Worker Blows Whistle on Asbestos in Hospital

The incident that forever changed Jerry Snell arrived without warning in a cloud of white asbestos dust six years ago.

It occurred as Snell, a maintenance worker at Metropolitan State Hospital, was changing covers on large presses used to iron sheets and pillowcases.

“I started to uncrate one of the new covers,” he recalled recently. “I pulled it out, and the white stuff went everywhere.”

As nearby fans blew the asbestos fibers throughout the hospital’s laundry, a worried Snell called his supervisors, who evacuated the building.

The hospital was reprimanded by Cal/OSHA for not notifying the worker safety agency that asbestos was to be handled by employees. And Snell, imbued with a new awareness of asbestos hazards, was transformed into a whistle-blower.

“That started the crusade,” Snell, 42, said of his six-year effort to identify asbestos hazards at the Norwalk hospital and to protect maintenance workers from them.

Snell’s behind-the-scenes crusade--waged mostly through conversations with other workers and repeated complaints to his union and his supervisors--may have peaked in November, when Cal/OSHA cited the hospital for six violations of worker safety law. Acting on complaints by Snell and a second employee, investigators found crumbling, dangerous asbestos insulation in equipment rooms and crawl spaces of 20 of the facility’s 76 buildings.

Beginning with the 1983 laundry incident, the 1,500-employee psychiatric hospital has received a total of 16 citations on five occasions for asbestos-related problems, according to state documents.

That record, say spokesmen for two unions representing about 50 maintenance and craft employees at the hospital, has identified Metropolitan as one of a handful of state facilities in Southern California whose asbestos problems require special union attention.

Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, sheet-metal and heating-system workers are the employees whose jobs regularly place them in false ceilings, attics and basements--the types of non-public places where frayed, brittle asbestos insulation has now been found. Hospital officials say there is no evidence that asbestos has posed a threat to patients or the public.

Crumbling asbestos is extremely dangerous because its microscopic fibers can flake into the air and can be inhaled, creating a risk of lung cancer or other respiratory diseases.

Several hospital workers said in interviews that they consider the recent Cal/OSHA citations strong evidence that hospital administrators are not concerned enough about asbestos.

Three Citations

“Where will (they) be in 15 years when I get lung cancer?” said maintenance worker Ralph Portugal. In August, Portugal said, he and two other workers ripped out a ceiling after a supervisor told them it contained no asbestos. But Cal/OSHA tests later showed that asbestos was present, and the agency issued three citations against the hospital.

The three workers involved in the job said none of them wore respirators or protective clothing.

Metropolitan administrators said procedures were followed during the August incident and defended their worker safety programs in general, saying they are extremely sensitive to complaints about possible asbestos exposure.

“As we run into asbestos, we follow all the procedures. We constantly work with the unions. We don’t put our employees at risk,” William Silva, executive director at Metropolitan since 1987, said after the Cal/OSHA citations were issued in November.

Silva said the hospital has identified asbestos hazards since at least 1982, when it began a $20-million rehabilitation of its buildings, all of which were built between 1916 and 1955. As in many public and private buildings erected before the 1980s, asbestos was used routinely as an insulator and fire retardant at Metropolitan.

Hospital administrators have declined to answer specific questions about past incidents, saying that some supervisors involved have left the hospital.

Several maintenance workers who were otherwise critical of the hospital’s response to asbestos problems, acknowledged in interviews that the hospital has become more responsive in the last year or two with a change in some supervisors and administrators. Stricter state and federal regulations have also increased the awareness of asbestos hazards, they said.

Even Snell--a union steward who said he was twice threatened with dismissal in 1986 because of asbestos complaints and was twice exiled to the hospital’s boiler room--sees improvement.

“We have problems with current management,” Snell said, “but I see light at the end of the tunnel. We have a workable relationship.”

That has not always been the case, Snell and several of his co-workers said.

‘The Big Lie’

Jim Failing, a steward for the Alliance of Trades and Maintenance, a union of state crafts workers and laborers, said, “The big lie for 10 years, and I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it, was that there is no asbestos problem at Metropolitan State Hospital.”

Snell said his own experiences over the years show that supervisors have sometimes failed to adequately respond to known asbestos hazards and to dangers that could have been identified readily.

After the 1983 laundry incident, for example, Snell said he told supervisors that he often encountered deteriorated asbestos in the hospital’s mechanical rooms, where it insulated pipes and machinery.

Hospital administrators responded to Snell’s requests for more protective clothing and complete asbestos removal by saying that they were following all worker-protection laws. Costly asbestos removal, they said in letters to Snell, was being addressed by the Department of Mental Health on a statewide basis, depending on the severity of the hazard.

They also said that a September, 1983, hospital test monitored by Cal/OSHA showed that maintenance workers performing a variety of jobs in the presence of brittle asbestos were not exposed to amounts that exceeded levels where special protection of workers is required.

In 1985, Snell complained through his union about brittle asbestos in the boiler room, where he had been assigned for a year. A hospital manager acknowledged the problem in a letter to Snell, but the crumbling asbestos was not covered with a protective glue-like coating until 14 months later, according to Snell and hospital documents.

In 1986, in what Snell described as an act of “utter frustration,” he painted red arrows on pipes in a number of buildings to identify asbestos hazards. Supervisors cited him for misconduct, Snell said, explaining that the arrows were a hazard because they might be confused with those that indicate the flow of hot water and steam, causing accidents.

Closed Crawl Spaces

Most recently, Snell and Failing called Cal/OSHA last July with complaints about asbestos debris in crawl spaces beneath several buildings. The inquiry that followed prompted a Cal/OSHA investigator to close off crawl spaces and equipment rooms in 20 aging hospital buildings where debris was found.

“He didn’t even have to go under most of those buildings,” Snell said. “You could just shine a flashlight on it. It’s there for anybody to see. That’s been the frustrating thing.”

Cal/OSHA, responding to those hazards and other safety problems including black widow spiders and exposed electrical wiring, cited the hospital in November for five “serious” violations of law and one lesser violation.

Violations are classified as serious if they create a “substantial probability that an employee will suffer death or serious physical harm,” and if the employer through “reasonable diligence” should have known of the problem and corrected it, according to Cal/OSHA.

Crawl spaces in four of the same buildings were among 24 buildings at Metropolitan where asbestos hazards were discovered in a 1986 survey by the Office of the State Architect, state officials confirmed. They said, however, that hazards were rated low two years ago and prompt abatement was not required.

Hospital officials say they have responded promptly to all known hazards.

Employees are trained to identify asbestos, and a private contractor has been hired to remove it when it is friable, or crumbly, said Silva, who has been hospital director for a year and a half.

“Anytime it’s identified, it’s blocked off until it’s abated. We take this issue very seriously,” Silva said. “When it comes to cost, and you’re talking about a person’s health and welfare, we’re not going to quibble about cost.”

Jack Eubanks, Silva’s assistant, noted in a recent interview that about $230,000 has been spent to remove or encapsulate hazardous asbestos in the 24 buildings where hazards were identified in the 1986 state survey.

As for Snell’s allegations of harassment and near dismissal, Eubanks would not comment other than to say Snell’s complaints about asbestos had nothing to do with his treatment by supervisors.

But some workers see things differently. It is Snell, the determined union steward, whose name they often mention when describing their own increasing sensitivity to asbestos hazards at Metropolitan.

“The supervisors class him as a troublemaker,” maintenance worker Quincel Holley said. “But I see him as somebody who’s doing something that’s right. Jerry keeps them on their toes. They think, ‘What’s he going to do now?’ And it benefits all of us.”

Generally, Snell is not a hard guy to get along with, said sheet-metal worker Jesus Barrios, “but as far as this asbestos thing, he’s just been adamant that the men should not get in a situation where they endanger their health. He’s just been very vocal about it.”

Snell, who lives in Norwalk with his wife, an elementary schoolteacher, and two teen-age children, said he never sought recognition through his role as a whistle-blower.

But four years in the Navy after his 1964 graduation from Burbank High School helped build his resolve to confront problems directly, Snell said. Eight years with an aggressive union at the old Firestone tire plant in South Gate in the 1970s also made him keenly aware of employees’ rights, he said.

“I tried to be a walking conscience for (Firestone) management,” he said.

Snell, who was then in his 20s, acknowledges that he made youthful mistakes at Firestone and said he may have developed a reputation as a nit-picker.

Snell arrived at Metropolitan in 1981 and said he strictly followed orders until the laundry incident in February, 1983. After that, he said, he used his union experience to sometimes buck superiors when they ordered him onto asbestos jobs for which he thought he was not adequately trained or protected.

“I might do it, but not without a kick and fight,” he said. But usually, he said, he would file complaints then back away to give supervisors time to respond and for their anger to subside.

To isolate him from other workers, Snell said, supervisors assigned him to a solitary watch of the hospital’s four large steam-producing boilers in July, 1984. He served there for 14 months and for 17 months more in 1986 and 1987 until the boiler room was closed, he said.

Tour by Managers

However, Snell’s complaints about brittle asbestos in the boiler room prompted a 1985 tour of the building by two hospital managers and, in 1986, the material was finally sealed off, according to Snell and hospital documents.

Then he painted the red arrows on asbestos-laden pipes. “The administration at that time was refusing to discuss the (asbestos) issue,” he said.

About the same time, he was involved in a confrontation at an employee training session, where, he said, he challenged his supervisor’s assertion that asbestos was not a hazard to hospital maintenance workers.

He had survived a dismissal hearing just five months earlier, and the meeting was being videotaped, so he withheld comment at first, he said.

“But after a few minutes, they just put down (another dissenter), so I picked up and it just turned into a shouting match between myself and the chief engineer,” Snell said. “The next day they told me I was back down in the boiler room by myself.”

A letter formally notifying Snell of his August, 1986, reassignment to the boiler room graveyard shift said the move made “the most optimal use of engineering staff skills.” Snell’s union complained, charging harassment, but the assignment stuck.

About the same time, according to a grievance filed by Barrios and 19 other crafts employees, the hospital formally notified the workers that they would routinely be required to help outside contractors in removing asbestos from the facility.

The workers filed a grievance and won, with top hospital administrators agreeing that staff workers would only have to remove or encapsulate “minimal” amounts of asbestos when doing repairs. But that decision has sometimes been ignored, Barrios said.

“You say, ‘Isn’t that asbestos?’ And they say, ‘No, it’s safe. That’s not asbestos,’ ” Barrios said. “It seems like management doesn’t care if it’s a danger to the worker as long as the work gets done. . . . They break their own rules.”

Difference of Opinion

In response to such complaints, hospital administrator Eubanks said: “There would be a difference of opinion of what is major and what is minor, and that may be the crux of (the dispute).”

It has been Metropolitan’s policy since October, 1985, to use only outside contractors for large asbestos projects, Eubanks said. Properly equipped maintenance workers and craftsmen are sometimes directed to do minor repairs involving removal of small amounts of asbestos, as allowed by law, he said.

Snell and other workers said they saw the hospital’s 1986 attempt to begin regularly assigning them to asbestos abatement projects as the hospital’s first open admission of a large asbestos problem.

“They went from the official position that the stuff doesn’t exist to, ‘We admit we got it and guess who’s going to get rid of it for us,’ ” Snell said.

Three months later Snell took a leave of absence and filed an unsuccessful claim of disability caused by stress on the job.

By the time he returned in January, 1987, administrative changes had begun to affect hospital policy on asbestos, said Snell and other workers.

Since then, new safety regulations have put workers and supervisors on their guard, he said.

In addition, Snell said, “They started saying to us, ‘If you’re concerned about asbestos, it’s incumbent on you to protect yourself.’ ” Hospital policy, according to administrative responses to grievances about asbestos exposure in 1988, is that workers are responsible for reporting unsafe conditions to their supervisors.

The policy, though acknowledging the asbestos hazard, can be risky to follow, because it puts workers in the position of disobeying supervisors and facing discipline if the worker and his boss disagree on whether a job can be done safely, union officials said.

Snell’s status--and perhaps his approach to problems--also seems to have changed.

Statewide Post

He was named to his union’s statewide contract negotiating team this year. Jim Tatum, the representative of the International Union of Operating Engineers who made the appointment, said Snell is “a very knowledgeable and very conscientious employee” who recognized Metropolitan’s serious asbestos problem long before many others.

“We are discovering in many of our state facilities that the problem is more extensive than we believed at first. It seems like it’s just now being defined,” Tatum said.

Shop steward Failing, who has worked closely with Snell this year, said his colleague is respected partly because he can remain calm during tense situations.

“He’s more of a diplomat than I am,” Failing said. “He gets on people’s nerves in a different way than I do. He kind of still retains his sense of humor and not his hostility towards the administration. He doesn’t show it, so sometimes he can communicate pretty good. It’s gotten to be an emotional thing with me. When I go to work in the morning it’s almost like suiting up to go into battle instead of going to make a living.”

Snell said that while asbestos problems remain serious, he can now joke with management.

“I say, ‘When are you going to reactivate the boiler room and put me back on graveyard?’ It’s nice to be able to joke about that,” he said. “I think management thinks I’m a pain . . . but now I can walk into about any office any time and discuss problems they’ve refused to discuss in the past.”

With the air of someone who has won an important battle, Snell added:

“(Supervisors) mean well, I think, but they’re so confused about what to do and their hands are so tied by financing. I myself wouldn’t want the responsibility of dealing with this asbestos problem.”