Asbestos trust could leave most affected victims with nothing

May 13, 2005
A $140 billion asbestos trust fund is headed for Senate debate today that, if it passes, could leave Americans affected with asbestos related illnesses outside of the workplace without legal rights and increased difficulty getting their medical bills covered.

While Congress is trying to reduce the high rate of asbestos litigation by replacing it with a federal compensation program for victims, lawmakers have focused its fund on affected asbestos workers but left thousands of others without the ability to seek legal recourse. According to a public interest law professor at George Washington University law school, Jonathon Turley, Congress realizes how much easier it is to document workplace claims, so despite realizing the environmentally exposed individuals, the legislature chose to deal with the easiest asbestos cases instead.

Asbestos illness in the U.S. is still so difficult to determine because of the 20 to 50 year latency period that can exist between asbestos exposure and disease onset. Thousands of people live close to the former W.R. Grace plants in Santa Ana and Newark that processed almost 10,000 train shipments of vermiculite contaminated by asbestos and sent toxic fibers into the surrounding neighborhoods.

People in the Sacramento, CA suburb of El Dorado Hills learned last week from the EPA that they and their children have been breathing potentially dangerous levels of asbestos stirred up by construction. Many of the asbestos fibers are tremolite asbestos, which is one of the leading offenders for the 200 cancer deaths and 2,000 other cases of lung abnormalities in Libby, Montana - the site where W.R. Grace knowingly had vermiculite miners dig into amphibole asbestos, which is considered 10 to hundreds of times more carcinogenic than common industrial asbestos.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, co-sponsor of the asbestos bill, contends that people sickened by asbestos exposure in the environment were included simply by expanding the definition of asbestos in the bill to include an especially lethal form of asbestos found in Northern California, but in writing the bill lawmakers almost exclusively applied it to workplace asbestos exposures. In order to be eligible to make a claim, asbestos victims must document their history of occupational asbestos exposure and be grouped into a series of medical criteria requiring some level of occupational exposure.

The only exceptions identified by lawmakers involve family members of asbestos workers subjected to take home exposures of asbestos dust and fibers and residents of Libby, Montana. The federal trust fund bill will, according to opposition, eliminate the rights to bring claims for asbestos injury and is Congress' largest experiment with tort reform yet.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to debate on what could be the final rewrite of the asbestos bill today. According to Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's congressional unit, the consumer group questions whether or not there is enough money available to compensate asbestos victims.

The group found that companies with low annual revenue- between $50 million and $200 million- would be required to pay the trust fund only $11 million less per year than companies with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions. In the study released earlier this week by the group, large companies like Dow Chemical, Honeywell and other Fortune 500 companies would enjoy significant savings because of the bill's yearly cap of $27.5 million on corporate payments into the trust fund.

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