Feds Underscore Zonolite Risk Even Minimal Handling Can Endanger Health, Study Says

Asbestos-contaminated vermiculite insulation in millions of homes across the country poses a “substantial health risk” to anyone who works in the houses’ attics, an assistant U.S. surgeon general has warned.

The vermiculite comes from a now-closed mine in Libby, Mont., operated for decades by W.R. Grace & Co.

The Zonolite insulation was manufactured at plants across the country, including one in Spokane.

“Internal company documentation and recent testing of residential insulation material reveal that even minimal handling by workers or residents poses a substantial health risk,” Dr. Hugh Sloan of the U.S. Public Health Service wrote last week in a request for help from other federal health experts.

Among the documents to which Sloan referred is a risk assessment conducted by Grace health experts while the mine was still open. The company experts estimated 30,000 additional lung cancers would result from exposure to asbestos by those “involved in the application of our products.”

Recent studies show even casual handling of the insulation can expose workers or homeowners to 150 times the asbestos level considered safe under federal regulations, according to the memo.

Grace, asked for comment about the memo Friday, did not respond.

The brownish-pink vermiculite from Libby was sold for use in garden products, fireproofing, cement mixtures and a score of other consumer products. But the vast majority of the ore was heat-treated until it expanded like popcorn. Then, marketed as Zonolite insulation, it was stuffed between rafters and inside walls in millions of homes from coast to coast.

The Spokane plant operated at 1318 N. Maple St. from the 1930s until 1973, when Grace shut it down after state officials found excessive levels of airborne asbestos. Some workers from the plant who have developed asbestos-related illnesses have sued the company.

The EPA has also taken samples from the Spokane plant site, to see whether further cleanup is warranted there.

Nobody is sure how many homes contain Zonolite. Estimates range from 2.5 million to 16 million.

“It sold like mad,” said Stephen Sheeran, who was a salesman for Grace in Michigan and eventually a sales manager for the company.

In Washington state alone there are at least 53,505 homes with Zonolite, according to lawyers who have filed a class-action suit seeking to order Grace to warn homeowners of the dangers.

Mike Black of Spokane is one of 19 lawyers from six law firms who have filed suit in five states.

“This is fairly clear-cut,” Black said. “We have shown the court that asbestos-contaminated Zonolite is dangerous, that Grace knew that and concealed it and that people throughout the country are being exposed to potentially lethal levels.”

A hearing is scheduled next month in Spokane.

In his letter to Linda Rosenstock, the director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, Sloan said recent investigations documented that even casual handling of the insulation can generate airborne exposures up to 150 times the level considered safe by OSHA for workers.

Sloan asked NIOSH to examine the risk to nursery, construction, insulation and other workers who use vermiculite end-products and to issue a nationwide warning, a “hazard alert,” cautioning workers of the potential dangers of these products. He also asked NIOSH to update earlier studies on the asbestostainted vermiculite to examine the progression of asbestos-related disease, and to determine whether tremolite, the predominant type of asbestos found in the ore, is more toxic then earlier believed.

Last November, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that hundreds of miners and members of their families were killed or sickened by asbestos contamination from the now-closed Grace mine in the tiny northwestern Montana town.

Grace shipped millions of pounds of the tainted ore to more than 250 plants that processed or sold the ore throughout the United States and Canada, causing workers at many of those plants to become ill and die of asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.

Eventually, old insulation has to be replaced. Remodeling, rewiring and a score of other home renovations could disturb the old Zonolite. Tests have shown that even installing a light fixture or ceiling fan through an attic floor insulated with Zonolite can generate dangerous levels of airborne asbestos.

Grace has always insisted that there was nothing hazardous in the insulation. The printing on the Zonolite bags said: “Contains no harmful chemicals” and “masks, gloves or special (safety) equipment” were not needed.

But thousands of pages of Grace correspondence, memos and reports obtained by the P-I show the company was well aware of the asbestos in the insulation and the health hazards it presented.

“We believe that a decision to affix asbestos warning labels to our products would result in substantial sales losses,” Grace Executive Vice President E.S. Wood wrote on May 24, 1977. He added, “The risk of liability to customers is heightened by the decision not to label our products.”

Grace made the decision not to label products, taking the position that tremolite fibers that contaminated the vermiculite could go unnoticed.

Only through the use of “elaborate techniques not commonly recognized or employed in the scientific community for detection of asbestos” in their potting soils and fireproofing could the tremolite asbestos fibers be detected, another 1977 memo reported.

“For this reason, we are taking the position with all but authorized government authorities that our mixed products are `non-asbestos’ products.”

Wood anticipated that the Consumer Product Safety Commission would take action to protect the public. He predicted “a high risk that our products will be banned in several significant uses,” and cited the Zonolite attic insulation and horticultural vermiculite.

Yet the safety commission took no actions against Grace products then, nor has it since.

Most of the thousands of studies done on the health effects of asbestos exposure centered on the worker being exposed hundreds of times a years for dozens of years. But studies by NIOSH, the Environmental Protection Agency and private medical investigators in the ‘70s and ‘80s cautioned that “single bursts” and “peak episodic” exposures to humans can cause cancer and asbestosis.

Grace documents from 1977 showed that the company was aware of reports that “even brief exposures, presumably at high levels, can later produce mesothelioma,” a fast-killing cancer attributed only to asbestos exposure.

“The hazards of these (high, short-term) exposures is aggravated and worsened when the release or disturbance occurs in an enclosed space such as an attic,” Anderson added.

Even though OSHA was made aware that thousands of workers were handling the contaminated vermiculite at factories and work sites throughout the country, there is no indication in public records that it ever weighed in on the asbestos hazard contained in some vermiculite.