S.D. Joins Cities Suing the Makers of Asbestos : Damages: The city has joined a growing list of municipalities in seeking millions to pay for the removal from public buildings of the cancer-causing material once widely used in construction.

Elected officials in the city and county of San Diego didn’t intend to blaze a trail when they decided in recent months to sue several asbestos manufacturers. Their motivation was simple: to win damages that would help defray the estimated multimillion dollar cost of removing the cancer-causing agent from hundreds of public buildings.

Within California, however, lawyers say the suits have made San Diego something of a maverick. The city and county are among the first municipalities in California to join a growing number of state and local governments, school districts and public hospitals that are taking asbestos manufacturers to court.

From South Carolina to North Dakota, scores of small- and medium-sized cities have sued large companies such as W.R. Grace Co. and U.S. Gypsum for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And more than a few have won. In 1986, for example, the city of Greenville, S.C., won nearly $7 million from W.R. Grace to pay for asbestos removal and replacement. In July, the public school district of Morton County, N.D., was awarded $382,000 to pay for removal of U.S. Gypsum products--and an additional $450,000 in punitive damages.

“Unlike most trends, this one didn’t start in California. In fact, California seems to be lagging behind a bit,” said Marcia Hughes, a partner with Casey, Gerry, Casey, Westbrook, Reed and Hughes, the San Diego law firm that is handling both the city’s and county’s suits. “But many cities are winning, or at least settling for large sums. We’re optimistic.”

The 1988 city suit, which goes to trial in state court next August, affects eight buildings, but may be expanded to include as many as 158 more. The county suit, filed in U.S. District Court last month, focuses on the main downtown courthouse and central jail. No specific monetary amount is being sought by the city or county, but officials say they expect that removing and replacing the asbestos will cost millions of dollars.

“Given the magnitude of the problem, it’s worth the effort” to sue, said David Janssen, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer.

Of the handful of asbestos property damage suits filed by public entities in California in recent years, none have yet been settled. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s 1983 suit against Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., which affects 12,000 buildings, is still in the discovery stage. The San Francisco Unified School District’s suit is pending as well.

The boom in asbestos-in-buildings litigation is fueled by the staggering cost of asbestos removal and by the frequency of its use. Until it was outlawed in the 1970s, asbestos was included in about 3,000 products used to fireproof, insulate and soundproof buildings. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 20% of the country’s 3.6 million public and commercial buildings--about 733,000 separate structures--may contain some asbestos material in walls, ceilings and support beams.

Asbestos that was installed in the 1960s for an average of 25 cents a square foot is now costing an average of $30 a square foot to remove--by one estimate, government and commercial property owners could spend $100 billion over the next 25 years to remove asbestos.

“It’s sort of like buying a car for $5,000 and then being told you’d have to pay $500,000 to get rid of it,” said Thomas D. Penfield, one of the attorneys who will try the San Diego County suit. “You would feel like, ‘If I’d only known . . .’ ”

That feeling has prompted so many asbestos-related lawsuits that the field supports its own journal, the National Journal of Asbestos-in-Buildings Litigation, a twice monthly clearinghouse of court rulings that commonly runs to 40 pages in length. It has also spawned another type of suit, between asbestos manufacturers and their insurance companies.

In 1988, for example, after 83 Texas school districts won asbestos property damage claims from W.R. Grace, the asbestos company’s insurer, the Continental Casualty Co., declined to pay damages. Grace’s attorneys filed suit, and the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas ruled that Continental Casualty pay up to $75 million to indemnify Grace for the costs of defending and settling the claims.

“Asbestos is liability looking for a target,” said Penfield, whose firm has done asbestos litigation for eight years. “It affects building owners, workers in those buildings, insurance companies, schools. It can be like a domino effect.”

But not everyone chooses to sue. The suits can take years to resolve. And because of their technical nature, they are expensive. Most asbestos-in-buildings litigation alleges that asbestos companies knew, or should have known, that their product was potentially deadly.

For years, scientists have argued that asbestos fibers, while safe when contained, can cause cancer when torn from walls and ceilings and allowed to float freely in the air. Penfield said that at least some asbestos manufacturers are believed to have known of potential health hazards since the 1930s.

But plaintiffs must also prove that specific products made by specific companies were used in their buildings. The discovery process involves analyzing samples from each building involved, interviewing construction workers about what products they installed and sorting through records.

In an effort to eliminate courtroom squabbles over whose asbestos is in a building and to speed up the clean-up process, Congress passed the Asbestos Information bill in 1988. The bill, signed into law by Ronald Reagan, requires asbestos manufacturers to disclose product characteristics to the federal government.

Other legislation is changing quickly, particularly at the state level. According to a survey of state asbestos laws and regulations issued by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 24 states reported new laws or regulations regarding asbestos in 1988. An equal number said they anticipated new laws or regulations in 1989.

It is only a matter of time, experts say, before the remaining states pass asbestos laws, which typically require a landlord to remove asbestos before a building is demolished or renovated.

Among the proposed asbestos-related federal legislation is a bill, introduced this April by U.S. Rep. James J. Florio (D-N.J.), that would extend existing asbestos clean-up guidelines for schools to apply to federal government buildings as well. The standards would also apply to commercial buildings if a building owner elected to undertake asbestos abatement work.

However, concerns about how to pay for extended cleanups have impeded the bill’s progress. It remains in a House subcommittee.