Opinion ID: 2813867
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Defendant’s Proof at Trial

Text: Paul Maynard, a retired railroad employee who had worked for the Defendant and its predecessor railroads from 1969 until 2000, was stationed at the Defendant’s Knoxville office from 1983 to 1987. As a trainmaster, Mr. Maynard was responsible for ensuring the safety of Mr. Payne and other railroad workers and annually testing all employees “on both safety and operating rules.” He testified that, in addition to the “efficiency tests” that he administered, various federal and state inspectors regularly visited the worksite “to make sure that the employees and the railroad were complying with the safety regulations.” According to Mr. Maynard, “the safety rules prohibited [railroad employees] from riding on the inside of cars,” as Mr. Payne and the other employees had testified was commonplace. He stated that the policy prohibiting employees from riding inside the open top gondola cars was based upon the concern that scrap metal cargo could “shift and . . . pin a person against the end of that car.” Mr. Maynard testified that when he learned in the fall of 1983 that there may have been radioactive materials at the Witherspoon scrapyard, “a flag went up,” and he “had some concerns about [whether it was] safe for [the Defendant’s] switch crew[s] to switch [the cars there].” He recalled contacting a state inspector, Billy Freeman, who had been “involved a lot with the Witherspoon thing for years and years,” and that Mr. Freeman had confirmed in writing that it was safe for the railroad crews to enter the scrapyard so long as they “stayed out of the vicinity of the contaminated barrels.” Mr. Maynard recalled that two years later, after receiving additional information about the levels of radioactivity at Witherspoon, he instructed the railroad employees to deliver the cars “just barely inside the gate area” so that -10- they were not actually entering the Witherspoon property.7 Mr. Maynard contended that he “did every possible thing” to protect the safety of his employees.8 On cross-examination, Mr. Maynard conceded that he had worked at the Defendant’s Knoxville location for only four years, and that he did not have any knowledge of the Knoxville worksites between 1962 and 1983—the first twenty years of Mr. Payne’s career with the Defendant—or at any time after 1987, when he was transferred to a Florida location.9 Asked about the presence of asbestos on the Defendant’s train engines, brakes, and cab heater pipes, Mr. Maynard responded that he had no personal knowledge because that “was not [his] area” of expertise. He further testified that during his time in Knoxville he was unaware of any asbestos removal from the Defendant’s train engines, but that he could smell diesel fumes “[a]ny time that [he] was ever around a diesel engine, a diesel locomotive, inside the cab or just in the general area.” He acknowledged that “diesel fumes would go[] into the air in the general direction back toward the caboose, the cab of the engine and beyond.” After seeing a photograph of an engine belonging to one of the Defendant’s predecessor railroads, Mr. Maynard agreed that the engines emitted “black looking smoke,” but explained that excessive black smoke, as depicted in the photograph, was a sign of “a serious mechanical misfunction” because “[i]f [an] engine is smoking like that, it’s not going to make it another mile.” He clarified that, as a trainmaster, his job was not to inspect the mechanics of the trains but to ensure safety and compliance with federal regulations. While admitting that he had never seen any of the Defendant’s employees wear protective equipment, he was unaware of any other railroad that did so. He further testified that the railroad crews would not have loaded or unloaded the cargo in the cars that they switched at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Facility and the Witherspoon scrapyard. Larry Liukonen, a board-certified industrial hygienist and safety professional who had worked for the railroad industry since 1979 and as a consultant for the Defendant from 1987 until about 2007, testified that his primary responsibilities included air sampling and 7 Mark Badders, an industrial hygienist who had worked for the Defendant and its predecessor railroads since 1980, testified that he met with Mr. Maynard and Mr. Freeman to measure radiation levels at the Witherspoon scrapyard in September of 1985, at which time he made the recommendation “that we no longer switch into the Witherspoon [s]crapyard site, but we would drop our cars and pick up cars just across Candora Road from the Witherspoon [s]crapyard.” 8 Mr. Badders similarly testified that his “main concern” was the safety of the Defendant’s train crews. In his opinion, the Defendant had provided a safe working environment for its employees. 9 Mr. Badders, who was still employed by the Defendant after Mr. Maynard was transferred to Florida, testified that in 1991 he recommended that the Defendant resume switching inside the Witherspoon facility after an independent evaluation was performed by Dr. William Ringo with CRU, Inc., who “stat[ed] that they had not found external radiation exposure” at the Witherspoon scrapyard. -11- laboratory testing of the Defendant’s facilities across the country, so as to monitor the railroad employees’ exposure levels to asbestos and diesel exhaust. Mr. Liukonen maintained that none of the Defendant’s workplace conditions would have involved “any significant exposure to asbestos,” and that if Mr. Payne had any exposure at all, it would have been well below the “[p]ermissible exposure limits” established by federal regulation. He further testified that in the early 1990s, the Defendant initiated “very extensive work on train crew exposures to diesel exhaust,” and that his studies indicated that diesel exhaust was not a health risk. He described Mr. Payne’s exposure to exhaust as “very low” and “probably not much different than driving down the interstate.” In Mr. Liukonen’s opinion, Mr. Payne “wasn’t exposed to hazardous levels of either asbestos or diesel exhaust.” Dr. John Edward Craighead, a practicing physician licensed in Vermont, has spent much of his career researching and publishing articles on lung cancer. In his preparations for the trial, he had been asked to “review the pathology, the biopsies that were taken of Mr. Payne; . . . to review the medical aspects of it, that is his clinical course of illness; and . . . [,] having defined his occupational background and smoking history and other factors, to opine on the cause of Mr. Payne’s disease, his lung cancer.” Dr. Craighead testified that the particular type of lung cancer associated with cigarette smoking “is always squamous cell carcinoma,” which is “sometimes known as a non-small[-]cell carcinoma” and is the type of lung cancer Mr. Payne had contracted. Despite many years of research on the issue of diesel exhaust and diseases, Dr. Craighead held the view that “there’s been . . . no good evidence that diesel fuel causes cancer.” In his opinion, any exposure to diesel exhaust fumes that Mr. Payne might have experienced did not increase his risk of lung cancer and was not a contributing cause of his lung cancer. As to the issue of asbestos exposure, Dr. Craighead testified that asbestos would not be a contributing cause of “classical lung cancer” 10 absent the underlying disease of asbestosis, which Mr. Payne did not contract. It was his opinion that asbestos did not play a role in contributing to Mr. Payne’s lung cancer.11 Although Dr. Craighead had not been asked to examine the Plaintiff’s claim of exposure to radioactive substances, he agreed during cross-examination that he had previously identified “a thyroid cancer in Mr. Payne,” and that radiation is “one of the contributing causes” of thyroid 10 Dr. Craighead distinguished “what we call lung cancer” from “a specific type of lung cancer” known as mesothelioma, “which is not the classical lung cancer” because it occurs “only [with] certain types of asbestos and under most unusual circumstances.” Dr. Craighead further testified that Mr. Payne’s medical records did not reveal any evidence of mesothelioma. 11 Dr. David Weill, a pulmonary specialist practicing at Stanford University Medical Center, likewise testified on behalf of the Defendant that, in his opinion, “because [Mr. Payne] did not have baseline asbestosis, . . . his asbestos exposure [did not] elevate[] his cancer risk at all.” -12- cancer.12 Dr. David Dooley, a certified health physicist specializing in radiation biology, addressed Mr. Payne’s exposure to radioactive substances. He first observed that “background radiation” is a part of nature, meaning “we have cosmic radiation that’s hitting the earth all the time . . . from space” and “we are being radiated from the ground we walk on” because of natural radiation levels in the soil. While acknowledging that excessive exposure to radiation can cause cancer and particularly lung cancer, Dr. Dooley contended that some radiation is beneficial and that “a number of scientific organizations” consider “five rem per year”13 to be “the allowable occupational exposure . . . where we don’t expect anything to happen to the person” who has been exposed to the radiation. Dr. Dooley, who had assessed radiation levels within various industries, opined that Mr. Payne would not have been exposed to as much radiation as a nuclear facility employee who worked in a “very highly radioactive area” and could “get up to five to ten rem to do [his or her] job.” He based his opinion on a “dose reconstruction,” which he described as “basically a time motion study of where Mr. Payne was when and how long he was there and what he could have been potentially exposed to.” He estimated Mr. Payne’s direct and indirect radiation exposure in relation to contaminated scrap metal, four “unique loads” of cargo that had “a little bit higher amounts of radioactivity,” contaminated soil at the Witherspoon scrapyard, depleted uranium contained in the metal drums at Witherspoon, and an isolated “cesium contamination incident along the rail tracks” at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Facility. According to Dr. Dooley, even though he “gave Mr. Payne every benefit of the doubt over [these] exposures,” the numbers produced by his dose reconstruction study were “just not high enough to say that Mr. Payne[,] over his [fifteen]-year . . . career where he was in and out of Witherspoon and . . . other locations . . . , could have ever gotten doses that would have been [a concern].” 14 12 As indicated, however, Dr. Frank testified on behalf of the Plaintiff that Mr. Payne “did not have thyroid cancer,” explaining that “[h]e . . . had a lesion in his thyroid that was at one point thought to be cancer but ultimately . . . was not shown to be a malignancy. . . . [T]hyroid cancer does have a relationship to exposure to radioactivity, but he did not have a thyroid cancer.” 13 Dr. Dooley explained that a “rem,” or “roentgen equivalent man,” is a measurement of radiation exposure “that takes the roentgen[,] which is the [amount of ionization] in air[,] and equates it to an exposure . . . that a human being in their system might get if [they are] exposed to that same amount of energy.” 14 Dr. Weill similarly opined that exposure to radiation did not play any role in contributing to Mr. Payne’s lung cancer because “if you compare his exposure to the kinds of exposure that ha[ve] been shown in the medical literature to increase the risk of lung cancer, Mr. Payne’s exposure would have been very small.” -13- On cross-examination, Dr. Dooley admitted that there were traces of plutonium, an element that “emits alpha radiation,” found in the soil at the Witherspoon scrapyard, which meant that the plutonium must have been transported by truck or railroad. Acknowledging “a very logical inference that it came from Oak Ridge,” Dr. Dooley agreed that the scrap metal transported to the Witherspoon site from Oak Ridge “could have [had] plutonium on it” and that no one at Oak Ridge could have “guarantee[d] that it wasn’t there.” Although Dr. Dooley maintained that the scrap metal “wasn’t classified as radioactive” and did not meet the definition of “radioactive materials” under federal regulations, he admitted that “[he] ha[d] no evidence that the railroad ever did any radiation surveys whatsoever,” that he did not find any evidence of radiation protection programs in use by the Defendant, that the Witherspoon company had at times violated radiological regulations, and that “[w]e’ll never know” exactly how much radiation Mr. Payne was exposed to during his term of employment. Dr. David Kocher, a health physicist and senior research scientist who had conducted “a wide variety of research activities related to radioactivity in the environment and calculating radiation doses,” testified that he had conducted a study in 1990, which measured “potential exposures to . . . the public and to railroad workers from radiation contamination along tracks in the town of Oak Ridge leading up to Y-12.” Relying on field data collected by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Environmental Restoration Program, Dr. Kocher reported that the radiation levels were “well below any applicable regulatory criterion” and, therefore, were “not a serious problem.” At the time, however, he did recommend “to the officials at Oak Ridge” that “they ought to just go dig up . . . a few cubic yards of contaminated dirt and haul it away[,] and they took [his] advice.” In preparation for the trial, Dr. Kocher applied his 1990 report to Mr. Payne by taking the same “radiation survey data that had been taken back in the 1980’s that [he had] used in [his] generic dose assessment back in 1990,” combining that data with information “about where [Mr. Payne] worked during what year, how many times a week . . . he [went] out there, [and] how many runs back and forth to Y-12 . . . he [made], and . . . tailor[ing] []his dose assessment to the particular conditions of exposure that [Mr. Payne] stated in his testimony.” He concluded that Mr. Payne’s exposure “almost certainly did not exceed a value of [one] millirem,” or one onethousandth of one rem, which he described as “not worthy of any concern.” Dr. Kocher estimated that during “the whole year that Mr. Payne was out at th[e] track area in east Oak Ridge,” the amount of radiation to which he was exposed “was equivalent to less than one pack of cigarettes.” He further testified that Dr. Dooley had overestimated Mr. Payne’s dose of plutonium, concluding that “plutonium [was] a very, very insignificant contributor to Mr. Payne’s exposure and that Mr. Mantooth’s concerns about the significance of plutonium at Witherspoon were technically unfounded.” On cross-examination, Dr. Kocher agreed that plutonium can travel through the air -14- and can cause lung cancer if inhaled. Although he did not necessarily agree with the methodology used by Dr. Dooley to reconstruct Mr. Payne’s exposure level, he believed that “[plutonium] was an unimportant contributor to [Mr. Payne’s] dose based on the data that Mr. Mantooth used in his analysis.” Dr. Kocher also addressed the “cesium contamination along the railroad tracks in Oak Ridge,” which had prompted his 1990 study and report. He identified the likely source of the cesium as waste from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the form of animal carcasses that were injected with cesium during controlled experiments to study “how radioactive material behaved inside the body of humans.” According to Dr. Kocher, the cesium contamination must have “stopped sometime in the ‘60s” because “it was a fairly short window of time during the 1960’s when Oak Ridge was the eastern regional burial ground for low level waste and it was during that period and that period only that an episode like this could have happened.” He acknowledged, however, that the area of the railroad tracks where the cesium contamination had occurred was not cleaned up and remediated until after his 1990 report was published.