There Were Rules on Handling Asbestos. They Were Ignored

Each year, hundreds of tons of asbestos arrive in the US from Brazil, most of it destined for two big chemical companies: Olin Corporation and OxyChem, which use the cancer-causing fibrous minerals to help produce chlorine. The US still hasn't banned asbestos, despite dozens of other nations doing so, but the companies have pushed back on concerns by insisting to Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency that today's workers have little to fear, thanks to strict new guidelines designed to significantly reduce workers' exposure to it. However, more than a dozen ex-employees from OxyChem's plant in Niagara Falls, NY, where some of them worked for decades (the plant closed late last year for "unrelated reasons"), tell Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi of ProPublica that these changes may be too late for them, even as the US finally contemplates banning asbestos.

McGrory and Bedi relay what they call the "quintessential story of American chemical regulation," in which workers toiling in unsafe conditions "were sacrificed to the bottom line of industry," and federal agencies were "cowed again and again by the well-financed lawyers and lobbyists of the companies they are supposed to oversee." The OxyChem workers interviewed describe working with little to no protection in areas rife with the material, and managers who looked the other way, despite protocols put in place to protect them. "We were constantly swimming in this stuff," says one ex-employee who worked at the plant for more than 25 years. McGrory and Bedi note that "one guy seemed to always have some on his mustache," per another former worker. The piece details some of the employees who got sick and died over the years from illnesses such as asbestosis and mesothelioma.

Multiple former workers say they even wore asbestos monitors to gauge the amount of asbestos around them, but that management failed to act on the results. "I failed so many times, they quit testing me," one ex-staffer says. Their revelations have floored environmental and public health experts. "Totally unacceptable," one tells McGrory and Bedi. "It sounds like something that maybe would happen in the 1940s or the 1950s," notes another. At any time, the EPA or Congress could've banned the substance, much like the EU and other nations have done over the past 25 years or so. Instead, "over and over, they crumpled in the face of pressure from OxyChem and its peers in the chlorine industry," McGrory and Bedi write. OxyChem calls ProPublica's account "inaccurate." Olin hasn't commented, despite multiple requests. Read the full piece here. (More asbestos stories.)