Plaintiffs’ Exhibits | Pittsburgh Corning Corporation
Compared to many other manufacturers, Pittsburgh Corning was a latecomer to the asbestos insulation market, which only means that the company knew better from the start. Once it got going in 1962, Pittsburgh Corning made and sold a huge quantity of “Unibestos,” an insulation product that was widely used for high temperature applications and was as deadly as it was popular. When Pittsburgh Corning began making Unibestos at its Tyler, Texas plant in 1962 it already knew that exposure to asbestos caused lung disease and mesothelioma. Nevertheless, the company forged ahead with its manufacturing plans and ramped up production of its Unibestos product at an additional facility in Port Allegheny, Pa. During some 10 years of Unibestos production, Pittsburgh Corning exposed its own employees and countless workers and their families to a product the company knew could cause cancers, including mesothelioma.
Before even entering the asbestos business, Pittsburgh Corning knew of the danger.
Pittsburgh Corning got its start manufacturing glass block and then FOAMGLAS cellular glass insulation for the construction industry. Because of its active involvement in the construction and insulation businesses, the family of Pittsburgh Corning companies was informed as early as 1945 that exposure to asbestos will damage the lungs. By the time it decided to purchase the Tyler plant, Pittsburgh Corning had been forewarned in particular that the entire Unibestos enterprise would likely lead to a good deal of human suffering and death. Company executives met with Dr. Richard Gaze, the executive director of a British holding company that owned the South African mines from which Pittsburgh Corning would purchase the amosite asbestos used in Unibestos. Amosite asbestos is a type of amphibole asbestos, brown in color, and is widely regarded as one of the most hazardous types of asbestos. Dr. Gaze warned Pittsburgh Corning about the precautions necessary to protect workers from such a dangerous substance. He told the company about the risks of asbestosis, cancer and mesothelioma. Dr. Gaze continued to warn Pittsburgh Corning executives about the dangers of asbestos during the entire 10 years that the company made and sold its Unibestos product. In a twist of fate, Dr. Gaze himself died of mesothelioma in 1982 at the age of 65.
Pittsburgh Corning continued to be warned about the risk of mesothelioma and lung cancer after it began manufacturing asbestos products.
Just a year after purchasing the Tyler plant, Pittsburgh Corning company executives were discussing reports of mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis associated with asbestos exposure. In 1964, the Pennsylvania Department of Health warned the company of a cancer threat. That same year, company managers learned of an important scientific study documenting the high rate of mesothelioma among asbestos workers. The study was very disturbing to Pittsburgh Corning’s medical director, who worried immediately about the threat of possible mesothelioma lawsuits. Five years later, a 1969 memo demonstrated the company’s recognition that existing “safety” standards for airborne asbestos would not protect against cancer. A 1970 comparison study of four asbestos insulation products determined that Unibestos was the worst of the lot and could not possibly be handled safely. Also in 1970, Pittsburgh Corning’s Tyler plant manager died of mesothelioma after having bragged to fellow employees that he lived, ate and breathed asbestos.
Despite this, the company’s asbestos insulation production lived on.
The Tyler plant: A twentieth century health nightmare.
Pittsburgh Corning employed hundreds of workers at its Tyler plant, which consisted of two large buildings covering about 100,000 square feet. One of the industrial hygiene engineers who had toured the facility in 1969, Morton Corn, testified in government hearings in 1984 that the plant was “one of the most contaminated asbestos facilities I’ve ever been in … Tyler was a fairly startling facility.” [U231]
Year after year, Pittsburgh Corning knowingly allowed the men and women it employed to breathe the factory air, which was thick with asbestos dust. The company knew that “dust control procedures were very poor” when the plant was purchased in mid 1962. [U83] The federal government sent the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to inspect the Tyler facility in 1967 only to find “grossly excessive fiber concentrations.” [U28] Pittsburgh Corning’s own medical director warned in 1968 that “there is a significant health hazard existing in all operations.” [U86]. Another survey of the plant in 1969 found that employees at the plant were exposed to excessive concentrations of amosite asbestos dust. Photographs showed asbestos dust hanging in the air and coating the plant in a layer of the toxic stuff. [U76] The same year, the company itself acknowledged that “[i]t is obvious from both a moral and legal standpoint that if Pittsburgh Corning continues to operate the UNIBESTOS plants at Port Allegheny, Pa., and Tyler, Texas, adequate steps to protect the employees must be taken.” [U79] In the same memo, however, Pittsburgh Corning pledged to start protecting its workers just as soon as it thought its Unibestos profits were high enough.
It turns out that Pittsburgh Corning never got around to fixing the plant conditions. A 1970 NIOSH survey found “grossly excessive fiber concentrations” yet again. [U28] The following year, in 1971, a third NIOSH inspection found a continuing asbestos threat. At that point, NIOSH wrote to the Texas State Department of Health to alert it to “an extremely serious and critical occupational health situation” requiring “immediate corrective action.” [U28] “Again personal air samples yielded grossly excessive fiber concentrations in all production, finishing, and shipping areas,” NIOSH reported. [U28] When NIOSH asked the company doctor for employee medical files, he responded first by stonewalling and then by handing over incomplete files that lacked employees’ chest x-rays. Even without the benefit of x-rays, the inspectors could see from looking at other test results that many employees were suffering from asbestosis, a lung disease that can progress over time, causing shortness of breath and—in severe cases—ultimately suffocating its victims. The NIOSH survey found “grossly inadequate” ventilation at the plant and described in some detail the asbestos-laden filth in which the employees were forced to work. [U3] Asbestos-contaminated dust was on the floor, ceilings and rafters. It sat in piles around the machines. It was carried into the lunchroom on the clothes worn by the workers. NIOSH reported that “many employees apparently were unaware of the serious implications of asbestos exposure.” [U3]
Employees at the Port Allegany plant were also placed at risk.
Shortly after Pittsburgh Corning opened its Allegany, Pa., plant in 1964, the Pennsylvania Department of Health inspected the company’s operations and reported that the workers there were endangered by the excessive levels of asbestos dust. A year later an assistant manager with the company, Ron Francis, visited an asbestos plant in Barclay, England, where he learned that his own plant workers were at risk of developing mesothelioma and asbestosis. Upon returning home, Francis informed the highest-ranking Pittsburgh Corning executives that the Port Allegany plant lacked proper dust controls and that the workers were in danger. When the company refused to protect or warn its workers, Francis quit.
In 1966 and 1968, the same industrial hygienist who had inspected the Tyler plant, Morton Corn, surveyed the Port Allegheny facility and on both occasions found excessive asbestos dust at the Pennsylvania plant. In 1971, a Pennsylvania state official wrote to Pittsburgh Corning, discussing the need to protect workers from the high levels of asbestos dust in the plant. A company memorandum discussing the official’s findings acknowledged that “if the state man visits in the meantime, I think they would very likely declare the plant to be in imminent danger and exercise their authority to close.” [U256] Later that year, a federal inspection revealed a serious health threat.
Pittsburgh Corning also hid the danger from its customers.
Pittsburgh Corning’s customers fared no better than its employees. Within months of its entry into the asbestos trade, Pittsburgh Corning boasted to its customers that no hazardous chemicals were present in the dust created when cutting Unibestos, even when this was known to be untrue. The company’s medical director similarly misled customers by providing false assurances of safety.
In 1969, the company’s sizable contract to sell Unibestos to the Navy was jeopardized after the United States Department of Labor inspected the company’s manufacturing facilities and cited the company for violating federal law. Attempting to maintain sales, company officials simply lied to the Labor Department by assuring the government that each employee used a U.S. Bureau of Mines approved respirator. In truth, the company could not even prove that such respirators were present at the plants, much less that a company policy required their use. Indeed, a 1963 memo described a corporate policy to “soft-sell on respirators,” [U84], and despite a 1964 Pennsylvania Department of Health recommendation, respirators still were not required. The company also attempted to mislead the government by suggesting that an industrial hygienist had approved the Tyler dust collection system. When Pittsburgh Corning made the claim, the hygienist, Morton Corn, had never set foot in the Tyler plant, and when he later did, Corn criticized the conditions he found there. Finally, Pittsburgh Corning continued its deception by claiming to have a medical examination program that did not exist. The company’s own internal correspondence discussing its problems with the Department of Labor acknowledged that the company was not adequately warning workers and was violating the law.
Pittsburgh Corning persisted in concealing the truth from its employees and its customers, even when the customer was the United States government. Pittsburgh Corning also chose to hide the danger from the workers exposed to its Unibestos product. The company learned in 1968 that some other asbestos companies had begun to place warning labels (even if insufficient warning labels) on cartons of asbestos products. Pittsburgh Corning lawyers realized that workers should be warned, but worried that warnings might increase the company’s liability to injured workers. As late as February 1969, Unibestos product brochures contained no warnings.
1972 brought an end to Unibestos production, but not to the human suffering.
On June 30, 1972, the Tyler facility was closed. Although the plant machinery was buried, the company’s asbestos waste had already been spread throughout the area in the open dumps used by Pittsburgh Corning to discard its toxic waste. More of the hazardous asbestos dust was distributed off-site in storage bags that the company actually sold to unsuspecting local nurseries, famous for growing beautiful Tyler roses.
The effects of Pittsburgh Corning’s deception lingered on after the plant closed. When a doctor working with NIOSH recognized the excessive cancer risk faced by the company’s workers, he attempted to set up an early detection health program. That’s when it was learned that Pittsburgh Corning began rigging its employees’ medical records and misstate the results of their medical testing in an effort to avoid workers’ compensation claims.
Pittsburgh Corning filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
