=======================Electronic
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RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #329
—March 18, 1993—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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HOW WE GOT HERE–PART 2: WHO WILL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR PCBS?
The story of PCBs is a morality play for our time.
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were discovered during the 19th
century, when petroleum was still more of a curiosity than a
recognized foundation for the world’s most powerful civilization.
As the automobile came into wider use during this century (Henry
Ford invented the assembly line around 1910), the demand for
gasoline grew. As gasoline was extracted from crude oil, great
quantities of other chemicals, like benzene, were left over.
Chemists started playing around with these chemicals, to see if
something useful could be made from smelly by-products, like
benzene.
If you heat benzene under the right conditions, you can glue two
benzene rings together, creating diphenyl. If you then expose
the diphenyl to chlorine gas under the right conditions, you can
create chlorinated diphenyls, or biphenyls as we call them today.
Adding more or less chlorine gives compounds with differing
properties, and thus PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, all 75 of
them) came into being. They aren’t soluble in water, they don’t
burn, the don’t conduct electricity, they do not degrade during
use, and they conduct heat very well–viola! An excellent
candidate for a variety of uses in the burgeoning fields of
electric power equipment and electronics.
By 1914 enough PCBs had already escaped into the environment to
leave measurable amounts in the feathers of birds held in museums
today. [1]
By the mid-1930s, as we saw earlier (RHWN #327) Monsanto was
producing PCBs commercially and PCBs had created a public health
problem sufficient in size to attract academic researchers, the
U.S. Public Health Service, and several large industrial
producers and users of PCBs.
In 1936 a senior official with the U.S., Public Health Service
described a wife and child, both of whom had developed chloracne,
a combination of blackheads and “pustules,” merely from contact
with a worker’s clothes. The same official wrote, “In addition
to these skin lesions, symptoms of systemic poisoning have
occurred among workers inhaling these fumes.” [2]
By 1947, E.C. Barnes of Westinghouse’s medical department wrote,
in an internal company memo, that long-term exposure to PCB fumes
“may produce internal bodily injury which may be disabling or
could be fatal.” [3]
By 1959, the assistant director of Monsanto’s Medical Department
would write to the Administrator of Industrial Hygiene at
Westinghouse saying, “…sufficient exposure, whether by
inhalation of vapors or skin contact, can result in chloracne
which I think we must assume could be an indication of a more
systemic injury if the exposure were allowed to continue.” [4]
In 1968, when 1300 residents of Kyushu, Japan, fell ill after
eating rice contaminated with PCBs, the world’s public health
establishment woke up from a long sleep and began to examine
PCBs, which by this time were everywhere.
In late 1971, a group of Westinghouse staff met to discuss PCBs
and they noted that PCBs concentrate in the food chain. A memo
summarizing the meeting said, “It was generally concluded that…
there is sufficient evidence that pcbs can be deleterious to the
health of animal and human life and that the risks of ignoring
the evidence that does exist was [sic] inappropriate for
Westinghouse.” [5] Yet the 1971 memo
recommended continued use of PCBs.
Nearly 20 years later, in the late 1980s, researchers began to
find that workers exposed to PCBs were dying of skin cancer and,
perhaps, of brain cancer. Westinghouse and Monsanto maintain
that they always informed their workers completely about the
hazards of PCBs, but during the 1990s, workers have begun to sue
for damages, saying the companies misled them.
Recently in a court in Travis County, Texas, Westinghouse
released a 22-page memo that bears no date, but which company
officials say was written by a Westinghouse staff lawyer in 1987
or 1988. [6] In the memo, the Westinghouse
lawyer describes
extensive paper and microfilm records held by the Westinghouse
Industrial Hygiene Department: “The majority of the documents in
Industrial Hygiene’s files are potential ‘smoking gun’
documents,” the memo says. The memo goes on, “The files are
filled with documentation which critiques and criticizes, from an
industrial hygiene perspective, Westinghouse manufacturing and
non-manufacturing operations. This documentation often times
points out deficiencies in Westinghouse operations and suggests
recommendations to correct these deficiencies. Industrial
Hygiene’s files contain information which details the various
chemical substances used at Westinghouse sites over the years and
often times the inadequacies in Westinghouse’s use and handling
of the substances. The files contain many years of employee test
results, some of them unfavorable,” the memo says. [7]
The memo says that Westinghouse executives must ask certain
questions before deciding to keep or destroy the smoking gun
records. The first question is, “What are the chances of
litigation? Is it pending or imminent?” The second question is,
“In the case of litigation, which party would have the burden of
proof?”
The memo then says, “We recommend that all such files generated
prior to 1974 be discarded…. In our opinion, the risks of
keeping these files on the whole substantially exceed the
advantages of maintaining the records….”
Westinghouse officials deny that the memo was acted upon. They
say they still have all the company’s files intact. However, in
a lawsuit against Westinghouse by Nevada Power and Light (NP&L),
Westinghouse did not produce documents, such as correspondence
between Westinghouse and Monsanto, requested by NP&L in a
“discovery” proceeding. Monsanto, on the other hand, did produce
correspondence with Westinghouse officials. [4] NP&L is suing
Westinghouse, GE and Monsanto for $48.5 million in compensatory
damages for costs the utility says it incurred because of PCBs in
electric power equipment.
Furthermore, in sworn testimony in the NP&L case, three
Westinghouse employees or former employees described how files
that they maintained about PCBs were taken from them by members
of Westinghouse legal staff in the 1980s and never returned to
them.
It is not clear why Westinghouse handed over the “smoking gun”
memo to opposing counsel in the Texas suit. In any case,
Westinghouse attorneys tried to have the document declared
“privileged” so that it would remain under wraps. On February 9,
1993, Texas Judge Paul R. Davis ruled against Westinghouse,
saying the memo “falls within the crime/fraud exemption to
privileged documents” under Texas law because, the Judge said,
the memo was “prepared, and describe[s] a plan, to commit fraud
on the courts of this nation.” Westinghouse denies fraudulent
intention, but destroying documents that might be needed in
foreseeable litigation is forbidden under U.S. law.
Westinghouse will have many opportunities to redeem its good name
in the next few years. If company officials still have all their
company records dating back to the 1930s, they will be able to
produce relevant documents during “discovery” proceedings in
dozens of lawsuits now impending or already filed. More than a
thousand individuals have already filed lawsuits against
Westinghouse, seeking compensation for alleged damages from
workplace exposures.
During this ’90s, the PCB morality play will move through the
courts, where Chapter 11 bankruptcy may be the only way out for
the purveyors of PCBs.
Some may see in this history the malevolent machinations of
corporate criminals. But others may find in this story
well-meaning individuals trapped in circumstances they believe
forced them to make choices that they, as individuals, could
never condone.
In RHWN #327 we heard General Electric’s F.R.
Kaimer describe the
HUMAN reaction of GE executives to the disfigurement and pain of
GE workers exposed to PCBs: “[W]e had 50 other men in very bad
condition as far as the acne was concerned. The first reaction
that several of our executives had was to throw it out–get it
out of our plant. They didn’t want anything like that for
treating wire. But that was easily said but not so easily done.
We might just as well have thrown our business to the four winds
and said, ‘We’ll close up,’ because there was no substitute and
there is none today in spite of all the efforts we have made
through our own research laboratories to find one.” [7]
In the end, it does not matter what motivated the actors in our
PCB story. Whether they were motivated by good or evil, the
necessary remedy is the same.
As a society, and as a species, we cannot survive the launching
of many more families of chemicals like PCBs or CFCs. Yet the
corporate form of organization shields those who launch such
chemicals, preventing them AS INDIVIDUALS from feeling the
consequences of their actions. The way out of this thicket is to
give back liability to all individuals, removing the corporate
shield that prevents individuals from feeling the consequences of
their own actions. Through reform of the corporate charter, we
can return to everyone their essential humanness, their
responsibility for their own choices in their own lives.
                
                
                
                
     –Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] Robert Risebrough and Virginia Brodine, “More Letters in
the
Wind,” in Sheldon Novick and Dorothy Cottrell, editors, OUR WORLD
IN PERIL: AN ENVIRONMENT REVIEW (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett,
1971), pgs. 243-255.
Descriptor terms: pcbs; polychlorinated biphenyls; benzene;
monsanto; u.s. public health service; westinghouse; chloracne;
kyushu; japan; tx; nevada power & light; np&l; smoking gun memo;
fraud; judge paul r. davis; general electric; f.r. kaimer;
petroleum; chlorinated hydrocarbons;