Georgia injury mesothelioma

Georgia-Pacific chief Pete Correll was hopping mad, and that was my first clue that I was onto something.

I was gearing up for another quarterly conference call in which Georgia-Pacific officials speak with analysts about the company's financial results. Georgia-Pacific, for the record, is the world's biggest tissue maker and a large producer of plywood and lumber.

The earnings calls are usually filled with hardcore commodity talk and the usual ups and downs of the building supply business.

But on this particular Thursday in late January 2002, there was a drastically different tone. As it turned out, what I heard that morning laid the foundation for my first investigative project.

Correll, chairman and chief executive of the Atlanta-based lumber giant, frequently complains about his bad luck, but this time Correll was more frazzled than I'd ever heard him in my three years of covering Georgia-Pacific.

In the weeks leading up to Georgia-Pacific's fourth-quarter earnings release, Wall Street had developed a sudden fixation on asbestos liability - something of which the company had no shortage. Georgia-Pacific used asbestos from 1965 to 1977 to make a compound for hanging wallboard and finish ceilings, and as a result, it was pulled into the biggest product liability disaster ever.

For years, executives had been telling investors not to worry about asbestos liability because the company had plenty of insurance. But investors started to get restless near the end of 2001, after a string of asbestos-related bankruptcies and eye-popping trial verdicts emerged against other defendants. Suddenly Georgia-Pacific, with its 63,000 pending asbestos injury claims, was in the spotlight.

Investors slashed a third off the company's stock price - and there were rumors that Georgia-Pacific might have to join other asbestos defendants fleeing to bankruptcy protection.

Correll had to do something quickly, so he tried a tirade. Raising his voice and sprinkling a bit of profanity throughout the hour-long conference call, Correll lashed out at analysts for "irrational" speculation. The asbestos panic was "absolutely absurd," and furthermore, "grossly overblown."

Correll, I remember thinking, doth protest too much.

Convoluted mess

With the sheer volume of lawsuits, we realized that I couldn't tackle the project alone, so veteran project reporter Ann Hardie was brought in to help wade through the litigation and piece together what had happened during the 1960s and 1970s at Georgia-Pacific.

From the start, Hardie and I were intrigued with the age-old notion that the decisions from long ago can sometimes come back to haunt you, so we focused on Georgia-Pacific's past, present and future as the overall theme for the project. The timeline theme emerged as a natural element for organizing and writing the project.

We spent the first month or so just trying to understand the basics. Before we could really dig into the legal end, we had to answer two questions that were at the root of the entire issue: 1. What is asbestos? 2. Why is it dangerous?

Hardie tackled those issues through interviews with local doctors and federal safety officials. We also purchased a reference book on the history of asbestos use.

In retrospect, most of the information was available via the Internet, but I think it helped in the early stages to hear it from our own sources. The only danger was that we already had begun to stockpile details outside the focus of Georgia-Pacific.

For example, we had assumed that asbestos was banned completely. Many of the news articles we found initially, including recent stories, had erroneously said so. We learned, however, that the EPA tried to phase out asbestos in 1989, but a federal judge overturned the ban on technicalities. Asbestos is still being used in pipeline wraps, brake linings and small appliances, for example.

We were surprised, and our editors were surprised, which naturally led to - "Hey, why don't we do a story on that?" We reminded ourselves that everything had to relate to Georgia-Pacific. (We handled the it's-not-banned facts in an "asbestos backgrounder" that ran as a sidebar.)

Once we learned about asbestos-related diseases, we answered a key legal question: Why are lawsuits still flooding the courts?

Asbestos illnesses typically don't begin to surface until 10 to 50 years after exposure to the toxic substance, so there has been a continuous wave of lawsuits since the use of asbestos hit its heyday in the construction industry during the 1970s.

Once we understood the health aspects of asbestos, we began to grasp the legal end, which by most accounts is a convoluted mess. In all, more than a half-million injury claims have been filed over asbestos since the 1970s, and experts say that claims could keep rolling in for the next 40 years.

Asbestos plaintiffs generally fall into one of three camps, depending on the alleged injuries: those who are dying from mesothelioma, a gruesome cancer that is considered the signature asbestos disease; those who have asbestosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs; and those who have a pleural thickening, which is when the membrane covering the lungs thickens due to asbestos exposure.

Our original plan was to find people from each group to illustrate the range of injuries. But finding people who were still alive and willing to talk was much harder than I had imagined. I assumed that with the thousands of lawsuits out there, I'd have a hard time whittling down the prospects. I was wrong.

First, there's no national database of asbestos claimants. Most lawsuits are filed in state courts, and there's no routine, centralized procedure for asbestos filings in state courts. Some courts have special asbestos dockets and some have installed electronic filing systems to cut down on the paperwork. But even when we began researching the cases electronically through CourtLink, it was nearly as cumbersome as thumbing through the paperwork.

Lawyers typically group more than 100 plaintiffs against dozens of defendants in a single lawsuit. By the time all the motions, discovery and other legal documents are piled on, one lawsuit could easily fill two shopping carts.

It didn't take long to realize why the U.S. Supreme Court has referred to the backlog of cases as an "elephantine mass."

Hardly any of the suits go to trial because defendants don't want to take chances with juries. Asbestos litigation has turned into a business transaction for the most part, with each side negotiating for the best deal. Almost all of the cases settle for confidential amounts.

For example, in the nearly 30 years that Georgia-Pacific has been dealing with asbestos lawsuits, the company has taken only a dozen cases to trial.

Rather than spin our wheels on finding people with each type of injury, we decided to find a few of the most damaging cases against Georgia-Pacific, and those were the people with mesothelioma. They're virtually guaranteed multimillion-dollar awards, and lawyers like to publicize the settlements when they can.

Within that group, we looked for people who would illustrate the variety of ways you could be exposed to asbestos. Most claims against Georgia-Pacific, its attorneys say, come from construction workers who breathed dust from asbestos-containing compounds. Some are the wives of workers who brought asbestos home on dusty work clothes. And some are consumers who claim they were sickened by breathing asbestos in products they used in home remodeling projects.

The three people we highlighted included a contractor, the wife of a plasterer and a young woman who was exposed to asbestos as a child during a renovation in her home.

Childhood exposure

Lisa Pransky, who was exposed to asbestos as a little girl, turned out to be the glue that held the first day of the series together.

I had first found Pransky back in 1999 when I saw a story in a legal newspaper out of Maryland. A jury had awarded her $9 million after she convinced them that her cancer was caused by Georgia-Pacific's asbestos-containing compound. She believed she had breathed asbestos as an 8-year-old when her father remodeled the basement.

At the time, I wrote a routine daily story and filed the clip away with some other lawsuits against the company, but she stuck in my mind. I remember imagining a little girl watching her dad work. I thought about how her father must have felt when he found out his remodeling project - a recreation room for his daughters - could be responsible for Lisa's cancer.

Pransky was one of the first people I checked on at the start of the project. I called her attorney in the middle of March to find out what the status of her case was. She had died in 2000, but the case was still on appeal on behalf of her husband. The appeals hearing, as luck would have it, was just three weeks away.