Document 2NVygny8VZOvjxqpZoM4jL2q7

GENERAL QUESTIONS; for all interviews 1. The first clue of the brain cancer epidemic at Texas City chemical plants came from a Union Carbide employee complaint to OSHA. If the company's health and safety program is so good why didn't the company discover this problem? 2. Why didn't this employee come to management with his concern? Is it a lack of trust? 3. Since discovering this brain tumor epidemic at Texas City, have you initiated similar studies at your other plants? At Taft? At Seadrift? At Brownsville? 4. Do you wait for a certain number of employee deaths before you take on expensive medical studies? How many deaths does it take? 5. Does Union Carbide now have the ability to better predict employee health hazards? Or can we look for more deaths? 6. Is your company trying to design a better early warning system, or do they have to be dropping by the roadside before the problem gets your attention? 7. What kind of monitoring system do you have in your plants to detect such health problems? 8 . What type of medical surveillance of employees do you use to be able to predict and prevent these kinds of health problems? Have you improved this system since discovering all the brain cancer deaths at Texas City? 9. Why are you not doing an extensive epidemiological survey at every one of your chemical plants? Is it because of the cost? UCC 096466 2. 10. Why didn't you start a more extensive medical or epidemiological survey at Texas City after the vinyl chloride you handle at at the plant was discovered to be a highly hazardous carcinogen? 11. You have this pretty yellow chain which surrounds the vinyl chloride area at Texas City to warn employees that you handle cancer-causing chemicals in that area. Isn't it true that this chain should probably surround your entire plant? 12. How many carcinogens do you handle at Texas City? How many embryotoxins? Toxic chemicals? Hazardous chemicals? 13. How many ways can an employee die from chemicals he can encounter from working in one of your plants? 14. How many cases of angiosarcoma did you find at Texas City? How many in the Kanawha Valley? 15. What other cancers--besides brain tumors and liver cancer--have you found among your employees? 16. Isn't it true that we have an epidemic on our hands? For example, didn't a study of cancer deaths in the Kanawha Valley show that Union Carbide employees had * multiple myeloma (multiple bone marrow tumors) at four times the expected rate * kidney cancer cases at three to four times the norm * and central nervous system cancer at two-and-a-half to three times the norm? 17. There's thirty deaths in the Kanawha Valley from bone,kidney and nervous system cancers. More than twenty deaths at Texas City. What will the body count be nationally? UCC 096467 3. 18. How often do Union Carbide chemical plant employees get thorough physical examinations specifically to look for cancer? 19. How many types of cancer are there? 20. What is a melanoma? A sarcoma? 21. Aren't you embarrassed that your company didn't discover this cancer problem on your own? In fact, isn't it true that the real leadership solving this problem has come from federal government agencies, the unions, your employees--but not from the chemical industry? 22. Why didn't the Chemical Manufacturers Association take an active role in letting the public and chemical plant employees know about the problem? 23. Do you honestly believe that Union Carbide has done everything possible to protect its workers from cancer? 24. How many Union Carbide products and chemicals that you use are now being tested to see if they cause cancer? 25. Just to give us some sense of the scope of the problem and of your research programs, how many rats or mice have died of cancer from Union Carbide-sponsored research program? 26. How many cancer-causing chemicals do you make or handle at Texas City? 27. What chemical products--please list them for us--do you make at Texas City? 28. What's the most hazardous chemical you handle at Texas City? at Bound Brook? At your Kanawha Valley plant? 29. How long have you had a testing program for chemical carcinogens? UCC 096468 4 30. In your personal opinion, will the standards for ethylene oxide exposure be tightened during the next five years? 31. How much does Union Carbide spend each year to develop research? 32. Have you always tested for long-term health effects of chemicals? Isn't it true, in fact, that your company's policy of testing only for acute effects has contributed to the current cancer epidemic? 33. If people are dying in your plant today from cancer which resulted from chemical exposures they got on the job 20 to 30 years ago, then the problem's like a timebomb isn't it? How can you predict how many more people will die of cancer? 34. It's safe to assume, isn't it, that your current studies are a direct result of public pressure and government intervention? 35. Why didn't you start your own study before NIOSH arrived? 36. Would you agree that the current requirement to test new products for their potential health hazard before they go on the market is a good one? If so, how can you defend the chemical industry for the years of abuse in dumping new products into the market place with a callous disregard for public health? 37. How many people, directly and indirectly, have been killed by the chemical industry? 38. Regarding product testing, are you now going back to test all of your existing products for potential health hazards? 39. When do you suspect a health hazard in a product--when employees start dropping dead? UCC 096469 5. 40. How far, in your opinion, does your company's obligation extend in protecting the health of employees and the public? Should you be fined when people die as a consequence of exposure to your chemicals? Should families be paid for the loss of a breadwinner? Should managers be jailed for their irresponsibility? 41. Will the "superfund" legislation now pending in congress help stop the cancer epidemic? 42. Under what circumstances would you shut down a plant like Texas City? If there were 30 employee deaths? 40? 50? How about 100? 43. What percentage of the products you make at Texas City are known carcinogens? Why don't you just stop using these if you know they cause cancer? 44. Exactly how do you protect an employee's health on the job at Texas City? 45. What's the risk factor involved in Texas City? For instance, is there a greater probability of an employee dying of cancer or from an explosion or fire? 46. What's the most recent major accident you had at the Texas City plant? Describe it for us. 47. Why is it that we always have to wait for government to move on problems before industry will do anything? 48. How many black males are involved in the current brain tumor study at Texas City? How many black males have died? Why have the blacks been ignored? 49. I guess the good news for blacks is that because we discriminated against you in the past and didn't hire as many of you, that we also didn't kill as many of you. Is that a fair assessment of this plant's EEO posture? UCC 096470 6. 50. How many women are involved in the brain tumor study? Will you study women after they start to drop dead too in 10 or 15 years? 51. According to the highly respected Dr. Victor Alexander of OSHA, the number of brain tumor deaths at the Union Carbide plant is a "four to five-fold excess" over expected levels. Isn't it fair to call that an epidemic? 52. When you have a death rate of such mammoth proportions--at four to five times the norm--wouldn't it be quite apparent that you had a problem? I mean, they are almost dropping dead in the streets. Why was the company so slow in recognizing this? 53. When a situation gets this out of hand, shouldn't the plant manager be indicted, perhaps for manslaughter, at the very least? 54. From a strictly scientific standpoint, would more brain tumor deaths give government researchers more to work with--and thus make it easier to solve the problem? 55. Is there a mystery chemical that's killing employees? Or is the problem synergistic with the combined effect of several chemicals? 56. What's the total number of deaths from chemical industry employees from various kinds of cancer? 57. Do you personally know any of the employees who died of brain cancer? 58. How do the families feel discovering now that their husband may have died from some chemical he was exposed to at the Union Carbide Texas City plant? UCC 096471 7. 59. What kind of benefits does a family receive when a person dies of a brain tumor from exposures to chemicals in this plant? 60. How many families are suing Union Carbide from the deaths here at Texas City? For how much money? What is the largest lawsuit? The smallest? 61. How much do you think the company will pay in legal fees to defend you against these lawsuits? 62. Isn't it true that your high powered Baker & Botts attorney tried to keep Union Carbide from conducting an employee health study simply because the results.of that study might be used against you in court? Your own attornies even think you're guilty, don't they? Have you started that study yet? 63. Is it a hindrance to your career advancement when a bunch of employees in a plant drop dead? 64. What kind of candid counseling do you give new hires at Texas City to warn them about the risk of working in a chemical plant? 65. Why don't you hold a face-to-face meeting with all employees at the Texas City plant to talk candidly with them and answer their questions about brain tumors. Why have you never held a press conference on this subject? 66. Do Texas City plant employees get free brain scans from the company? Why not? 67. What do you do if an employee requests a brain scan? Could you describe the pain for us that someone might have who had an advanced glioblastoma multiforme? UCC 096472 68. What are the chances that your employees may be inadvertently carrying this mystery chemical home as a health threat to their Ptf4 spouses and children? 8. 69. Have you done any studies of cancer incidence among the families of chemical plant workers? Do you plan such a study? 70. We know the chemical industry plants like yours produce a lot of important products that are essential for us, but how about the frivolous ones? Do we really need swizzle sticks? Do you think we could learn to live without Glad bags? How about vinyl coats? In fact, couldn't we reduce the risk of cancer by not making as many non-essential chemical products? 71. Could you reduce exposure to chemicals in the plant? What would it cost to make it really safe? 72. When will NIOSH complete its epidemiology study? 73. What is the cohort mortality analysis study designed to show? 74. By contrast, what does the case control study show? 75. Why is it so difficult to identify which chemical is the real culprit? Who's in charge of this government study, OSHA or NIOSH? Why is there so much confusion about that? 76. How many brain tumor deaths would we expect from 9,000 normal people in the general population? How many have you had at the Texas City plant? 77. Exactly what is an epidemiology study? 78. Why has the number of reported brain tumor deaths increased since the NIOSH study began. 79. Isn't it true that, insofar as the study is concerned, NIOSH has quit counting the deaths? UCC 096473 9. 80. Does your company still maintain that you're not sure that there is a problem? How many deaths does it take for the chemical industry to classify this as a problem? 81. Suppose that the federal government study concludes that there is an excessive number of brain cancer deaths at your plant, what would you do? Would you shut the plant down? Would you institute additional safeguards for employees? 82. Why haven't you initiated your own study at the plant? 83. If you had it to do over again, would you work with NIOSH in conducting this study in the same way that you have in the past. 84. Why has OSHA been so critical of Union Carbide? 85. Do you think the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in New York was helpful in focusing scientific attention on the pro blem. 86. Why is it scientists have so much trouble agreeing on what the problem is? Is it a matter of conflicting self interest-- since some of you work for industry and some of you work for the government? 87. Be candid with me for a moment, what do you think might be the problem? 88. What's your candid personal opinion? How will we eventually solve this problem? 89. Isn't it logical to suspect that we may have excessive rates of other types of cancer? What studies do you currently have underway at Texas City to explore this? UCC 096474 10. 90. How many other epidemiological studies does Union Carbide have underway? 91. Isn't it true that after all this work and public attention and press coverage that NIOSH will probably not be able to discover what chemical is causing brain cancer? Why haven't you been candid with the public and press to warn them of this reality? 92. Isn't it true that the scientists are more optimistic about what they can find in an epidemiological study of Union Carbide workers in the Kanawha Valley because they have a greater number of deaths to work with? 93. When will the Kanawha Valley study be complete? Will the study deal just with brain cancers, or will you get into studying other types too--such as liver, kidney, bone marrow, central nervous system and the many others that afflict the chemical industry? 94. Why does your company consistently wait for the government to move in~-like it did in Texas City and like it's doing in West Virginia--instead of initiating its own studies? 95. When you company completed an epidemiological study at your Bound Brook, New Jersey plant, why did you decide not to share the results with local union officials and employees? 96. Was the Whiting plant closed because of the high cost of correcting health hazards in the plant? 97. Does your company feel responsible for monitoring the health effects of former Whiting plant employees or do you just wash your hands and walk away when you shut down such a plant? UCC 096475 11. 98. What raw materials do you use at Texas City? Which of these are carcinogens? 99. Do you basically operate the plant the same way today as you did in the 1940's? 100. Given the massive problem of digging out 30-year-old employee health records for this study, have you now changed your employee and medical record keeping at Union Carbide plants? 101. Do you think it will be easier in the future--say 10 years from now--to look back and find out why your employees are dying? 102. Your company has said that these brain cancer deaths could be a matter of chance and not necessarily related to chemical exposure. Is that like the chance of being killed in an explosion if you are an employee of this plant, or like the chance of being annihilated if an ammonia truck overturns on 610 Loop? Is that the kind of chance you're talking about? 103. Your plant has suggested that perhaps this higher incidence of cancer among employees is not a plant problem but instead is reflective of a higher incidence of cancer in the Houston area. Isn't it fair to assume that if there's a higher incidence of cancer in Houston that it's probably due, at least in part, to the concentration of chemical plants in this area? 104. Do you think the public really believes that chemical plants are safe? 105. If you were an outside operator in a Union Carbide Texas City plant production unit, what would be the greatest job-related health hazard facing you? UCC 096476 12. 106. We understand that the Texas City plant manager is one of the employees in the control group of this NIOSH study. Let's be serious for a minute. Now what possible health hazards does a plant manager face--getting a paper cut on the memo from the company attorneys that instruct him not to comment on a lawsuit? 107. How are you going to solve this problem? 108. What things are you doing now to make this a safer plant in the future? UCC 096477 TEXAS CITY HEALTH - QUESTIONS 1. According to the April issue of Houston City Magazine Dow's Freeport plant officials say that employees "don't have a high level of concern about brain cancer". Is that true at Carbide's Texas City plant too? 2. We understand that a NIOSH doctor is now looking into the area of La Marque as possibly affected in this brain tumor epidemic. Is that true? 3. Why has it taken the government so long to complete this study 4. Has Union Carbide instituted any new safety steps to protect employees at the Texas City plant since the first OSHA com plaint was filed? 5. Why hasn't OSHA made a copy of the employee complaint that started this study available to the public? 6. Which industrial plant has the largest number of brain tumor deaths at this time? Carbide? Dow? Monsanto? 7. What do you think, in your own personal opinion, is the real problem? What is causing these brain tumors? 8. Why hasn't Union Carbide initiated its own studies into this problem? 9. Do you expect employee health concern to be an issue in your next bargaining round with the union? 10. Have you had any trouble hiring new employees or a decline in applicants since these brain tumor problems first came to light? Or, are people in Texas City sort of numbed about all UCC 096478 *-r* Page 2. the industrial threats they face every day? 2$ UCC 096479