestos companies to force the government to share in the liability have failed.
  

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