Many from closed Ragland factory got mesothelioma

Sunday, May 22, 2005
THOMAS SPENCER and JEFF HANSEN
News staff writers

RAGLAND - From 1976 to 1982, Wade Riggs worked hunched over a lathe in a cloud of dust, milling the ends of cement asbestos pipe.

Almost three decades after he was first exposed to asbestos, Riggs has inoperable lung cancer and is unable to work. He coughs up blood and has little appetite; his right leg is numb.

Riggs, 53, blames his former employer, Cement Asbestos Pipe Co., which shut down in 1982. Riggs and other former Capco workers say they were never told their daily exposure to asbestos could scar the lungs, leading to debilitating breathing problems and dramatically increasing chances of contracting lung cancer or mesothelioma, a deadly cancer whose only known cause is asbestos exposure.

"They didn't tell us," Riggs said.

Over the life of the plant, fewer than 300 people worked there, employees estimate. Eleven have since died of mesothelioma, according to family members. At least five have died of lung cancer, and eight more died after suffering with severe asbestosis, which either caused or contributed to their deaths. Most died in their 50s or early 60s.

At least two more former employees are fighting mesothelioma, which attacks the lining of the lungs.

Those include Randy Henderson, 53, assistant managing editor of The Birmingham News. Henderson worked at Capco two summers in the late 1960s.

At least two other former employees are fighting lung cancer, and dozens more have asbestosis to varying degrees. Robbed of breath, many of those workers have had to retire on disability as the disease progresses, and they live in fear of developing mesothelioma.

In court, Capco - a joint venture between Birmingham's Woodward Iron and Asarco, an international mining company - has admitted executives knew asbestos could cause fatal disease even before they built the plant and hired the first worker.

Among the sick are Perry Poe, who got a job at Capco fresh out of high school, joining his father on the payroll. For unloading raw asbestos from trucks and boxcars, Poe earned $2.89 an hour in 1972, the equivalent to $12.72 an hour today.

By the time Poe went to work at the plant, there was a public campaign warning of the dangers of asbestos, but news was slow to reach Ragland.

"We really didn't understand at the time," said Poe, who at 50 is feeling the effects of advancing asbestosis. He tires easily and has a cough he can't get rid of. He knows one day asbestos may kill him, as asbestos-related respiratory failure killed his father.

Former Capco workers recall handling asbestos without protective clothing or protective masks until the late 1970s.

On one end of the plant, they unloaded bulk asbestos - white chrysotile asbestos mined by their Asarco-owned sister company in Canada and blue crocidolite asbestos mined in South Africa. They tossed the bags into stacks. To make cement, they cut open the bags and dumped dry asbestos into a hopper, sending dust aloft.

Eighty pounds of blue asbestos and 80 pounds of white asbestos were mixed with 1,100 pounds of cement, plus silica and water, to make one ton of pipe. The cement was pumped into a vat, rolled into the shape of a pipe and cooked in an autoclave. When the pipes dried, men cut them into lengths and used lathes to mill the ends for joints, again raising clouds of dust.

Donald White would come home from work covered in dust.

"He had that stuff all over him," Racille White said of her husband, who died of asbestosis at age 65. He spent the last three years of his life sleeping in a recliner so he could breathe.

"I had to hang his jeans on the back deck and hose them down before I could put them in the washing machine," she recalled.

For much of the plant's existence, no one wore a respirator, workers said. Men would go home coated with the dust, spitting and blowing it out all weekend. continue reading...