When then-newly named investigative reporter Bill Burke approached his editor last year with a story idea, he admittedly didn’t know what he’d get. “I just knew there was a very rich lode there,” he recalled.
Burke, who had given up the reins of the Public Safety Team to return to his first love — reporting — envisioned looking at a prosperous law firm, Glasser & Glasser, which had grown rich pioneering in the specialty practice of asbestos personal-injury law. The firm was moving into new digs at the six-story Crown Center in Norfolk.
“At the same time, Glasser’s adversaries — the companies that once manufactured asbestos products — were all heading to bankruptcy court,” Burke said. “I saw this as a symbol of a tremendous transfer of wealth.”
That was the germ for the five-part series, “Shipbuilding’s Deadly Legacy,” which begins on today’s front page. The special report details how the federal government and the asbestos industry kept secret for 40 years the fact that exposure to asbestos could kill you — and how that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of individuals, many of them former shipyard workers or their family members.
Even more startling is the realization that the tragedy is expected to continue claiming lives over the next 30 years. “The magnitude of this is pretty staggering,” said Burke. “No story we’ve told, I think, has the impact that this one does.”
Adds deputy managing editor Joe Coccaro, who supervises The Pilot’s three-member Investigative Team: “This is not an old story. We’re in the middle of it right now. . . . This is a very Hampton Roads-centric story. It’s about our people and our community.
“And those affected aren’t just the guys who were crawling in the belly of the ship, but their loved ones, as well.”
A factor driving The Pilot’s pursuit of the story was the realization that little had been written — nationally or locally — about the absbestos-related deaths, especially from the viewpoint of the victims. There had been thousands and thousands of lawsuits (Glasser is responsible for filing more than 10,000). But settlements, as Burke notes, become a private matter, with both sides forbidden to disclose the terms.
“We had only scratched the surface, writing cursory and arcane stories about trusts being set up by bankrupt asbestos companies and class-action suits,” Burke said.
“The story that needed to be told was about the medicine and the law and how all these workers came to be injured on the job. The story of who all these people are, the jobs they did, and what the impact on their lives has been. It also seemed like the right time to tell the story because a new wave of asbestos litigation was causing all kinds of convulsions in financial markets, starting in early 2000.” I asked Burke what was the most difficult task he faced in reporting the story.
“One of the toughest challenges was getting good reliable numbers — numbers of suits filed, numbers of people sickened and killed by asbestos, numbers of dollars paid to victims and their lawyers,” he said. “For instance, there was very little information available about the incidence rate of mesothelioma, the deadliest type of asbestos cancer, in Hampton Roads. No comprehensive medical surveys have been done in recent years locally. The state Health Department’s cancer registry keeps numbers, but reporting is incomplete and the numbers weren’t very helpful.”
Burke got better numbers from the trust that has been set up by Johns-Manville Corp. to pay claims to victims. The trust has received more than half a million claims and was able to provide Burke with perspective on the scope of the local epidemic that wasn’t available elsewhere.
“Also, since settlement agreements are mostly confidential, I had to do a lot of digging to come up with what I felt were reasonably accurate estimates on the total payout to victims and their lawyers,” Burke said. “Another frustration was the unwillingness of the Navy and the local shipyards to discuss their historic roles in the asbestos tragedy.”
Of all the individual stories, the one about Bill Powell, a former Visa executive who was diagnosed with mesothelioma at age 47, proved the most heart-rending, Burke said. Powell, who is profiled in Monday’s Part Two of the series, had apparently been exposed to the cancer-causing asbestos when his dad, a shipyard employee, came home every day from work when Powell was a boy.
“I interviewed him several times in the fall and followed developments in his story closely,” Burke said. “We e-mailed each other a lot. He was a bright, engaging guy looking for a cure to a disease that almost always kills and trying to cheer other meso victims on an Internet Web site with quotes from his Book of Bill. But he was a realist too. He never asked his doctor what his prognosis was.
“I hoped he would be the happy-ending story for our series, but he died on March 13 at age 51, and photographer Steve Earley and I covered his memorial service as part of the series.”
Burke and Coccaro hope the series will spark broader public awareness of the extent of asbestos-related illness in the community. “We also hope it’ll motivate people to get tested,” especially anyone who worked in a shipyard or whose parents did, Coccaro added.
