Johns-Manville Environmental Control Department Industrial Hygienists Conference Minutes (1974)

Twelve pages of minutes of a conference of J-M's industrial hygienists held January 21 to 23, 1974, with W. B. Reitze among the guest speakers. The hygienists discussed dust sampling, reporting and equipment. Ed Stevens noted that "plants concentrate their efforts on stations over TLV at the expense of stations reported as being under TLV," so that "retrogression is not uncommon," and Ed Bulava reported that some plants were "playing games" with the surveys.

What it shows

Bulava gave examples: a plant manager stood behind the operator during sampling to make sure conditions were not typical, and plants put off surveys until they had done "cosmetic housekeeping." Efforts to sample maintenance workers, whose asbestos exposures were thought significant, had met "only modest success" because of "minimal cooperation from plant people." The hygienists also noted that their records could one day be evidence in a federal court case, and that apart from asbestos in the United States they would use federal TLVs in their reports.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Minutes from Industrial Hygienists Conference Environmental Control Department (J-M), dated January 21-23, 1974. It was pointed out that plants concentrate their efforts on stations over TLV at the expense of stations reported as being under TLV. Hence, retrogression is not uncommon. Certain plants were reported to be "playing games"; e.g., they would state that a sample of a given area could not be taken because they were not ready. Due to minimal cooperation from plant people, efforts to sample maintenance workers had been met with only modest success.