Lawyers underscore Yucca silica dangers

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Sept. 2, 2004 | 9:46 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Attorneys who filed the lawsuit against Yucca Mountain contractors on the grounds that they did not warn workers about the dangers of silica dust are attempting to paint it as one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history.

The case may eventually compare to the "Hawk's Nest Incident" of the 1930s, when a tunneling company ordered workers into a mountain in West Virginia, despite documented health risks of silica exposure, said Joe Egan, the Washington, D.C.-area lawyer who filed the lawsuit.

"There are many people who will die prematurely as a result of this," Egan said of the Yucca workers.

Egan on Wednesday filed an amendment to the original class action lawsuit he filed in March on behalf of former Yucca Mountain employee Gene Griego and others who were involved with Yucca drilling or were otherwise exposed to silica in the mountain tunnel from 1992 to 2003. Griego worked at Yucca from 1993 to 2002 and was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease last year.

The amended lawsuit lists nine corporate defendants -- contractors involved with Yucca tunneling and research, including Bechtel National Inc., Bechtel SAIC Co., Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction Services and former contractor TRW Environmental Safety Systems, a subsidiary that was later folded into Northrop Grumman Corp. Corporate officials were not available for comment.

The amendment offers more evidence that the contractors intentionally and willfully exposed workers to danger to save time and money. In some cases, the contractors ignored the safety directives of the Energy Department, the suit says.

The amendment includes more information from new research into Energy Department documents and new interviews, Egan said. Egan is the lawyer who is also leading Nevada's effort to challenge the Yucca project in federal court.

"In short, although defendants completed the five-mile long main tunnel loop at Yucca in 1997 in record time, they did so by deliberately sacrificing their workforce and ... visitors to meet deadlines, save costs, and earn award fees, intentionally deceiving their workers about the hazards, thereby imposing harm upon them," the amended suit says.

The amendment serves to put the scope of the case in historical context, Egan said. As many as 1,500 workers may have died as a result of their work at Hawk's Nest in West Virginia, the lawsuit says.

The Energy Department has estimated that 1,200 to 1,500 workers were exposed "significantly" to silica and erionite dusts at Yucca, according to the original suit.