Johns-Manville Interrogatory Answers on Its Mines and Mills, Excerpts (1978)

Seven pages of excerpts from Johns-Manville's answers to interrogatories in asbestos lawsuits, put together with the "Mines and Mills" chart and a page of handwritten notes, with unrelated answers blacked out. The answers say that J-M began mining raw asbestos in "approximately 1918"; that Johns-Manville Sales Corporation owned 80 percent of Coalinga Asbestos Company, which ran a mine at Coalinga, California, from March 1962 to June 1974; and that Johns-Manville Products Corporation made asbestos-containing industrial thermal insulation from 1927 until it merged into the Sales Corporation on December 31, 1975. One answer lists the mines J-M or its predecessor drew raw asbestos from after 1945: Advocate, Coalinga, Chrysotile (Arizona), Jeffrey, Munro, Reeves, and Rhodesian mines at Mashaba and Shamala.

What it shows

Asked why it stopped making asbestos insulation, J-M answered that the products had been replaced "in a desire to improve the products and keep abreast of competition," and that "the overriding factor in such decision was the desire to eliminate the potential of asbestos dust in a work environment where control of such dust appeared to be difficult and inconsistent, at best." It gave "economic and marketing considerations" for closing the Coalinga mine. The same mine facts appear in J-M's mines and subsidiaries chart and in Diemer's April 1978 memo.