Exposure to Mineral Dust Causes Lifelong Health Issues.

Oakland, CASure it was dusty, and sure the particles stuck in the throat but none of the railroad workers suspected that thirty years later they would be diagnosed as permanently injured by exposure to dangerous levels of mineral dust.

Kenneth started at Southern Pacific Railroad in 1976 in San Francisco. By the time he transferred to Oakland in 1983, the company had merged with Union Pacific but he held the same position as car inspector. Unknown to him, the freight cars contained asbestos.

"I was exposed to asbestos in the late 70s," says Keith. "I started out in the workshop located in an industrial area, working on freight cars. They had these guys in white uniforms up on ladders scraping things off the pipes. And it was all falling down on top of us, but we didn't know what it was; no one told us it was asbestos or what they were doing. They were just doing their job while we were doing ours.

This went on for several weeks because it was a big warehouse and they had to go all the way around. I worked around that specific area for five to six years. Then I transferred to Oakland and worked in a construction area where they were using a different type of sandblasting, so I was exposed to stuff that had silica chemicals in it."

Originating from the common mineral silica, which is found in granite, sandstone, flint, and coal, it becomes an occupational hazard especially when ground, crushed, cut and broken up. The inhalation of the resulting silica dust causes fibrosis of the lungs, resulting in respiratory disease. Silicosis can take anywhere from two years to develop, in the case of acute exposure, up to 20 years.

"The changes I noticed when I got home," says Keith, "was I'd be coughing up dust and dark stuff or when I blew my nose it would come out black. When I would walk for awhile, I'd start getting tired, my knees and joints started hurting, so did my lower back, but you know, I've been working a lot of years.

I didn't know what was happening until I went for the screening. The silicosis showed up and proved that I had been exposed to it. There was enough in me and my buddies that we were diagnosed as being contaminated."

It wasn't the railroad who organized the screening. Through a friend of a buddy, Keith heard that a group of lawyers from Houston, Texas had set up at the Hilton Hotel in Oakland and were calling for anyone who had worked in sandblasting or anything to do with dust or sand.

"So we all went down," Keith says. "They had everything set up; you know they even had people coming in for the screening who were hooked up to oxygen tanks. There were doctors, lawyers, x-ray technicians and all that and we did breathing tests where we had to breathe into this machine. The tests were extensive.

Before the actual tests, they showed a movie and you had to check off in this little book they gave us, by memory first, any kind of sand you might have been exposed to, what kind of respirator you used that might have been defective, the whole nine yards. It took about two hours but it wasn't nerve-racking because the lawyers were searching for the companies who manufactured the type of respirator, or the type of sand or name-brand sand we were exposed to.

If you were diagnosed, they sent you right down the hall to see a paralegal. This was about May 2003.

Then lawsuits started. I got a letter one day that said, in my case, this was one of many claims I'd be getting in the near future. Apparently there were several more claims but I only got paid for one.

Health-wise, since then, it's still dusty where I work and sometimes I leave there with my eyes all red as if I've got an allergy, but I've got to keep working--got to eat, don't I? And as far as the silicoses goes, I get arthritic symptoms in my knees and my ankles, and pain periodically, for which I take Advil or Tylenol."