Document gREv9Q7xV5bqBmVjn5Mx577L

FILE NAME Brakes BRK DATE 1972 June 8 DOC BRK037 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION Newspaper Article - Perilous Particles Nae OB egg tee VOL CLXXIX NO 112 Perilous Particles M Tiny Asbestos Fibers Pose a Health Threat Harry Balley is one man who isn't likely to Mr.| find much solace in the new standards Bailey isn't an asbestos worker He's a brick-| layer in a Mobil Oil Corp. refinery alongsidealongside the Delaware River in Paulsboro N.J. He has| been working at the plant for 33 years and every year he has gone to the company medi- cal.department for a chest ray | | They never said there was anything wrong | with me says year Mr. Bailey and in- deed he has thus far developed no outward symptoms But a few months ago he and 18 other workers from the refinery went to Mount Sinal for an examination and every one of them proved to have scarred lungs sign of asbestosis a nonmalignant lung disease Mobil has refused to release his medical rec- ords to the New York doctors Mr. Bailey says The company declines to comment on the mat- ter To Workers and Public First Scarring Then Complications Asbestosis begins with ray evidence of scarring like that found in Mr. Bailey's lungs Long Exposure Can Result In Lung Disease Cancer As the disease progresses the lungs stiffen and breathing becomes difficult The heart has to work harder and can become enlarged Ultimately death may be caused by heart attack or suffocation Industry Seeks Solutions The mineral can also cause lung cancer fact asbestos can cause cancer just about any- ve The Bodies Are in the Street place body if particles somehow in- gested The ability of the sharp tiny particles t^penetrate the lung once breathed in has pro- By BARRY NEWMAN Staff Reporter THE WALL STREET JOURNAL NEW YORK Joseph Marino's gas station on the fringe of Manhattan's Spanish Harlem the proven method of cleaning an old brake assembly goes like this Pull off the wheel aim an air hose at the exposed parts and blow the dust out A cloud of brown dust invariably flies right into the mechanics faces says Mr. Marino But it doesn't bother them We got masks and everything Mr. Marino shrugs The guys don't use them What the hell i What the mechanics don't seem to know- duced a high incidence brane surrounding the mesothelioma In the of cancer in the memlung a disease called general populace causes one in 10,000 deaths Of 632 asbestos workers being studied by Dr. Selikoff 32 have died of it so far The Mobil refinery where Bailey works factortesin the oll and chemical industries uses asbestos for insula- tion Mr. Bailey works with insulation workers inside the furnaces ripping out soft brick There's asbestos and brick dust and a lot of sulphur too he says We complained about the dust and dirt Nothing is done to keep it down The fans make it worse and you can't like thousands of other mechanics that the wet it because of the heat in the bricks The brown dust is dangerous Brake linings are f made of asbestos And if a mechanic breathes in enough dust from the worn out linings it could eventually kill him The lethal quality of tiny indestructible asbestos fibers that lodge in the lung is well known Widely publicized studies by Dr. Irving Selikoff of the Mount Sinal School of Medicine company bought new respirators but under the conditions they clog in 15 minutes In the asbestos cutting rooms he adds there aren't any vacuum attachments on the power saws And when the insulation workers saw asbestos sheets outside the room or mix cement in a wheelbarrow anybody can get the dust lead him to predict that of the roughly 250,000 asbestos industry workers today about 95,000 will die unnecessarily of occupational cancer In the next 10 to 15 years we will enter the asbestos cancer era says Dr. Selikoff This is one of the great disasters of our time Hazards for Others Too The asbestos industry is well aware of the problem and is taking action to conibat it though critics say the steps aren't as drastic as | the situation demands But asbestos industry| workers aren't the only ones who might fall prey to the lung cancers and other discases caused by the mineral's irritating fibers It's likely that millions of workers in other industries using asbestos fibers could be affected as well as ordinary people who have come into contact with asbestos in the atmosphere Perhaps the most tragic fact is that for those who have already been sufficiently exposed changes in procedures and standards of asbestos including a new set announced yesterday by the Department of Labor meaningless It takes as many as 40 years after the first exposure for asbestos related diseases to surface Controls instituted now will| indeed have an effect but not for decades Company Disagrees Mobil disagrees with the description of working conditions In response to a query the company issued this statement We have no problems at the Paulsboro refinery concerning the use of materials containing asbestos We use very little of such material and what we do use is used under strictly controlled conditions Recently the Occupational Safety and Health Administration carried out an extensive and thorough inspection of the entire Paulsboro refinery No violations were found in the plant's handling of asbestos materials Mr. Bailey's union the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers is protesting that inspection Steven Wodka a union health and safety spe- cialist says little attention was paid to health violations And he complains that after a week comp of accompanying the inspectors the y inexplicably had me kicked out of the nt Mobil declines comment on Mr. Wodka's charge wae . Oil refineries are by no mean the only places where asbestos turns up The versatile substance is a fireproof binder and insulator Date thousands of products including such things as Please Turn to Page 16 Column 4 J  ~ Perilous Particles Tiny Asbestos Fibers Pose a Health Threat Continued From Page One ; plastics shingles paper and pipes In most of these the asbestos is harmless to users But depending on how it's added to the products asbestos can pose a threat to workers in the factories where the products are made Until six months ago for instance asbestos was being used as an antileak ingredient in Prestone antifreeze made by Union Carbide Corp. At a Carteret N.J. plant run for Union Carbide by General American Transportation the asbestos would arrive in paper sacks Workers would cut the bags open with knives and feed the powdery white asbestos into tanks of antifreeze says James Irving a fire and safety engineer who has worked in the plant for 22 years . They'd wear face masks but no protective clothing Mr. Irving says and the blowers in the room where they worked would send the dust out to where others were working Then they'd pile up the bags outside the building and a crew would pick them up and throw them onto the truck raising a big cloud of dust Asbestos was removed from the Prestone formula late last year Mr. Irving says the change took place after the Oil Chemical and Atomic workers made an issue of it Union Carbide denies that The decision says Herbert J. Hannigan the company's technical manager of siderations auto products siderations and based on had not mahri kentwig itnhg mate consumers of certain products Bits of as- bestos used in filters for beverage making have been found in wine and beer for instance and could be dangerous if swallowed The use of such filters in beverage making seems to have been curtailed but knowledge of the hazard ap- { pears to have had little effect elsewhere even in medical circles Asbestos says a soon ptuabllsisha ed study is being used in filter for intravenously some hospifed liquids Afraid of a Checkup Among construction workers outside the as- bestos virtually all of whom are ex- posed to asbestos whether they work with it di- rectly or concern remains relatively low Jacob Novak business manager of the Asbestos Workers Union local in New York says he has tried without success for instance to in- duce a group of plasterers to have checkups Some of these people don't want to face a free X ray because they're afraid of what they might hear says Mr. Novak a year vet- eran of the asbestos trades who had a nonmalignant tumor removed from a lung last winter Anxiety in the demolition industry also seems minimal We don't have a dust prob- lem in demolition says Leonard Kapy vice president of Wrecking Corp. of America one of the largest demolition companies in the country Some people think you can take down a building without dust he says with a laugh As for asbestos Mr. Kapy isn't worried I know fellas who have laid asbestos pipe for largest The company operates the asbestos Manville factory in the country at N.J. where according to a recent Mount Sinai study 40 of the workers die of asbestos cancer cutback dealJohns- Corrective steps being taken already Manville maintains are adequate to with in the the problem without causing a plant's production the lifeblood of the New Jersey town of 15,000 At least one asbestos fuc- tory run by a PPG Industries and Corning Glass Works joint venture in Tyler Texas closed last February because of profitability and concern over safety a spokesman says Actually the curbing of asbestos contamina- tion is more an exercise in good housekeeping than capital expenditure While the cost of stopping pollution at a power plant or smelter millions might run into the hundreds of the cost of cleaning up an asbestos operation would be closer to a 10th of that magnitude accord- ing to doctors engineers and union officials Some of the staples of such an operation al ready in use in many plants are compara years and there's nothing wrong with them When working in closed quarters he says his men use drop cloths and fans but they don't wear respirators because they're too hot and they don't work Nevertheless the federal Environmental Protection Agency is preparing regulations ex- pected to be announced this summer that would attempt to impose controls on air pollution from demolition operations These could include requirements for wetting down the work areas or the removal of all asbestos be- tively inexpensive closed plastic bags for mixing cement vacuum attachments on power saws drop cloths suppressant chemicals and powered respirators that blow fil- tered air into the user's face to ease discomfort The new Labor Department standards do indeed call for many of these practice rules But while they are unquestionably fore a building is toppled The technical prob- needed step toward strict controls Dr. Selikoff lem of measuring dust levels however could says he also says he remains pessimistic toss out the demolition regulation entirely The potential for surveillance is remote he says James Krowder an engineer with the EPA's hazardous pollutants branch Setting a standard for asbestos concentrations at work sites has been similarly difficult says because of the small underfinanced staffs of federal and state inspectors A survey ; recently completed at Mount Sinal of 9,400 as- bestos workers around the country for in- for the fledgling Occupation Safety and Health Administration a year Department of stance showed that in 1970 and 1971 there was only one dust count taken in asbestos plants for Labor unit The reason Nobody how every 20,000 days worked much dangerous asbestos And while he says he appreciates the asbes- dustry by Manville Corp. the larg- t est five allow- ing field has fought for a standard five asbestos fibers per cubic centimeter of aly in the factories But the doctors at Mount Sihai and elsewhere argue that the only true safe asbestos pollution would A Four Delay giving particles stream entree into the blood The government's decision yesterday was to impose a fiber average with a maxinium The use of asbestos in fireproof textiles is common Once in a while asbestos fiber even finds its way into ordinary fabrics Dr. William Nicholson an associate of Dr. Selikoff at Mount Sinai has a girl's charcoal winter coat with red trim hanging in one of his laboratories It's one of more than 200,000 imported concentration in the work area of 10 fibers per cubic centimenter at any time In 1976 the new regulations call for a more stringent fiber limit with the year delay intended to give the industry a chance to control the problem The industry says even a fiber limit could hurt it economically J. B. Jobe Johns- coats made with % asbestos fiber sold two years ago Some of them are presumably still being worn Give that coat a shake says Dr. Manville's executive vice president said at hearings in March that it would be socially irresponsible to adopt such stringent regula- Nicholson and you get dust levels as high as in an asbestos factory Asbestos workers in the construction industry are perhaps the most sensitive of all work- ers to the asbestos hazard It was the construction industry which uses thirds of all as- bestos products that was the target of the first wave of antiasbestos publicity more than four years ago At least four cities York Boston Chicago and Philadelphia banned tions tet tos industry's expressed interest in solving the problem Dr. Selikoff is pressed to ex- plain the contapi athn y u am ion ng gmany worke ers and managers This isn't just another scare , he says Some people want to see the bodies in the street before they become con- cerned Unfortunately in this case the bodies are in the street the spraying of asbestos fireproofing material| altogether Substitute materials are being de- | .| veloped though there's some question being raised about their safety too