Deposition of Dr. Kenneth W. Smith in Louisville Trust Company v. Johns-Manville on Dust at Asbestos, Quebec (1976)

Seven pages (cover, appearances and pages 44 to 48) of the deposition of Dr. Kenneth Wallace Smith, taken on April 21, 1976, at his office in Windsor, Ontario, in The Louisville Trust Company, administrator of the estate of William Virgil Sampson, v. Johns-Manville Corporation, in the Jefferson Circuit Court in Kentucky. Smith testified that he first learned people other than workers could develop disease in the late 1940s, when he and Dr. Paul Cartier reviewed X-rays of workers and townspeople of Thetford Mines at Saranac Lake and found the patterns "undistinguishable in many cases." He described standing at the edge of the open pit at Asbestos with A. R. Fisher, Dr. Stevenson and McGaw, watching dust blow over the town, and seeing bundles of fibre "rolling like tumbleweed down the main streets of the town."

What it shows

Smith also testified that J-M funded the Saranac studies both directly and through the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which was J-M's insurer for occupational disease in the United States, and that he and A. R. Fisher discussed "many times" what dust does to people, employed or not. He praised J-M's dust control once it began, and said the merit rating of the Asbestos operation saved several hundred thousand dollars a year in workmen's compensation premiums. The dust outside the plant was also the subject of the 1949 approval to extend dust control "both within and without the plant" (Woodard to McGaw).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

In subsequent depositions, Smith claims to have been aware of downwind disease at Canadian asbestos mines at this time.

Related documents

• Johns-Manville Release on the Hospital and Accident Prevention at Asbestos, Quebec (1939)
• Town of Asbestos and Its Junior Chamber of Commerce to H. K. Sherry on Dust Collection (1939)