Ralph Hutt worked at the WR Grace Co. vermiculite plant in Libby for just 18 months in 1968 and 1969.
His father helped him get the job.
Originally, he was given a paper mask to combat the foggy and dusty conditions.
The paper mask, not unlike today’s COVID-19 masks, quickly became overloaded with dust.
When he asked his supervisor about it, Hutt was told not to worry – it was just dust.
He asked for a respirator. This request was denied by Grace officials.
He didn’t know it then, but his x-rays already showed signs of asbestos damage to his lungs.
He didn’t know it, but Grace knew it — just like the workplace safety program run by Grace’s insurance company, Maryland Casualty Company.
Hutt is currently strapped to oxygen in a modular home in Oregon as increasing amounts of oxygen slowly become less effective. Asbestosis, a lung disease caused by asbestos fibers in vermiculite, will slowly suffocate him until he can’t breathe.
But a Cascade County jury returned a $36.5 million verdict Thursday, after determining the insurance company was unprotected by Grace’s bankruptcy in Libby more than two decades ago, and that she had a distinct duty to warn workers like Hutt of the dangers. Court documents told Hutt’s story.
“It goes beyond a genuine material dispute that substantial efforts by the Maryland Casualty Company to influence Grace to lessen or further lessen the danger had no effect on Grace,” said a previous court ruling. Supreme Court of the State of Montana regarding this lawsuit. “We believe that the extent of the duty owed by MCC to Hunt and other Grace workers was to exercise due diligence in the circumstances to warn them of the known risk of exposure to airborne asbestos in and around the or of Grace’s workplaces.”
The price is $6.5 million in compensatory damages for Hutt and $30 million in punitive damages to be paid by Maryland Casualty Company, now part of Zurich.
The case is also a landmark – showing conclusively that Maryland Casualty designed a plan to protect workers just enough to ensure they didn’t get sick enough while working for the company, and that he worked with Grace to avoid legal liability after the workers retired. This is the first major asbestos-related lawsuit in nearly two decades.
In a pretrial Montana Supreme Court decision in which Maryland Casualty argued that it should not be held liable for Libby’s operations, a unanimous court (with two concurring opinions) set the framework that guided Cascade County’s decision this week.
“MCC’s goal was to avoid having to pay occupational disease claims,” Judge Dirk Sandefur wrote in the notice. “MCC also sought to achieve this goal by concealing the extent of the danger workers faced from asbestos-laden dust and by preventing workers from discovering that some of them were developing asbestos-related illnesses. ‘asbestos.
“…The filing further indicates that MCC not only failed to notify the workers, but took positive steps to conceal this information from the workers, thereby increasing the risk of further harm to the workers at the facility. plant for additional asbestos exposure.”
Many claims filed by affected Libby workers were dismissed either because of Grace’s bankruptcy or because most workers had only one year from their last day of employment to file a claim. workers’ compensation against the insurance company, according to state law at the time. . In most cases, the effects of asbestos-related diseases, which include asbestos or mesothelioma, are latent and take years to develop.
However, a nine-day trial revealed the complicated and intentional ways Grace and Maryland Casualty worked to minimize and discourage inquiries into conditions at Libby, which were beginning to be noticed as early as 1964.
Originally, Maryland Casualty claimed it was simply Grace’s workers’ compensation insurance company and should not be held responsible for cases like Hutt’s. However, a thorough analysis of the records shows that Maryland Casualty had done much more than just provide workers’ compensation. There have been repeated visits from industrial hygienists, doctors and worker safety experts who have noted large amounts of airborne asbestos.
Grace asked Maryland Casualty to design a worker safety program, and he agreed, saying he designed a plan from pre-hire to retirement. Much of that plan centered on twice-a-year X-rays and moving workers who showed early signs of lung problems to other jobs. However, documents presented at trial also show that neither Grace nor Maryland Casualty told the workers or their doctors about the test results or the dangers that both companies, as well as state officials, had extensively documented.
Maryland Casualty’s 37-page safety plan, which was crafted after a local Libby doctor wrote to the company about concerns about unusually high numbers of workers with lung problems, never included the word “asbestos” once, and supervisors consistently called the air “a dust problem.” Yet routine air testing by Grace, Montana State and Maryland Casualty revealed that up to 80% of the dust was asbestos.
The court filing also established several instances where Grace, in consultation with Maryland Casualty, urged local Libby officials to settle with sick workers, rather than fight legal action: “The attorney noted that the The extent and severity of the adverse health effects Grace workers would make it “necessary to lay out the whole situation to the Industrial Accidents Board, whose records may well be made available to unions and the general public.”
Instead, the lawyers advocated a course of settlement in 1964, wanting to avoid “the need to expose all the most damaging aspects of our situation”.
Legal Strategy
The strategy employed by Hutt’s legal team was championed by Allan McGarvey, who worked for decades with Grace Company victims in Libby. McGarvey is based in Kalispell. Trial attorney Clifford Edwards, of Billings, handled the courtroom aspects of the trial.
Under state law at the time, workers had to file for workers’ compensation within one year of their last day of employment. This law presented a challenge for almost all of the workers affected because they did not know the extent of their lung damage, and it takes years for it to become apparent. However, the state’s statute of limitations made it impossible to seek relief.
Maryland Casualty was also protected, in part, by Grace’s bankruptcy, which meant that the company would not be liable in place of Grace in many cases.
However, McGarvey argued for several years, in a case that took him to Delaware bankruptcy court and the state Supreme Court, that Maryland Casualty had a common law duty to inform workers of the risks , especially when they knew what was happening to the workers and Grace was not following all the safety plans.
Hutt’s case was not framed as a workers’ compensation claim or a claim against Grace. Instead, he successfully alleged that Maryland Casualty had a duty, as administrator of Grace’s safety plan at Libby, to warn workers of the dangers.
“Grace and MCC worked together to relocate ill employees to areas with low asbestos dust to avoid insurance liability,” Judge Ingrid Gustafson wrote in a concurring opinion. “MCC was not simply negligent in its failure to act; instead, by strategically recognizing the latency period of asbestosis development, MCC has engaged in affirmative action to conceal the risk of asbestos exposure and worker injury to avoid liability. , thereby increasing the risk of further harm to plant workers from further exposure to asbestos.
Gustafson also noted that employees were likely reassured about their safety precisely because of the tests conducted by Maryland Casualty and Grace.
“It is entirely reasonable as a matter of fact for an employee like Hutt to infer that the safety program and medical testing that takes place because of his work environment is designed to protect him,” Gustafson wrote. “His reliance on the lack of follow-up to his tests centers on the doctor or other medical professional performing the tests, whether that medical professional was employed by MCC or Grace.”
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