Asbestos Workers Fear for Jobs, Not Health

After working eight years at an asbestos mill here in the Mother Lode country, Dave Gorgas is nervous about his future.

But Gorgas, a lanky, hawk-nosed man of 32, is not afraid that he will die of lung cancer or some other asbestos-related disease.

Instead he worries that public anxiety and government regulations will shut down Calaveras Asbestos Ltd., one of three operating asbestos mines and mills in the country, and throw him out of work.

“I’m concerned about getting a steady job, but I’m not concerned about the levels of asbestos I’m exposed to,” remarked Gorgas, a union steward who is married and has one young child and a second on the way.

Like Gorgas, Dan Daniels hopes to be saved from those who would save asbestos workers from asbestos.

‘A Real Concern’

Daniels, an electrician, has worked 23 years at the KCAC Inc. asbestos mill in economically depressed King City. Job loss “is a real concern of most of the guys,” Daniels said. “And I’m sure they fear that worse than the asbestos.”

John L. Myers, president of KCAC and chairman of the Asbestos Information Assn. of North America, a U.S-Canadian trade group, argues that asbestos illness has been arrested by workplace controls on airborne dust and elimination of some high-risk uses of the fibrous mineral.

“I think the high incidence of disease from asbestos is in the past,” Myers said. “I sincerely believe that the asbestos crisis is over, and that asbestos can be used safely . . . in today’s products.”

But this upbeat assessment may be the last gasp of a dying industry.

In January, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed an immediate ban on some asbestos products and elimination of all others within a decade. The proposal, which had been under consideration for several years, would prohibit certain high-volume asbestos uses for which safer and economically competitive substitutes are available. These products--accounting for about half of the annual U.S. asbestos consumption of 240,000 tons--include protective clothing; roofing and flooring felts, sheet flooring and floor tile made with asbestos; and asbestos concrete pipe and fittings.

All other asbestos uses would be phased out over 10 years through a 10% annual reduction in imports and domestic mining.

The EPA has tentatively set July 15 for the start of public hearings on the proposal in Washington.

No Level ‘Is Without Risk’

The EPA estimates that the ban would avert about 1,900 cancer deaths from exposure to asbestos fiber, which agency administrator Lee M. Thomas said “is released into the air through its life cycle, from mining to processing to use and final disposal. . . . No level of exposure is without risk.”

Asbestos is regarded by many researchers as the second leading environmental cause of lung cancer, behind cigarette smoking.

But to workers and officials at the two California mines and mills, the notoriety of asbestos seems more a subject of bitter amusement than a source of personal concern. Neither gruesome news stories nor the weight of medical evidence has shaken their conviction that asbestos work can be pretty safe--or at least that, under current safety rules, its risks are unremarkable compared to other jobs.

Nor do the the mines and mills seem a cause of anxiety for most who live nearby.

King City, a sun-baked Monterey County farm town of 6,700 on U.S. 101, is set among vineyards, fields of lettuce, chili peppers, tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic. The mountains nearby are known for boar hunting, and tusked heads of the wild pigs grin from the walls of local establishments.

Five miles south of town, the two-story KCAC mill is an industrial island in an expanse of rolling farmland, its conveyors spitting wet gray tailings into a pile as tall as the roof. A few hundred feet behind the plant, a grass-covered mesa has grown up over the years, made of more than 300,000 tons of tailings that have been hauled there and seeded. From the mesa, the Gabilan range stretches out to the east, while the Santa Lucia Mountains rise in the blue haze to the west.

Owned by Union Carbide Corp. from the opening in 1963 until last year’s sale to KCAC, the mill crushes and screens asbestos ore to produce about 20,000 tons of pure fiber per year. Annual sales are $6 million to $7 million, with about 70% going to domestic firms and most of the rest to Japan, Europe and South America. KCAC fiber is used in floor tiles and oil drilling muds and as a thickener for asphalt, auto undercoating and other types of resins and sealants.

Mine 57 Miles Away

The ore is hauled 57 miles from a mine in San Benito County over mountain roads strewn with pine cones that are almost the size of bowling balls. The open-pit mine at the southern end of the Diablo Mountains is cut into an asbestos deposit of more than 40 square miles that, for size and purity, is unique. The asbestos is found in serpentine, the California state rock.

KCAC has 60 employees, the majority paid $7 to $11 per hour. According to the company, most of those who hire on remain with the company, with the average hourly worker having 10 years’ tenure at the plant.

The company payroll would seem modest somewhere else. But this is King City, where average annual unemployment is 19%--and tops 25% in winter when farm work and food processing slack off.

“Sixty jobs to us is significant,” said City Manager Damon Edwards, who noted that a city industrial park completed a year ago has yet to attract a tenant.

Over the years, occasional air tests have shown elevated fiber levels in the sparsely settled areas downwind and upwind of the mill.

And in an incident in 1979, a hauler from the KCAC mine accidentally scattered a full truckload of asbestos ore along a major street in King City.

Nonetheless, Edwards said, the asbestos plant has never been an issue in King City, which “is not an enclave for very active environmentalists.”

No Complaints Registered

Dee Gregory, a senior clerk in the King City office of the Monterey County Health Department, said that in eight years with the agency she has never taken a complaint nor even a question about the asbestos mill.

“It’s a little town,” she said. “Everybody sleeps in it. They haven’t woke up to asbestos yet.”

One KCAC worker had another explanation. “A lot of people in this area think that is a cement plant,” he said.

But even those familiar with asbestos may be given more to gallows humor than expressions of concern.

At the Picacho Saloon, a roadhouse on an isolated stretch of road between King City and the asbestos mine, John Brewen, a ranch hand, thanked asbestos for his robust appearance.

“I’m 94 years old,” he quipped. “It hasn’t hurt me a bit.”

Brewen, actually 41, also joked about the remarkable heat resistance of fish in local streams.

“You cook ‘em and cook ‘em and cook ‘em,” he said. “They stay the same way.”

More than 200 miles away in the Sierra foothills, the Calaveras mine and mill, which also opened in the early 1960s, occupies 500 acres on a narrow arm of Tulloch Lake, an impoundment of the Stanislaus River.

The seven-story mill, standing on a high bluff above the lake, produces about 36,000 tons of asbestos fiber per year, almost all used to strengthen concrete pipe and building products. Annual sales are $10 million to $14 million, mostly to foreign countries, including Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.

A few hundred yards from the mill, asbestos ore is gouged from an open pit mine that resembles a giant amphitheater, with rock benches forming huge concentric circles from the lip to the base more than 500 feet below.

Giant piles of mine and mill waste are within view of another monument to earth-moving: the New Melones Dam just upstream on the Stanislaus.

Payroll of 180

Calaveras pays about $8.50 to $10 per hour and has a payroll of 180--making it the largest private employer in Calaveras County.

The Calaveras operation has prompted a bit more environmental concern. In a nearby residential area, unpaved asbestos-laden roads--which may have been built 15 years ago with waste from the mine and mill--are being sealed to hold down dust through the EPA Superfund toxic cleanup program.

But the area has a long familiarity with mining--and its inherent safety and environmental risks. Perhaps the most widespread local grievances against the plant is the annual winter shutdown that idles most of the work force for about three months.

Wilbur-Ellis Co. of San Francisco, a distributor of agricultural chemicals in the United States and foreign countries, is part owner of both Calaveras and KCAC--and the country’s other asbestos mine and mill in Vermont. Most of the asbestos used in the United States comes from Canada.

The proposed asbestos ban is seen by many at Calaveras and KCAC as a reaction to the carelessness of a bygone era, when asbestos billowed through factories and ship holds like windblown snow.

“I think what they’re not taking into consideration is how tight of a ship we run down there,” said Gorgas, who works in the truck shop storeroom at Calaveras Asbestos.

In interviews, some workers and officials blamed the depressed state of their industry on politically motivated regulators and the news media--described by one Calaveras Asbestos official as a “Chicken Little industry” that makes a “living off of keeping the sky falling.”

Some questioned why news stories rarely note that most asbestos victims also smoked and that health risks are far less for those who do not.

‘Have We Been Picked On?’

“The government subsidizes tobacco and wants to ban asbestos. . . . And you say, have we been picked on,” KCAC President Myers asked rhetorically. “I believe we have.”

Others suggest that the industry is small and on the defensive--and thus an easy mark for public displays of vigilance.

The fact that asbestos helped send many workers to their graves was never mentioned as a cause of the industry’s predicament.

KCAC officials boast that there has never been a claim--much less, a proven case--of asbestos-related illness at their mine and mill in 23 years. The statement was backed by employees and a local clinic that periodically examines company workers.

The spotless record, while encouraging, is not wholly reassuring, since asbestos disease often does not show up for 30 or 40 years after initial exposure.

A Calaveras Asbestos official also claimed an unblemished safety record for that plant. But he admitted, when questioned, that a previous owner, Pacific Asbestos Co.--which operated the plant through 1974--had to compensate workers for lung damage.

In 1973, a team from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York examined Pacific Asbestos workers at the local union’s request. Chest X-rays showed lung abnormalities in 59% of those who had worked at the mill for five to 10 years--a high rate for relatively brief exposure.

Subsequently 17 workers who filed workers compensation claims were found by a state compensation judge to have at least “early” asbestosis--a disease caused by lung scarring that, in advanced cases, can result in seriously impaired breathing.

‘Rather Unbelievable’

Conditions in the plant at that time were “rather unbelievable,” said Don Spatz, a former official with the union.

Big improvements since have not eliminated the anxiety of all workers. Mike Canham, 35, who worked four years at the Calaveras mine before opening an auto repair business last year, said fine dust hung over the place despite company efforts to wet it down. Sometimes enough dust built up in one shift that “you could play tick-tack-toe on your car,” Canham said.

Canham’s wife, Eloise, said she “would be concerned even driving out there to get his paycheck. . . . For a long time, I tried to get him to quit.”

Most employees praised the companies for working hard to protect them. “The management is a lot stricter on us than a lot of . . . people are on themselves,” said Marty Harris, a bearded man of 29 who has worked eight years for KCAC.

KCAC uses a milling process that keeps the asbestos wet through most of the production process and prevents fiber release. Both companies spray outdoor ore and piles of tailings from water trucks to hold down dust. They also issue respirators to workers and require their use in areas with the highest fiber counts. And both plants use exhaust fans and fabric tubes to capture dust.

Both firms have banned smoking on company property, recognizing that asbestos workers who smoke are at much greater risk than those exposed to asbestos or tobacco alone. Some workers who used to smoke “have even expressed that they’re glad of that rule because it made them quit,” said Daniels, a 23-year KCAC employee.

Calaveras, however, does not require workers to wear coveralls, and neither firm requires employees to shower after work to avoid dragging asbestos home. There have been documented cases of family members of asbestos workers contracting mesothelioma, an invariably fatal cancer usually caused by asbestos. The Mount Sinai research team in 1973 found disturbing levels of airborne asbestos in the homes of some Pacific Asbestos workers.

And although workers praised management for being frank about asbestos risks, it was evident that some KCAC workers were somewhat misinformed on the hazards of chrysotile asbestos, the type mined and milled at both California plants. In interviews, several said that chrysotile is not a proven cause of cancer among nonsmokers.

However, extensive medical research has shown that while chrysotile is less likely to break into the extremely fine fibers that most easily lodge in the lungs, it can cause cancer, even in nonsmokers.

Les Raper, 60, a former lab technician for Pacific Asbestos who has asbestosis, said the idea that chrysotile asbestos was “not harmful . . . was expounded by the company, and we believed it.”

This “was pretty stupid because none of it was safe,” Raper said. But at the time “it sounded reasonable.”

Supporters of an asbestos ban contend that the purported safety of modern asbestos mines and mills is somewhat beside the point, since the measure is aimed more at later exposures.

The mines and mills are “not where most asbestos disease is coming from,” explained William Nicholson, associate director of environmental medicine at Mount Sinai.

Studies suggest that there is a greater risk for other workers, such as factory hands who blend asbestos fiber into finished products and construction workers who install or rip out asbestos construction materials.

The ban also is intended to eliminate consumer exposure, such as might occur when a vinyl asbestos floor is replaced.

The large volume of exports to factories in the Third World--where dust controls may be primitive--also raises safety concerns.

High Marks Received

The Calaveras and KCAC operations themselves, however, are given high marks by most of the health and safety officials who deal with them. “We’re really working at staying in business,” said Bob Kronkhyte, vice president of KCAC.

Officials with Cal/OSHA, the state job safety agency, and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, praised both operations. Most areas of the plants meet the workplace limit of two asbestos fibers per cubic centimeter of air--although that standard allows a worker to breathe up to 16 million fibers during an eight-hour shift and is under broad attack.

Both plants on occasion have been cited by air quality agencies for visible emission of asbestos-containing dust, which is prohibited under the federal Clean Air Act.

Larry Odle, who heads the Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District, said the King City mill is in compliance with district rules. But he said his agency feels obliged to watch the plant closely.

During an inspection a few years ago, Odle said, he and one of his inspectors were told by a company official that their concern about asbestos was overblown. To emphasize the point, Odle said, the official--who has since retired--dumped some asbestos on his desk and “proceeded to . . . actually eat it. . . . I mean, he put it in his mouth.”

This, Odle said, “was supposedly going to convince us that we should reduce the frequency of inspections.”