Zonolite’S Effects Outlive Plant Spokane Workers Toiled Amid Vermiculite Shipped In From Libby Mine

“My Dearest Darling Mother:

Remember I kept my illness from you to spare you needless suffering. There is nothing you could do to help me.”

- LeRoy Joireman, October 1995

Bing Crosby sang about the wonders of Zonolite Insulation. LeRoy Joireman died from it.

And doctors say the disease Joireman contracted from working at a Spokane zonolite plant inflicts one of the most torturous deaths known to humankind.

Some people require intravenous morphine to numb mesothelioma’s pain. Some need part of their spinal cord severed. Some are driven to suicide.

Tremolite asbestos triggered Joireman’s cancer. It tainted vermiculite ore that was mined near Libby, Mont., and converted into home insulation at the Vermiculite Northwest plant at 1318 N. Maple St.

Although the plant was small, employee turnover was high. Hundreds of workers and their families were exposed during its operation from the 1930s until 1973. Neighbors also may have breathed contaminated dust wafting from the plant.

Joireman’s wrongful death suit against the plant’s owners was recently settled for about $300,000, though the owners admitted no wrongdoing. Several other workers, including a former plant manager who defends the Spokane factory, have spots on their lungs from inhaling asbestos. Widows talk about their husbands’ lungs suddenly giving out.

Because asbestos-inflicted diseases take years to develop, more former workers and plant neighbors could develop mesothelioma tumors or lung cancer.

Between 60 and 220 factories across the United States made home insulation from the poisonous Libby ore, according to Environmental Protection Agency investigators. They are gearing up for detailed investigations in Spokane and elsewhere.

Several class-action lawsuits allege that W.R. Grace & Co., owner of the Libby mine and several processing plants including the Spokane plant, knew it was risking the health of thousands of workers and millions of people who lived near the insulation factories - and chose profit over health protection.

Doctors concur. The presence of asbestos was noted in the Libby vermiculite ore in 1919, when the mine was originally mapped.

“We knew asbestos probably caused cancer in the 1930s,” says Dr. Samuel Hammar, a Bremerton pathologist. It was a certainty by the 1940s.

“No one has a documented trail of ignoring health and safety issues into the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s like Grace,” says Dr. David S. Egilman, a practicing physician and Brown University professor.

Grace officials, who did not return calls seeking comment for this story, have denied that they knowingly placed workers at risk.

Vermiculite Northwest was a spare operation, without respirators, ventilation or any other worker protection for most of its run, according to interviews with former employees, dead workers’ families and reviews of hundreds of pages of court records. Some of the older hands, pastyskinned veterans with persistent coughs, tied bandannas around their faces when they shoveled vermiculite out of the 40-ton rail cars that arrived from Libby with a foot of charcoalcolored dust covering the ore.

Former workers say employees never were told the ore contained asbestos. Dust rained down “like a hazy morning fog,” one worker recalls.

Not only was there asbestos in the vermiculite ore that workers ginned into home insulation, but the company also imported 100-pound sacks of chrysotile asbestos to shred and add to other products.

“We shredded so much asbestos there, it hung from the rafters,” another former employee testified in a lawsuit.

“The Spokane plant, I think you will find out, was one of the worst in the nation,” says Spokane attorney Darrell W. Scott, who is representing Libby residents and Libby mine workers in a class-action lawsuit filed a few weeks ago.

Air-quality tests taken at the Spokane plant in 1973 showed airborne asbestos contamination three to 10 times greater than the legal limit. Those levels would be 200 to 500 times more lethal than today’s standards allow.

Washington Department of Labor and Industries inspectors recommended a $500-$1,000 fine and steps to quell the dust that Grace officials called “Mickey Mouse corrective action,” in an internal company memo. “Without rebuilding the entire facility, there’s no way we can comply,” the memo said.

Instead, Grace closed the plant in 1973.

Washington inspectors also urged Grace to put asbestos warning labels on the bags of Zonolite Insulation made in Spokane. Grace refused, according to a class-action lawsuit recently filed in Boston.

Meanwhile, millions of homeowners had heeded Crosby’s jingle - “Bing-O … it’s done in HALF-A-DAY” - that was published in Better Homes and Gardens magazine ads in the 1950s. They hauled sacks of the Zonolite brand insulation to their attics, ripped them open and spread the granules by hand. While rare, that much exposure alone can unleash asbestos’ worst venom.

College kid’s job

LeRoy Joireman - Lee to friends and family - was 18 when he began bagging insulation at Vermiculite Northwest to earn his college tuition. The youngest of four boys, he fancied himself a drama or speech teacher.

A photograph from his Eastern Washington University days shows Joireman dressed for the role of Paris in the play “Amphitryon.” Greek mythology says Paris was fatally wounded by a poison arrow.

Joireman worked at Vermiculite Northwest from 1959 through 1961. The plant was opened in the 1930s by two Spokane and two Seattle businessmen and sold to W.R. Grace in 1966. Throughout its life, the factory purchased rail cars of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite from the Libby mine and was licensed to make what became nationally known as Zonolite Insulation.

Jim Blake and other children loved to follow the ore train to the plant, catching candy the conductor threw and playing in piles of “puffed mica” - the processed vermiculite - in the plant yard. “It was a neighborhood thing,” says Blake, who still lives in Spokane.

Workers initially moved the ore by shovel and wheelbarrow into a plant that resembled a huge, open garage. Later a motorized loader eased that labor.

The ore, described by some workers as looking like dried raisins, was fed into a furnace that operated like an air popper for popcorn. The vermiculite danced on air pumped through the furnace while 1,600-degree heat boiled the water trapped in the rock’s micalike crystals.

The rock expanded. Air pockets replaced the trapped water and gave vermiculite its insulating quality. The puffed vermiculite was siphoned off to a bagging hopper.

Workers like Joireman clamped a paper sack to the hopper chute, opened a trap door and filled the sack. Once full, the 25-pound bag was dropped to the floor to settle its fluffy load.

As the next bag was filling, Joireman hefted the full sack onto a table, pinched the top, and fed it through a sewing machine. He repeated this every 16 seconds.

Dust spewed.

“That stuff would go right down your lungs,” says Arnie Joireman, who visited the plant while his younger brother was bagging. “It was just like smoking.”

Tim Groh, who came to the plant a few years later, wore a broadbrimmed hat to keep the dust off of his face.

“It was always raining dust,” Groh says, “like the fallout from St. Helens.”

He is one of the few employees who recall any sort of breathing protection - a paper mask that hung on the wall near an old cement mixer. Workers were told to wear the mask while pouring asbestos, asbestos-laced vermiculite and other chemicals into the cement drum to make acoustical plaster mix, Groh says.

Day after day, Groh pulled the mask off its nail, smacked it against his leg to clear out the residue and strapped it on only long enough to mix the plaster orders. Although he worked just 18 months at Vermiculite Northwest, he has scarring on his lungs - the tracks of asbestosis.

Vermiculite Northwest turned the ore into an absorbent for barbecue pits. It also became kitty litter or an additive for cattle feed, lawn fertilizer, insulating concrete and acoustical plaster.

Most of it became home insulation that the Spokane operation sold down into Grangeville, Idaho, through Western Montana, across Oregon and Washington and into Alaska.

Demand was so high that Vermiculite Northwest opened an insulation plant in Portland in the 1950s. It temporarily ran a smaller operation at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage, Alaska.

The jobs were dull and dirty. Open warehouse doors and holes in the roof provided ventilation. Dust collected on the floor, requiring constant sweeping to keep carts and wheelbarrows rolling, Groh says. It was hot working next to the furnace during any season. And freezing unloading box cars in the winter.

“You’d have to be kind of stupid like us to work there,” says Clyde Nance, who spent stints at Vermiculite Northwest before and after his tour with the Army in the late 1950s.

Yet Spokane was a tough city. Unemployment ran 10 percent. The $1.65-per-hour jobs were prized. The plant manager treated workers well.

All of the workers say they weren’t told that the vermiculite was tainted with lethal shards of asbestos. Or of the hazards of the other asbestos they handled.

When doctors quizzed Joireman about his work history, he mistakenly told them he wasn’t exposed to asbestos at the Spokane plant. He blamed his mesothelioma on a summer job at a bowling alley, which he suspected had an asbestos ceiling.

The company’s defense

Concern over tainted vermiculite is overblown, says Milt McDaniel, plant manager in Spokane for decades.

He started at Vermiculite Northwest in 1944, when his mother was running the night shift with high school kids. She asked McDaniel to troubleshoot a mechanical problem and he stayed. Four years later he moved to the office as bookkeeper. Soon he was plant manager.

“I really doubt there’s any problem,” McDaniel says. “I would say Zonolite is the best insulation you could find anywhere.”

The dust collection system “was not the best, that’s for sure,” McDaniel acknowledges. But if employees operated the equipment properly, there was little dust hitting those who bagged the vermiculite, he says.

Contrary to what former workers recall, McDaniel says respirators were provided for employees. “However, we were lax in those early years enforcing it,” he says.

McDaniel has had a spot on his lung for 30 years. He is sure it was caused by the asbestos-laden vermiculite. That doesn’t sway his opinion that the dangers are being sensationalized.

W.R. Grace officials did not return phone calls. But in a deposition taken in Joireman’s wrongful death lawsuit, William Culver - once president of Vermiculite Northwest and a long-time employee of Grace - also praises the Spokane plant.

“It was a pretty clean operation,” he told Seattle attorney William Rutzick in 1997. Dust collectors gathered “a great bulk of the dust which would have occurred from the time the ore was dumped into the (furnace) hopper until the vermiculite came out in a bag.”

Culver admits neither Vermiculite Northwest nor Grace ever tested the plant air for asbestos. But its presence “was obvious to anyone working there because you could see it coming out” of a separator that refined the vermiculite before it hit the furnace, Culver says.

Respirators were recommended to employees, Culver testified. He observed workers at the Spokane plant wearing them during his visits.

He says he wasn’t aware asbestos caused health problems until 1968, even though the Montana Department of Health reported in 1956 that the asbestos in the Libby vermiculite ore was “of considerable toxicity.”

Did Culver feel any emotions years later when he first saw reports detailing the health risks to workers who dealt with asbestos-contaminated vermiculite, attorney Rutzick asked Culver.

“I don’t think I had any emotions,” Culver replied. “I think there’s no conclusions from these documents.” The companies responded appropriately under the circumstances, he says.

The Environmental Protection Agency disagrees.

The asbestos levels measured by the Washington Department of Labor and Industries in 1973 “are all extremely high exposure levels,” says EPA’s Paul Peronard, who is overseeing the Libby contamination.

“We’re pretty concerned historically and currently about the expansion plants,” Peronard says. “We fully expect there to be medical problems with people who worked at these processing centers.”

Tiny needles

Asbestos fibers are tiny needles that easily penetrate the lungs. They ride home on workers’ clothes and lodge in the lungs of wives, children and other bystanders.

Asbestos fibers often provoke inflammation. The body fights back by sealing the injured area in the lungs, the lung lining, or the chest cavity with scar tissue and calcification.

“Asbestos is a more powerful scarring agent than most anything else,” says Hammar, the Bremerton lung pathologist.

Asbestos also can alter the DNA of lung cells. This causes the cells to mutate, resulting in either lung cancer or mesothelioma.

Mesothelioma grows in the lining of the chest, the abdomen or, in rare instances, in the lining of the heart.

“It’s a horrible tumor,” exerting great pressure on nerve fibers as it grows, Hammar says. “I don’t know if there’s any more painful, debilitating, uncomfortable disease.”

The pain drives some people to have doctors clip part of their spinal cord. Others kill themselves. “Death is not the worst possible thing that can happen,” adds Gerald Joireman, also a brother of the late LeRoy Joireman.

Mesothelioma like Joireman’s goes undetected for 30 to 50 years. It takes about half of that time for the first cancer cell to develop. Then the cancerous mass expands, producing fluid that eventually gives the patient considerable discomfort.

By the time the unlucky person sees their doctor, the tumor already is large and eventually will encase all of the organs in the chest cavity, the abdomen or, sometimes, the heart.

There is no cure. Death is months away.

LeRoy Joireman was on a Caribbean cruise in late 1994 when the abdominal pain started. He returned to Portland, where he taught middle school.

Doctors took a biopsy and told Joireman to bring his wife for the next visit so they could plan his last months. That was January 1995. He was 56.

Drawing a gallon of fluid

Joireman told his oldest brother about his illness a few weeks later in the quiet corner of a Portland Burger King. Joireman’s wife, Doris, was home in bed. She could not bear to hear him talk about his fate again.

“I was very bitter when I found out what caused it. He was, too,” Arnie Joireman recalls.

Doctors told Joireman all known mesothelioma treatments fail. He chose chemotherapy anyway and completed six courses by July 1995.

His abdomen continued to swell. Doctors were drawing a gallon of straw-colored fluid at a time in August. Three weeks later, it was nearly 2 gallons.

“I can be drained again Tuesday at 1:30 so I can eat again,” Joireman wrote in a journal he kept toward the end. “I feel so useless and despondent.”

By mid-October, his belly was refilling with fluid every 24 hours. Doctors inserted a catheter so Doris could drain the yellow liquid at home.

Joireman’s stomach was so large that even writing was arduous. When he did, he agonized over not telling his mother about his impending death, his journal says.

Joireman’s last journal entries detail excruciating pain in his abdomen, neck and back. Sleep was nearly impossible.

`Beyond negligence’

“Thank you mom, for a wonderful childhood of love and care that put me `straight.’ I’ll end this now saying my love for you will never end. Your son, LeRoy.”

Joireman died Nov. 2, 1995.

Ten months later his older brother, Gerald, arranged to meet his late brother’s wife during a business trip. Gerald called several times the week he was in Portland.

Doris didn’t answer. She had fallen in her bathroom, struck her head and died.

Because of his brother’s influence, Gerald had landed a job doing the same filthy work at Vermiculite Northwest in the late ‘50s. He worked there for a much shorter time. He is now 64 and asbestos has not shown its hand.

Even so, Gerald is tormented by what he now knows about the vermiculite he shoveled and bagged 40 years ago.

“If they were aware that it had asbestos and aware asbestos caused cancer, it was beyond negligence,” Gerald Joireman says of Vermiculite Northwest and W.R. Grace. “It was murder.”

Graphic: Vermiculite and asbestosis