Halliburton settles asbestos claims with families of local victims

The Halliburton Company settled legal claims with about 120 families of asbestos victims in the Pacific Northwest this week, agreeing to pay out $30 million and to create a fund for future victims of the deadly fiber.

The local settlement was part of a $4.3 billion national settlement involving about 250,000 plaintiffs who had sued the company in connection with exposure to asbestos products distributed by Halliburton subsidiaries.

Matthew Bergman, attorney for the local families and one of seven lawyers involved in negotiating the settlement, said today that Dresser Industries, a Halliburton subsidiary, knew since the 1930s that asbestos was harmful, yet issued no warnings. Locally, asbestos products were widely used in shipyards, pulp mills and power plants.

Many of Bergman's clients worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, he said. Some were civilian workers and others were sailors, some of whom remember sleeping in bunks beneath pipes insulated with asbestos, he said.

Charisse Dahlke's husband Dale started working in the Naval yard at age 18, and spent 25 years as an electrician before being diagnosed with mesothelioma, a type of cancer caused by asbestos. He died seven months later, in May 2003.

"It was everywhere," Dahlke, a Port Orchard mother of three, recalls her husband saying. "He even remembered some of the guys using it for snowball fights."

The men had no idea it was harmful. The disease can take decades to manifest.

"The bad thing for me is they knew and they didn't tell people," she said.

Mary LaPointe's husband Dan was the son of a construction worker who often came home from work in clothes dusted with a fluffy white powder.

In high school and college, Dan LaPointe worked construction jobs, mostly handling insulation material. More than 25 years after first being exposed, Dan LaPointe was diagnosed with asbestos-related cancer, and died in 2000.

The lawsuits had hurt Halliburton investors financially. According to the New York Times, in one day in 2001, shares fell by more than 40 percent, to $12 a share, because of concern over asbestos liability. When the settlement was finalized, the company called it "good news" because it removed uncertainty about the company's future. Stocks today traded at about $41 per share.

Asbestos is no longer used at the Naval yard, however it is still used elsewhere in the United States. Sen. Patty Murray has been working on legislation to ban asbestos, but has been unsuccessful.

President Bush has urged legal reform related to asbestos, as well. In his State of the Union speech last night, the president said the U.S. economy has been held back by "irresponsible class actions and frivolous asbestos claims," and he urged Congress to pass reforms that would help limit such actions.