Indoor Pollution Alleged as El Segundo ‘Sick Building’ Trial Begins

Louise Aldrich says working at one of the Airport Towers in El Segundo made her absolutely sick.

Her eyes hurt. Her head pounded. Her throat and neck glands swelled.

Aldrich wasn’t alone in her suffering, her lawyers charged in a trial that opened in Torrance Superior Court last week.

They say similar symptoms began plaguing many of the 12th-floor occupants of Airport Tower C shortly after they moved into the spanking-new building on Sepulveda Boulevard in early 1985.

The alleged effects of fumes trapped in the 23-story building, originally owned by Prudential Insurance Co., has become the subject of a multimillion-dollar civil trial featuring 14 attorneys, a dozen plaintiffs, 10 defendants and nearly 1,500 exhibits.

Legal experts say the complex trial, expected to last as long as three months, could help set standards for allocating responsibility in cases alleging “sick building syndrome.”

The term refers to buildings in which poor ventilation combines with a variety of fumes to create indoor air pollution. Environmental experts say the syndrome has become more common in recent years.

Energy conservation measures begun in the late 1970s--such as sealing windows shut and installing extra insulation--and new man-made construction materials that release gases into the air have combined to create indoor pollution as much as 100 times worse than pollution outdoors, a recent Environmental Protection Agency study has shown.

Plaintiffs in the Torrance suit say indoor pollution and poor construction worked in concert with a poorly designed ventilation system in Airport Tower C to drive them from their 12th-floor offices.

Defendants in the civil suit say that the building is not sick, and that hysteria stemming from minor glue fumes and the sight of inspectors wearing futuristic protective clothing precipitated the lawsuit.

Tower C, the third of three high-rise buildings Prudential developed on Sepulveda Boulevard, was the only one to allow tenants to move in before all construction had been completed. The other two are not named in the lawsuit. All three buildings are currently occupied.

Attorneys outlined the case they will be presenting to jurors during opening statements last week.

“This building was a classic and severe case of sick building syndrome,” said attorney Helen Eisenstein, who represents two former tenants--a software firm and an accounting firm--and eight of the 10 individuals who are suing Prudential and its contractors.

“A number of factors came together to make tenants sick here: inadequate ventilation, construction fumes, improper operation of the ventilation system and poor choices of building materials,” Eisenstein said.

“Prudential built a sick building and allowed that building to get sicker and sicker,” she said.

Attorneys for Prudential and its contractors, however, told jurors that “nothing sinister” was going on at Airport Tower C and that the structure does not suffer from sick building syndrome.

“Through hysteria and through greed, what you and I would equate with smelling model airplane glue has grown into a situation where you are faced with making a decision in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit,” said attorney Scott Hoyt, who represents Prudential and its property manager.

Eisenstein said the trouble began in February, 1985, about a month after the 34 staff members of Phoenix Computers Corp. and the eight staff members of the accounting firm of Schneider & Connolly moved into adjoining suites on Airport Tower C’s 12th floor.

Although the basic construction work had been completed on the high-rise, much of the interior work remained incomplete on several floors, she said.

Property managers assured the new tenants, however, that none of the remaining construction work would affect them.

On Feb. 15, 1985, however, Aldrich and Pam Connolly were sitting in Connolly’s office when strong glue odors began wafting into the room. Both women began to cough, their eyes and throats burned and they had trouble catching their breath as they fled the building, Eisenstein said.

Property managers discovered that one of the building’s contractors had used a duct sealant to repair holes cut in the ventilation system on the opposite side of the 12th floor, Eisenstein and Hoyt agreed.

A county health inspector called to the scene that day advised against using the sealant again while tenants were in the building.

What happened after that is the basis of the suit.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs contend that strong construction-related odors continued throughout the spring, frequently driving tenants from their offices with headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats and dizziness.

The defendants, however, contend that the initial glue fumes sparked a wave of unfounded hysteria among the tenants, who became “habitual complainers . . . who were feeding off one another,” Hoyt said.

“The inspector showed up in a moon suit and it scared people,” Hoyt told jurors. “He’ll tell you that that was an over-reaction.”

Eisenstein said the complaints continued because odors from the sealant and several other substances continued to build up and could not dissipate in a building that provided very little fresh air.

Although property managers tried to resolve the problem by taking out windows and putting in large fans, this only made the offices intolerably windy and cold.

Ultimately, both companies moved elsewhere.

“This could all have been avoided with planning and exercise of common sense,” Eisenstein told jurors.

“I am convinced the defendants in this case did nothing wrong,” Hoyt responded.

Carl Meyer, an attorney and former chemistry professor whose law practice specializes in indoor air quality issues, said the case is one of the first of its kind actually to go to trial.

“You have to step-by-step prove that the chemicals were linked to the building, how much of the chemicals were in the building, where the ventilation took the chemicals and in what concentrations,” said Meyer, who is not involved in the Airport Tower case. “Then you have to show that people breathed that stuff and you have to prove with toxicologists and doctors how that impacted them.

“That’s an expensive process, involving dozens of experts, and most people can’t go through that,” he said.

Cases involving indoor air pollution are similar to the new field of litigation created in the 1920s after the invention of the automobile, Meyer said.

“We’re doing litigation that in 20 or 30 years will be routine,” he said. “We are setting standards so that in the future people won’t need all these experts.”

In addition to the computer and accounting firms, the Airport Tower suit was filed by 10 individual workers for the two companies--Aldrich, Connolly, Michael and Jackie Schneider, Jeanne Call, Pauline Bowie, James Miles, Elizabeth Harding, Barbara Phillips and Cynthia Lee Jones.

The suit names Prudential; Property Management Systems Corp., which managed the site; Langdon & Wilson, the building’s architect; Moran Construction Co., the general contractor; Engineered Automated Systems Inc., which installed the main ventilation system; Innerspace Constructors, the subcontractor responsible for completing the 12th floor, and W. F. Taylor Inc., which installed the 12th-floor heating and cooling ducts.