Opinion ID: 1481786
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Eagle's Substantial Factor Causation

Text: Eagle manufactured a powder, containing asbestos, from which to make insulating cement. Eagle argues that there was insufficient evidence of a substantial causal relationship between either decedent's exposure to its product and the fatal mesotheliomas. Evaluation of that argument requires an appreciation of the workplace environments of each decedent.
In 1942-1944 when Balbos was employed at Fairfield as a sheet metal worker, that shipyard was engaged exclusively in building Liberty ships, a World War II cargo vessel. Asbestos products were used for insulation. There was evidence from which the jury could have found the following. Bethlehem used two insulation contractors at Fairfield, each of which supplied its own materials. One was Reid-Hayden, which later merged into Porter, and the other was Armstrong Cork (Armstrong). Each did the insulation on alternate ships. Eighty percent of the insulation on a Liberty ship was in the engine room, where the boilers, turbines, and myriad runs of pipe had to be covered. The engine room of a Liberty ship was approximately two stories high, with catwalks at the higher level. The length and width of the engine room approximated one-half of the area of a large, ceremonial courtroom. Additional piping had to be insulated in the shaft alley, an enclosed area running aft from the engine room bulkhead to the propeller. The engine room and shaft alley were ventilated by air drawn by fans through large funnels on the deck, and thereafter through sheet metal ducts, into the areas below deck. There were no exhaust systems. Asbestos was brought into these work areas in the form of blocks, tubing, blankets, cloth, and powder. Dust was created by sawing, breaking, ripping, crushing, and stirring these products. The blocks came in three foot lengths, six inch widths, and varying thicknesses. They were used to line the outside of boilers and turbines. To prevent sharp edges and to give the covering a neat appearance the six inch widths were cut lengthwise in half by hand saws. The blocks also had to be cut into wedge-shaped pieces for circular surfaces. Asbestos tubing was used to cover the pipes. Tubing came in three foot lengths, with interior diameters of varying sizes. Viewed cross-sectionally, the tubing was either a circle with a slit or two semi-circles, called half-rounds. In order to obtain a tight fit it was not uncommon to cut a narrow strip from the length of the tubing to be placed around a pipe. At every elbow, joint, and valve the tubing had to be cut to fit. Insulators working on scaffolding, or on catwalks, or at the bottom of the engine room, would simply let the cut-off scraps and short pieces of block and tubing free fall. Asbestos blankets and cloth, also used to wrap pipes or otherwise to layer insulation, were usually simply ripped to the desired size. Powdered asbestos cement was mixed with water to form a coating which was applied over the blocks, tubes, blankets, and cloth in order to fill in all of the crevices and to create a finished appearance. Building a single Liberty ship required 100 bags of asbestos cement, each weighing 100 pounds. Clouds of dust were created when this powder was dumped into mixing tubs or buckets. The wet cement was applied with trowels. Drippings of cement fell and were left to dry where they landed. Working in, and trooping through, the engine room were other trades, including sheet metal workers, of whom Balbos was one. All of the workers further contributed to creating ambient asbestos dust by crushing underfoot the scraps and dried cement drippings. Even when laborers cleaned up the work area by shovelling or sweeping the debris, dust was generated. As a result, all of the workers in the engine room, including not only insulators, but also electricians, pipefitters, riggers, iron worker-erectors, and sheet metal workers, would be covered with a white coating of asbestos dust. Balbos's brother, who also worked at Fairfield and who would regularly meet Balbos for lunch, described Balbos as covered with asbestos dust when they met. Eagle's asbestos cement contributed to this scene. The product was used by both of the supplier-installers at Fairfield for application to high temperature surfaces. It was applied in layers. After the first layer dried, a second layer was applied until the specified thickness was obtained.
Key Highway, where Knuckles worked, was a very large ship repair yard with the capacity to work on ten to fifteen ships at one time. The repair work involved first ripping out the damaged or otherwise deficient area of the ship to be repaired. The ripping out process generated asbestos dust from the old insulation. Replacement work, particularly in the engine room, required new insulation, and that work proceeded much in the fashion of the insulation of newly constructed ships at Fairfield, described above. A witness who worked as an acetylene burner at Key Highway continuously from 1946 to 1982 saw Knuckles at work practically every day. As an erector, Knuckles would hang new plates. This could be done on the outside of the ship, on the keel plates, in the engine room, in the boiler room, and in the shaft housing. Those in Knuckles's trade would erect catwalks and handrails in the engine and boiler rooms and erect the foundations for engines. A frequent activity in the Key Highway shipyard was rotor inspection which a ship would require approximately every five years. This involved breaking through the asbestos cement and block covering of the main turbine to remove the cover and, after inspection and any repair, reinsulating the turbine. The witness who had been a burner also described working in the 1970s with Knuckles on two, specifically identified ships, each of which were in the yard for one year. Their sterns were torn out and replaced in order to install new rudders. That same witness additionally recalled working in the 1950s with Knuckles on the conversion of former troop ships which were completely gutted. A witness who worked as a pipe coverer at Key Highway for twenty-eight years beginning in 1949 identified Eagle 66 cement as one of the products which he used during that period. Another witness who from 1951 to 1982 operated a forklift delivering asbestos products from a central warehouse at Key Highway to the various ships in the yard described delivering 100 pound bags of Eagle cement to ships in the yard.
Eagle's submission is that neither in Balbos nor in Knuckles did the plaintiffs produce sufficient evidence to permit a jury to find that Eagle's failure to warn was a proximate cause of the decedents' deaths. Eagle does not dispute, however, that the principle of proximate causation by which the evidence concerning causation in fact is to be determined is the substantial-factor rule, and not the but-for rule. As pointed out in W. Keeton, Prosser & Keeton on The Law of Torts § 41, at 266 (5th ed. 1984) (Prosser), [i]f two causes concur to bring about an event, and either one of them, operating alone, would have been sufficient to cause the identical result, some test of proximate causation, other than but-for is needed. Accordingly, Restatement (Second) of Torts § 431 states the following rule: The actor's negligent conduct is a legal cause of harm to another if (a) his conduct is a substantial factor in bringing about the harm, and (b) there is no rule of law relieving the actor from liability because of the manner in which his negligence has resulted in the harm. In products liability involving asbestos, where the plaintiff has sufficiently demonstrated both lung disease resulting from exposure to asbestos and that the exposure was to the asbestos products of many different, but identified, suppliers, no supplier enjoys a causation defense solely on the ground that the plaintiff would probably have suffered the same disease from inhaling fibers originating from the products of other suppliers. [11] Further, in the instant cases, a medical expert for the plaintiffs testified that all of [the] exposures to asbestos were a significant contributing causal factor to the mesothelioma, because the causation is cumulative. The defendants' medical expert also believed that a person must reach an undefined threshold of asbestos exposure before exposure will cause mesothelioma. Thus, the failure to warn on the part of any one supplier of an asbestos product to which a decedent was exposed can operate as a concurrent proximate cause with the failures to warn on the part of other such suppliers. See Wehmeier v. UNR Indus., 213 Ill. App.3d 6, 157 Ill.Dec. 251, 256, 572 N.E.2d 320, 335 (1991); Sholtis v. American Cyanamid Co., 238 N.J. Super. 8, 568 A.2d 1196, 1205 (1989); O'Connor v. Raymark Indus., 401 Mass. 586, 518 N.E.2d 510, 513 (1988). Eagle's argument that its conduct was not a substantial factor is made on several levels. At the most primitive level Eagle emphasizes the lack of direct evidence specifically placing either decedent in the immediate area of the use of an Eagle product at the time when that product was being used. Exposure, however, may be established circumstantially. See Roehling v. National Gypsum Co. Gold Bond Bldg. Products, 786 F.2d 1225, 1228 (4th Cir.1986) (The evidence, circumstantial as it may be, need only establish that [plaintiff] was in the same vicinity as witnesses who can identify the products causing the asbestos dust that all people in that area, not just the product handlers, inhaled.). The causation question here is whether the evidence and inferences most favorable to the plaintiffs support a finding that exposure to Eagle's products was a substantial factor in the death of each decedent. Neither decedent in the cases before us worked directly with asbestos products; rather, they were bystanders. Whether the exposure of any given bystander to any particular supplier's product will be legally sufficient to permit a finding of substantial-factor causation is fact specific to each case. The finding involves the interrelationship between the use of a defendant's product at the workplace and the activities of the plaintiff at the workplace. This requires an understanding of the physical characteristics of the workplace and of the relationship between the activities of the direct users of the product and the bystander plaintiff. See, e.g., Rotondo v. Keene Corp., 956 F.2d 436 (3d Cir.1992) [1992 Asbestos Lit.R. (Andrews) 24,745]. Within that context, the factors to be evaluated include the nature of the product, the frequency of its use, the proximity, in distance and in time, of a plaintiff to the use of a product, and the regularity of the exposure of that plaintiff to the use of that product. See Robertson v. Allied Signal, Inc., 914 F.2d 360, 367-68 (3d Cir.1990); Lohrmann v. Pittsburgh Corning Corp., 782 F.2d 1156, 1162-63 (4th Cir.1986); Blackston v. Shook & Fletcher Insulation Co., 764 F.2d 1480, 1482-83 (11th Cir.1985); Wehmeier v. UNR Indus., 157 Ill.Dec. at 256-58, 572 N.E.2d at 335-37; Eckenrod v. GAF Corp., 375 Pa.Super. 187, 544 A.2d 50, 52-53, alloc. denied, 520 Pa. 605, 553 A.2d 968 (1988). In addition, trial courts must consider the evidence presented as to medical causation of the plaintiff's particular disease. Lockwood v. AC & S, Inc., 109 Wash.2d 235, 744 P.2d 605, 613 (1987). The way in which the foregoing principles are applied to the facts in the cited cases is informative. In Blackston, 764 F.2d 1480, the plaintiff had been a pipefitter for thirty-five years, but the case involved only two years of that period during which the plaintiff worked on the construction of a paper mill in Georgia. The defendant, one of the contractors on that job, used the asbestos product in question, but the plaintiff's evidence did not show that he was working in the vicinity [where] it was being used. Id. at 1481. Robertson v. Allied Signal presented the claims of workers at a tire manufacturing facility where the principal activity took place in a building three levels high with a total area of 862,000 square feet. One of the defendants, Allied Signal, made the asbestos brakes used on certain cutting machines in the stock-cutting area. The trial court had granted summary judgment for Allied Signal. That judgment was reversed as to one plaintiff whose job was to run the mill that supplied the cutters, so that that plaintiff worked in proximity to the cutters for seven years. Judgment for Allied Signal was affirmed as to the other plaintiffs who worked elsewhere in the building. The size of the tire manufacturing facility in Robertson was used to distinguish that case in Rotondo v. Keene Corp., 956 F.2d at 441 [1992 Asbestos Lit R. at 24,750]. Rotondo was a welder at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in 1942-43. The defendant manufactured an asbestos pipe covering called Ehret. In reviewing a judgment for the plaintiff, the Third Circuit applied governing Pennsylvania law, as enunciated in Eckenrod v. GAF Corp., 544 A.2d 50, where [t]he court stated that `a plaintiff must establish more than the presence of asbestos in the workplace; he must prove that he worked in the vicinity of the product's use.' In particular, a plaintiff must present evidence `to show that he inhaled asbestos fibers shed by the specific manufacturer's product.' The relevant evidence is `the frequency of the use of the product and the regularity of the plaintiff's employment in proximity thereto.' 956 F.2d at 439 [1992 Asbestos Lit.R. at 24,748] (quoting 544 A.2d at 52-53 (citations omitted)). Those requirements were satisfied in Rotondo for the following reasons: In summary, the testimony introduced in the instant case did not merely place Ehret pipecovering `somewhere' in a large facility, but rather placed it in the specific area (i.e., the boiler room) in which Rotondo worked. In addition, the evidence established that Rotondo worked in the boiler room of the Monticello at least 2 days a week for at least 3 to 4 months during the summer of 1942, and that the pipecoverers used the Ehret product fifty percent of the time. 956 F.2d at 442 [1992 Asbestos Lit.R. at 24,751]. The facts in the cases before us are quite similar to those in Roehling v. National Gypsum, 786 F.2d 1225. The plaintiff was a pipefitter who for six months had worked on the construction of new boilers at the power station of an industrial plant. He did not apply insulation, a task done by asbestos installers who followed behind in the progress of the work. The boiler walls were insulated with asbestos block and then covered with asbestos cement. An insulator-helper testified that `tons of' the defendant's cement were used on the boiler walls. Id. at 1227. Summary judgment for the cement supplier was reversed because the facts and underlying inferences established that the plaintiff worked in the same limited area of the plant, at the same time as the insulators working side by side. Id. at 1228. In the cases before us the juries could reasonably find that Eagle's 66 cement was specifically designed for high temperature surfaces and that, at Fairfield and Key Highway during the respective periods of employment of the decedents, great quantities of 66 were used regularly, thickly to coat the housings of the steam and energy generating units, and the pipes emanating therefrom, in ships which were newly constructed, converted, or repaired. Further, the jury in Balbos could conclude that the engine room was the area of the most dense concentration of asbestos fibers in newly constructed Liberty ships. The jury could further infer from the description of Balbos's being covered regularly with asbestos dust, that he was frequently exposed in the engine room area. In the Knuckles case, there is direct evidence placing Knuckles within the engine room area of ships under repair, as well as working on exterior plates. Although Knuckles's exposure in the engine room area of ships to fibers from high temperature asbestos cement may not have been as regular as that of Balbos, the exposure of Knuckles was over a much longer period. Indeed, each decedent had about the same concentration of asbestos fibers in his lung tissue, as determined on autopsy. Thus, the jury in each case could find that the decedent was frequently exposed to fibers from the Eagle 66 asbestos cement in the proximity of the engine room of ships where that product was regularly used.