Sitting at the kitchen table with his wife, Carole, Mervin Klees recalled showing up to work at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train shops outside West Burlington.
He and his coworkers would file into the massive locomotive repair building early in the morning, where the maintenance crew sometimes had re-fitted the pipes in the ceiling the night before. To get to the pipes, workers would have to cut through the asbestos insulation…
Victrola, are you an attorney? Do you work for one?
Common enough story for any older industrial facility and company that had operations before 1980 or so.
What’s kind of surprising is that the asbestos was supposedly from the overhead pipes per this article - well, perhaps some of it, but not most, because:
That West Burlington, Iowa shop was home to the CB&Q’s fleet of steam locomotives, whose boilers were of course likely insulated with asbestos ‘lagging’ ! They would have had much more work done on them than the shop’s pipes.
Also not mentioned is the fact that BNSF is the 2nd successor corporation to the CB&Q, after BN. Depending on the type of liability - personal injury vs. clean-up - it may stay with the owner of the property, or with the successor railroad. But the people who were in charge when most of this happened are probably long since retired, and many are likely dead themselves - so to blame the current BNSF management for anything more than inheriting the problem is not based on facts.
The finger-pointing between the 2 government agencies - EPA and Iowa DNR - about “Who’s responsible ?” is also not uncommon, but that’s about the worst I’ve ever seen in print. Either Abbott & Costello and/ or Gilbert & Sullivan would have had great fun with that one. Good thing the railroad has stepped up to the plate and hired a consultant (AECOM) to monitor the situation - otherwise, who would be ?
On the charge of being an attorney, or employed by one, not guilty.
The whole issue here is revolving around the $30 Billion Dollars that have been set aside into Trust Funds for victim’s classes due to Asbestos Exposures.
The BNSF Case seems to be more of a case of collateral damage. They might be classed similarly to the last one standing in a game of legal musical chairs;
The preceeding corporations to the final Corporate entity of today’s BNSF Rwy. According to the link below from the BNSF Rwy website; the present Corporaton is a compilation of over 390 predecessor lines over 160 years of history.
http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/our-railroad/company-history/
Any one of which practicing the then current business practices could have conceivably created a legal problem for its next corporate kin. like leaving a time bomb to be discovered as science and business practices advance in history.
(The following link is an explanation of how the $30 Billion Dollar set aside for asbestos exposure claims came about through the process of Chapter 11 Bankruptcies. It is a fairly simple explanation of how the Trust Funds were created, and that process. There are some advertisements for lawyers that go along with it, so I am just publishing the link for its explanation alone.)
http://www.mesorc.com/mesothelioma-lawsuits/asbestos-bankruptcy-trusts
We have all seen the plethora of Legal advertisement alluding to the the availability of Billion Dollar Trust Funds available for Classes of Asbestos exposures. This is a fact of life and I am trying to be as neutral in this post as possible to avoid the pitfalls of attacking one side or another.
Use of Asbestos was a fact of life in American Railroads