Bortolozzo's daughter, Beatrice, and son, Gianluca, are among the few plaintiffs who refused to settle with the chemical companies. This factory has stolen husbands, stolen fathers. You can't put a value on the life of a person. Two Montedison retirees in their 60s, neither of whom wished to be quoted by name, said in an interview that they blame the company for the demise of most of their friends and their own poor health. Each has been plagued by sexual dysfunction, liver abnormalities and a numbing of the extremities, which becomes more pronounced in cold weather.
Cancer is always in the back of their minds.
He added, however, that he would not allow his son to work for Montedison. I would have killed him myself before I would have let him do that. For many years, the retirees said, vinyl chloride levels inside the plant were staggering, reaching a potentially explosive 40,000 parts per million near the reactors, where the liquid monomer was turned into resin. There is no reason to believe that conditions were much better in U.S. plants prior to 1974, when the government imposed strict new limits on vinyl chloride. As late as 1973, for example, an average of one employee per quarter was overcome by vinyl chloride vapor at a Conoco PVC plant in Aberdeen, Miss., according to a company document.