Insulators
SECRETS OF ASBESTOS; Family of insulators ravaged by disease; Like thousands in the trade throughout the country, the four brothers didn't realize the white dust that covered them at work could kill.(NEWS)(SECRETS OF ASBESTOS)
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) | November 9, 2003 | Gordon, Greg
Washington, D.C. -- A STAR TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT
The four Bertrand brothers were a tightly knit bunch, following their father into the insulation trade in the 1950s.
They kicked up dust all day as they labored to wrap huge boilers and miles of pipelines with blocks of asbestos and a mudlike asbestos finishing coat.
Sawing and mixing left their faces and hands coated with white film. Like thousands of insulators across the country, the Bertrands didn't know that the white dust could kill.
Bob Bertrand, 64, a St. Paul father of four, is the only surviving brother of a family ravaged by asbestos. And he is fighting for his life against mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lining of the lungs almost always caused by exposure to asbestos fibers.
He said asbestos contributed to the deaths of two of his brothers, and he and his family suspect it was a factor in the death of his father and his third brother.
Surviving family members are convinced that mesothelioma, which causes fluid to build in the body, killed family patriarch Louis Bertrand. He died in 1967 at age 68 of a burst stomach.
The oldest son, Louis Francis Bertrand, was next, dying in 1970 at age 42 of a heart attack. There was never an asbestos-related diagnosis, but he had had problems breathing, and there had been no family history of heart disease. Seven years later, 20-year-old Louis Jr. stepped into the family's back yard and shot himself to death.
"He wanted to be with his dad," Bob Bertrand said, choking back tears.
In 1985, 51-year-old Eugene Bertrand, who suffered from asbestosis, died of a heart attack. Asbestosis is known to contribute to heart attacks by limiting the flow of oxygen to the heart. Then in 1993, mesothelioma took the life of Raymond Bertrand, age 57.
Bob Bertrand's sister, Alice, married an insulator, Jim Garfield, who died of mesothelioma at age 63 in 1992. Garfield's brother, Mark, also an insulator, died in 1998 of asbestos-related disease, Alice Garfield said.
Alice Garfield, 72, of White Bear Lake, and Bob Bertrand's wife, Jacqueline, 61, have been diagnosed with asbestosis - apparently from shaking dust off their husbands' clothes.
"It's unreal ... just unreal," Bertrand said of asbestos' toll on his family. "I can't even put it into words."
Firsthand
The Bertrands are among a long line of insulators whose lives turned tragic because of the asbestos disaster. No union has been harder hit than the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers.
"Nobody knows the hideous devastation that's been caused by asbestos better than the asbestos workers," said Terry Lynch, the political and legislative director for the 30,000-member union. "We know it firsthand."
James Grogan, president of the 100-year-old union, said it has represented more than 88,000 insulators and that all but a small percentage were exposed to asbestos. Grogan, who breathed the fibers while doing insulation work in New Jersey years ago, estimates asbestos-related diseases have killed tens of thousands of them.
Officials of St. Paul-based Local 34, Minnesota's largest insulators' local with about 400 active members, said 137 union card holders died between 1974 and 2002. Public health experts say death certificates grossly underestimate asbestos-related deaths. Of Local 34's fatalities, an analysis of death certificates showed at least 67 could have been asbestos-related.
Harold Duchene, a retired business manager of Local 34, has attended every victim's funeral over the past 20 years. As the toll grew, workers nearing the end of their battles with asbestos became recognizable.
"They get a gray look about them," said Gary Benson, business manager of a smaller insulators local based in Minneapolis. "You'd go to a [union] meeting and you could just about tell who wouldn't be around long."
Grogan said mesothelioma victims typically "suffer from six to 13 months," often from fierce pain as tumors press against nerve endings along their rib cages.
"The guys that die from pure asbestosis choke themselves to death for three and four years," he said. "They cough a minimum of 20 hours a day. I don't think they get two hours sleep."
Huffing and puffing
Bob Bertrand, who spent 45 years as an insulator, said it wouldn't surprise him if insurers knew of asbestos' threats, noting that manufacturers "kept on pushing" the products after learning of the dangers.
When he learned he had mesothelioma on Oct. 4, 2001, he said, a doctor told him: "You've got four to six months and you're dead."
His children scrambled to research the disease, he said, but "every time they'd come up with something, it'd make you sadder, knowing that these companies knew that the stuff was dangerous."
Despite his fast-moving cancer, he went back to work, huffing and puffing through the year's end, before retiring.
With his condition inoperable because the cancer had spread to both lungs, Bertrand recently went to see Dr. Arkadiusz Dudek, a University of Minnesota oncologist experimenting with a chemotherapy approach for late-term mesothelioma patients.
The treatments sapped Bertrand's strength but shrank the tumors by 25 percent - enough to ease his pain and keep him alive.
Bertrand said he has moved beyond anger to acceptance of his plight.
"I got the extra time to work out everything with my family."
Greg Gordon is at ggordon@mcclatchydc.com.
