The Pittsburgh Corning Bankruptcy
Pittsburgh Corning filed for bankruptcy in the year 2000, taking itself out of the tort system. However, there may be a couple of hundred million dollars that will at least theoretically be available to compensate sufferers of mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis who have been exposed to Pittsburgh Corning’s Unibestos pipecovering. If you think you have a claim please contact us.
Foamglass is used as a low-temperature insulating material and is especially used as an insulator for refrigeration equipment. The traditional material for this kind of work was vegetable cork, i.e., the stuff that gets stuck in wine bottles. During the Second World War, Pittsburgh Corning (hereinafter “PC”) had a bonanza because Portugal is the world’s major source of cork. It was difficult, to say the least, to bring cork from Portugal across the Atlantic, what with U-boats and all. So the Federal Government had Pittsburgh Corning churn out great quantities of foamglass, which is still used for low-temperature (up to a couple of hundred degrees) and refrigeration insulation. While foamglass does not contain asbestos, it plays a role in the story because of the precautions PC took to prevent its workers from getting silicosis, which, as a glass company, they were very sensitive to.
In 1961, in order to enter the high-temperature insulation market, PC began to look into purchasing the Unibestos product line from Unarco. Unibestos was a unique type of industrial thermal pipe insulation — it is composed mostly (at least 60%) of amosite asbestos fiber, and little else. As part of their investigation they got in touch with Cape Asbestos in the UK, in order to see about the supply of raw amosite fiber. In 1961, Richard Gaze, chief scientist for Cape Asbestos in England, met with the top management of PC in Pittsburgh to advise them on the whole matter. Gaze was in Pittsburgh meeting with the management of North American Asbestos, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cape, which sold Cape’s raw fiber in the US and Canada. Gaze met with the President of PC, Russell Brittingham (now deceased) and others, and told them about the manufacturing process. Gaze was knowledgeable about this because another subsidiary of Cape, called Cape Insulation, made a similar product with the trade name “Caposite” at a plant in Barking, England. Gaze also warned them about the hazards of asbestos. Gaze had known about asbestos and disease since he started working with Cape in 1943. He was fully aware of asbestos and mesothelioma at the time he met with the PC people. The next step was that PC sent a delegation to a pipecovering plant in Canada owned by an outfit called Holmes Foundry that used Cape’s amosite fiber. Shortly after that, Brittingham wrote to Gaze and asked if he could come to London to learn more. When he did come to London, Gaze showed him around the Barking Plant. PC then sent a delegation to look at the Barking Plant and get more technical know-how, which is what they were primarily interested in. It was at that point that they put the ink on the supply contract. Gaze continued to travel to Pittsburgh to meet with PC management every year until 1971 and on all these occasions he discussed the hazards of asbestos.
Pittsburgh Corning purchased the Unibestos product line from Unarco on May 5, 1962. This included the operating plant in Tyler, Texas, and a plant in Illinois that was dismantled. PC had a manufacturing facility at Port Allegany, in Western Pennsylvania, that was already making foamglass and glass block. A building was added and the equipment from the Unarco Plant in Illinois was set up there.
Unibestos pipecovering is manufactured in the following fashion: the amosite asbestos bag is slit open and the contents are dumped into a machine that “fluffs” the fiber, separating all the clumps and bundles of fiber so that the resultant material is, well, fluffy. The asbestos is dry-mixed with other dry ingredients, such as diatomaceous earth, and a machine spreads the mixture out evenly on a conveyor belt. As it went down the conveyor belt, it was sprayed by overhead nozzles with liquid sodium silicate, the binder that holds everything together. As it went further down the line it was rolled up on a mandrel. A mandrel is a cylindrical male mold that functions somewhat akin to a rolling pin. After the material was rolled up on the mandrel to the desired thickness the mandrel was removed and the piece — now a hollow tube a little longer than three feet — went onto another conveyor through an oven for drying. Once dry, the ends of the product were trimmed off with a bandsaw and then the tube was sawed down the middle to make two halves for pipecovering.
The general supervisor of the Unibestos operation, from its inception, was Bernard Ryan. He had the research department at PC pull medical articles for him in 1962-63 regarding hazards of the ingredients that would be going into Unibestos, including, of course, asbestos. These included Dr. Wagner’s mesothelioma article, published in 1960. He compiled notes on these articles, but did not show the notes to anyone else at PC. Included was a notation made from Wagner’s 1963 article on asbestosis in experimental animals, to the effect that amosite asbestos fiber was worse than chrysotile.
The PC “party line” used to be that their first awareness of asbestos health hazards was through their marketing guy, Roy Fuhs, who is now deceased. He testified at a deposition in 1978 and at a trial for PC in 1983, to the effect that the idea for the warnings came from Fuhs being in a warehouse in Mississippi in 1968 and seeing the warning label on a box of Owens-Corning Kaylo. He communicated to his superiors that it might be a good idea to label boxes of Unibestos in the same manner, which was apparently done at the end of 1968. In fact, PC put warnings on Unibestos because they were being sued.
The three witnesses who kill PC are Lee Grant, M.D., Morton Corn, Ph.D., and Ron Francis. Lee Grant is sort of a pathetic figure. He went into the Air Force after his medical training, doing a subspecialty of industrial medicine. By 1964, he was a full colonel and assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He retired that year and moved to the Pittsburgh area, where he was approached, unsolicited, by Pittsburgh Plate Glass to be their Medical Director. This was a newly created position at PPG. In October of 1964, he was approached by Byrl Stout, who had become head of manufacturing at PC that year. According to Grant, Stout came with another official from PC into Grant’s Office at PPG. Stout had a copy of a 1964 newspaper article headlined “a rare carcinoma on the rise.” Stout asked Grant what he knew about mesothelioma. A detailed memo by Grant of this meeting, along with a copy of the article, still exists. Dr. Grant first visited the Tyler, Texas plant in November of 1965. He had available to him an industrial hygiene survey that was done in 1963. He had also reviewed the medical literature to some extent. The bottom line was that nobody did anything about the health situation at Tyler, in spite of Dr. Grant’s repeated involvement. He never pushed hard to do anything, and was understandably very defensive on this point at the time his deposition was taken in the 1970’s.
What was bugging Dr. Grant can be found in the deposition of Morton Corn, Ph.D. He was an industrial hygiene engineer who was retained by PC at the direction of Dr. Grant in 1966, when both he and Grant visited the Port Allegany plant. Corn subsequently designed dust control systems for both Port Allegany and Tyler. The Port Allegany system was installed in the summer of 1970, with modifications insisted on by PC, over Corn’s objections, that greatly diminished the effectiveness of the system. The Tyler system was never installed. Corn also supervised the shutdown and cleanup of the Tyler plant in 1972-73.
In 1973, Paul Brodeur (who later wrote a book, “Outrageous Misconduct” about the asbestos industry) wrote a series of “Annals of Industry” articles for the New Yorker magazine. This then became a book entitled “Expendable America” which won a reporting prize. The focus of the articles and subsequent book was on PC’s conduct in connection with the Tyler, Texas plant. Brodeur had come down like ton of bricks on Dr. Grant, for abdicating his responsibilities as a physician and looking out for his employer rather than the workers. Grant was devastated by this article, and thought that he had been treated unfairly. Corn is more sympathetic to Grant, but also testifies that book is essentially an accurate recitation of what happened. Grant then attempted to take an extraordinary step to clear his name. He wanted to have what is known as a “peer review” with the American Academy of Occupational Medicine, where other occupational/industrial physicians would examine all of the available facts and pass judgment on his conduct. He gathered all of his files together, prepared a written statement, consulted with Dr. Corn, and called a meeting with the PPG management at PPG headquarters on December 18, 1973. The meeting, which Corn attended, was a humiliating embarrassment for Dr. Grant. The PPG house counsel basically told Grant to forget about the peer review, because it would make others at PC and PPG look bad. All of the top management people were there, and it was clear that they had all met before he and Corn got there. No one else, including Grant, got to say a word, and the meeting was over in ten or fifteen minutes.
Ron Francis was promoted to the title of assistant works manager of the Port Allegany plant (not just the Unibestos part of it, which was known as “Plant 8″) in June of 1964. In the late summer or early fall of 1965, he met Richard Gaze when Gaze was on one of his visits to Port Allegany. Gaze told Byrl Stout at that time that the asbestos dust levels were too high. In response Larry Griffith, the head guy at Port Allegany and Francis’ immediate supervisor sent Francis and Robert Stohr, head of quality control, on a three-day trip to England to see how dust control was done at the Cape Plants. Stohr was going to compare the quality of the finished Cape products with those of the PC products. When Francis got to the airport in London, he picked up a newspaper (the Sunday Times) that had the headline “Scientists track down killer dust disease.” He read the article and brought the paper to the Cape plant with him. There he met with a Dr. Harding, the plant doctor, who told Mr. Francis all about asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. He was able to observe the dust removal system at the Cape plant, which was vastly superior to anything he had ever seen. For example, all of the dust creating processes were done by machines, rather than workers, and those machines were in hermetically sealed housings that were totally dustproof. If they needed to be opened and serviced, the personnel doing that wore respirators.
He photographed the equipment, and flew back to the US. On his flight back, he wrote a detailed report to his superior, Mr. Griffith. That report has vanished. When he got back, he started always to wear a respirator in plant 8. He met with the president of the company, who told him that his fancy dust equipment was too expensive and Unibestos was not profitable enough to justify the outlay. Francis continued to agitate, and in 1966 he did not get a bonus, in spite of everyone else at Port Allegany getting one. He felt totally isolated at this point, so he left the company in April of 1966.
Pittsburgh Corning is notable for at least two reasons: first, they made what was probably the most lethal construction product ever put on the market, Unibestos pipe insulation; second, they entered the asbestos thermal insulation market after many of the health hazards of asbestos had become irrefutably known throughout the thermal insulation industry.
Unibestos was one of the few high-temperature thermal pipe insulations that could be applied to pipes made from stainless steel (ordinary calcium silicates cause stainless steel to corrode). It was, therefore, used heavily in applications like nuclear submarines (the reactors have pipes made of stainless steel), chemical plants, and refineries. As it is composed primarily of amosite asbestos, Unibestos was one of the more lethal products to hit the pipe insulation market, especially when it comes to causing mesothelioma.
Those who will be most affected are workers whose primary exposure was to Unibestos, and those who have difficulty proving exposure to the asbestos-containing products of other manufacturers which are not, as of yet, in bankruptcy.
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