Stealh Attack
On Pearl Harbor’s 60th anniversary, a look back at asbestos, the silent killer of legions of Pearl Harbor shipyard workers.

Angela Rickabaugh Shears

December 5, 2001

On December 7, 1941, Tristan Nobriga and his wife, Fannie, were sipping coffee on their back porch in Kalihi while four of their five children were attending Sunday morning church services. Their infant son John was with them. "We heard all these planes coming, going around, and I looked up and a plane was right above me," 91-year-old Fannie Nobriga recalled in a recent interview. "The pilot had these big goggles, and he was looking down at me."
      The phone rang and her husband rushed to respond to the call for help at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, where only months earlier he had landed a job as an electrician. He returned home two days later.
      "A lot of them were helping take out bodies from the water," said John Nobriga about his father and other shipyard workers who were called in that day. "For two months the shipyard was secured — only workers and military were allowed in. You saw what happened in New York on Sept. 11, so you can imagine in ’41 when all those ships were attacked."
      Tristan Nobriga encouraged his son to apply for work at the shipyard, hoping he would be "one of the lucky ones who gets in." But that was before the elder Nobriga learned he had mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to the deadly microscopic fibers of asbestos. He died in 1979, 11 months after the diagnosis.
      Nobriga was one of 4.5 million shipyard workers nationwide who were exposed to asbestos during World War II. About 25,000 civilians worked at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard during the peak year of 1945, with some 40,000 employed during the course of the war. In addition to a flood of workers from the Mainland, Pearl’s workforce during that time included thousands drawn from Hawai‘i’s multi-ethnic population — except for Japanese Americans, considered a security threat at the time.
      Unlike most shipyard workers on the Mainland, who built ships with new, intact materials, Pearl Harbor was a ship-repair facility, where workers were in harm’s way every day as they handled damaged and aged asbestos that crumbled upon touch, became airborne and was inhaled.
      Pearl’s shipyard workers described grim working conditions, according to lawsuits filed against manufacturers of asbestos-containing materials, including Johns-Manville, Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. and Raybestos-Manhattan. Owens-Corning’s defense attorney, David Fairbanks, recalled court testimony of workers who described electricians, pipefitters and journeymen crammed into very tight spaces to make repairs. Wartime required fast turnaround.
      "They said it was like a snowstorm," Fairbanks said. "It was like a blizzard. Scene like a snowman — no can see, no can breathe. No mask or respirator. Nothing."
      Asbestos has killed an estimated 257,250 since the mid-1960s — with an additional 151,150 expected to perish before the national epidemic winds down in the year 2030. This chilling information comes from medical experts at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
      Most statistics about asbestos are based on the 30 years of study by Irving Selikoff, who was head of the Environmental Science Laboratory at Mount Sinai. Selikoff was instrumental in exposing the dangers of asbestos. If Selikoff’s projections are correct, the total number of U.S. deaths from asbestos will equal those of World War II — over 400,000.
      In Hawai‘i, medical reporting of early lung-cancer cases did not list the underlying causes, such as asbestos. Early statistics from the Hawai‘i Cancer Research Center and the Hawai‘i Department of Health do not specifically designate mesothelioma or asbestosis as a cause of death. Therefore, the number of people in the state who have fallen victim to this preventable disease is unknown.
      As of 2001, "hundreds" of asbestos victims have died, attorney Richard DeRobertis said recently in his cluttered, file-stacked office. DeRobertis, of Galiher DeRobertis Nakamura Ono Takitani, has worked alongside partner Gary O. Galiher since 1983 on asbestos-related lawsuits.
      The Galiher firm, handling the vast majority of asbestos-related cases in the state, has recovered in excess of $100 million for victims and their families over the past 20 years. According to the firm, in 1982 alone a $12 million aggregate settlement was received on behalf of 140 asbestos plaintiffs.
      Unlike the yearly remembrances of Pearl Harbor’s military heroes, deaths of shipyard workers — occurring one by one over the past 60 years — have gone largely unnoticed.
      Tristan Nobriga worked at Pearl Harbor for 28 years on ships, and later on nuclear submarines. With but a fifth-grade education, Nobriga earned a comfortable living for his family by learning the electrical trade. He mastered the use of asbestos insulating cloth, which was wrapped around electrical cables to protect them from heat damage.
      Nobriga and other workers spent 12 hours a day in asbestos-dust-clouded compartments repairing pipes and bulkheads. Asbestos was used throughout the lower levels of ships because of its phenomenal heat-resistant qualities.
      "He used to come home full of asbestos — in his eyes, his hair, his clothes," said Fannie. "I was afraid I would get it too, after I found out what it was."
      Not until 1964 were warnings placed on a few specific products. Nor were there warnings about secondhand exposure. Rose Martin Ledesma of Kaua‘i died in 1998 from the same mesothelioma form of lung cancer that her husband succumbed to in 1997. She washed her husband’s asbestos-soaked laundry for 33 years during the time he worked at the Kekaha Sugar Mill on Kaua‘i.
      "Another woman died from the same disease and the only evidence of exposure was that she hugged her grandfather every day when he came home from work at one of the sugar mills on Maui," DeRobertis said.

Unsung heroes
The vital role of civilian workers at Pearl Harbor is exemplified by the USS Yorktown saga. The Yorktown was safely at sea on Dec. 7. Five months later, however, the bomb-crippled Yorktown slid into Pearl Harbor on its 10-mile-long oil slick, fresh from the Battle of the Coral Sea. One of only three U.S. carriers (compared to 10 Japanese carriers) in the Pacific, the Yorktown needed major repairs that would keep her in port an estimated 90 days. Admiral Chester Nimitz had other plans and ordered Pearl’s workers and sailors to ready the ship for action within three days.
      Working around the clock, shipyard workers completed repairs in just 48 hours.
      At Midway six days later, on June 4, 1942, bombers from the Yorktown and its sister carrier, the Enterprise, dove out of the sky and delivered their deadly bombs and torpedoes, which set off fatal explosions and fires in three Japanese warships, including the flagship Akagi of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. It was Nagumo who, six months earlier, had directed the raid on Pearl Harbor.
      Although rarely acknowledged, Pearl’s shipyard workers contributed mightily to the nation’s decisive, turning-point battle of the war in the Pacific. The Battle of Midway permanently halted the eastward advance of the Japanese Empire and extinguished U.S. fears of Japanese attack-invasion of Hawai‘i and the West Coast.

Exposing the silent enemy
In 1978, Fannie Nobriga told her husband of 48 years to see a doctor about the coughing that kept her awake at night.
      "My father got sick, he went surgery, and the doctor came out to us and explained what my father had," said John Nobriga, who worked as an electrician at Pearl Harbor for 32 years until 1991. The doctor told them that Tristan had mesothelioma, a rare form of incurable cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos. John recalled, "These fish hooks get caught in the lungs and build up fluid and you can’t breathe — that’s what happened to my father."
      The disease sent Nobriga to the hospital, where a lung was punctured to drain the fluid. John remembers, "It looked like wine — two, three bottles at a time. He’d come home for a while, then it’d happen again." There was nothing else the doctors could do for him. At age 69, on Oct. 27, 1979, Nobriga died of mesothelioma, 28 years after starting his job at Pearl.
      Asbestos causes mesothelioma and also contributes to other diseases including lung, stomach and gastrointestinal cancers, according to the latest medical science. Mesothelioma’s latency period is from 20 to 40 years and is usually fatal within one or two years after diagnosis. "Asbestosis is caused by one thing only — breathing asbestos," states Barry I. Castleman in his 1990 book, Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects. Asbestosis, a debilitating but not necessarily fatal condition, has a latency period of 15 to 35 years.
      Known as far back as the First century, the term asbestos comes from the Greek word meaning "inextinguishable." During World War II, asbestos was considered vital in the construction boom in the shipyards, where its fireproofing and insulation qualities reduced shipboard risks created by steam turbines and high-temperature operations.
      Since 1989, five asbestos-containing products, including corrugated paper, rollboard, commercial paper, specialty paper and flooring felt, have been banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce unreasonable health risks to the public. The EPA also forbids the introduction of any new uses for asbestos. The list of products containing asbestos and still in use includes vinyl floor tile, roofing felt, vehicle automatic transmission components and disc brake pads.
      The World Trade Center collapse on Sept. 11 created an asbestos-filled dust cloud that hovered for weeks over the site. The Twin Towers were built in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1969, as information began to come out on asbestos’ dangers, the Twin Towers’ contractors stopped using the asbestos-containing materials to fireproof steel beams. In 1971, asbestos was banned in construction by the city of New York.
      Also in 1971, the Occupational Safety and Health Act established federal authority over asbestos in the workplace and developed standards regarding exposure limits, labeling and disposal of wastes, respirators, showers and work-clothes laundering.
      "Asbestos used to come in bags, and the dusty bags would be on the docks, and people at lunch hour would sit on the bags to relax and eat," said John Nobriga. "We weren’t told that, for instance, you better put on a tank suit, mask, or nothing." Like his father, he was unaware of the potential danger.
      Although the link between asbestos and mesothelioma was made in the 1930s, manufacturers of asbestos-containing products denied knowledge and responsibility until they were hit with thousands of lawsuits by workers claiming personal injuries. In August 1982, a full-page statement appeared in major East Coast newspapers announcing that Johns-Manville, a top Fortune 500 company with $2 billion in assets, was "overwhelmed by 16,500 lawsuits related to the health effects of asbestos."
      Johns-Manville estimated the $40,000-per-case settlement would bankrupt the company and filed a petition for reorganization and protection under Chapter 11, thereby skirting the potential $2 billion liability.

The Nobriga case
In 1978, attorney Galiher, fresh out of UH law school, filed the Nobriga lawsuit — the first asbestos-related lawsuit in Hawai‘i. The lawsuit was filed against 24 asbestos-related companies, including Raybestos-Manhattan and Johns-Manville. After meeting with Pearl Harbor workers and researching Mainland cases, Galiher assumed the challenge of battling some 30 Island law firms representing the various companies.
      "These people were as honest as the day is long, and just when they should have been enjoying their retirement years, the disease was discovered," Galiher said in a recent interview. "I thought they really got cheated, and I wanted to help them. I felt good about the merits of the case and had no idea it would turn into what it turned into." By 1982, Galiher had filed 140 asbestos-related cases.
      The Nobriga case turned into a major media event. "Because of the publicity, the case alerted a lot of Pearl Harbor shipyard workers about the dangers, and it generated more lawsuits because people realized what defenses were available and that there was a legal remedy for them," DeRobertis said.
      Nobriga’s suit included file documents from Sumner Simpson, president of Raybestos-Manhattan in the 1930s, that clearly revealed that asbestos-product manufacturers knew their goods were dangerous. A letter written in 1935 by a Johns-Manville attorney to Simpson expressed concern about an asbestos dust-control article being published in a trade magazine. The letter said: "I agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum publicity.
      "Even if we should eventually decide to raise no objections to the publication of an article. … I think we should warn the editors to use American data on the subject rather than English." The American data was less alarming.
      This and other incriminating evidence provided courts and juries with proof that both Raybestos-Manhattan and Johns-Manville made deliberate decisions — as early as 1941 — to withhold information that may have saved thousands of lives. In fact, records indicate that as early as 1933, Johns-Manville had quietly paid claims to employees diagnosed with asbestosis.
      "Johns-Manville engaged in a coverup greater than anything Richard Nixon or anybody associated with Watergate ever could have dreamed of," Ronald Motley, a Mainland asbestos litigation expert, said during a trial in 1981 in Jacksonville, Florida, when he represented a client diagnosed with asbestosis. Motley was also involved in the Nobriga case.
      Major asbestos-related corporations provided "fake studies, suppressed findings, bribed attorneys and failed to give information," assistant U.S. Attorney Theodore G. Meeker charged in a recent interview. Meeker worked on asbestos litigation from 1983 until 1987 for the federal government and also served 30 years in the U.S. Navy as an active-duty and reserve officer.
      "In my opinion, a strong case can be made that the upper management of the major manufacturers, if they were still alive, could be charged with mass murder," Meeker said. However, no criminal charges have ever been filed.
      Galiher and DeRobertis agree with Meeker’s assessment of the manufacturer’s role in the coverup, "Of course, that’s why we were allowed to bring punitive damage claims — because of their conscious indifference to the consequences of marketing asbestos, knowing it was deadly," DeRobertis said.
      The wave of lawsuits that began on the East Coast in the 1960s surged west across the country as people learned their illnesses had a cause: asbestos and its knowing manufacturers. Based largely on the Simpson documents and the findings published by Selikoff, lawyers were winning settlements for their clients ranging from thousands to millions of dollars. Selikoff’s epidemiological studies on insulators published in 1964-’65, "are credited even by the asbestos industry with establishing unequivocally the existence of a cancer hazard from occupational exposure to asbestos," according to author Castleman.
      Four years after Nobriga’s case was filed, his widow and his six children accepted $564,000 in out-of-court settlements and $98,000 from two asbestos manufacturers in the trial settlement.
      Galiher’s firm has filed up to 1,800 asbestos-related cases over the past 20 years. The firm averages "at least 25 new cases each year, because people continually get diseases from being exposed 25 to 50 years earlier," DeRobertis said.
      A current case will be presented by Galiher in May 2002 involving a Pearl Harbor Shop 31 machinist who, over the years, had repaired brakes on the cranes and winches that lower lifeboats and heavy equipment off ships. Certain braking materials came in rolls, "and the workers would have to roll it, drill it, cut it, sand it, during three-to-five day overhaul projects," Galiher said. "We have good evidence against the defendant, but they said they never made such a brake. It’s shameless how they lie."
      The machinist’s fatal diagnosis: mesothelioma. He died this year at 75.

An empty chair
Two-and-a-half years after mesothelioma claimed her husband, Fannie Nobriga and her children sat in a First Circuit courtroom in Honolulu listening to the court proceedings that ensued with their suit and watching the videotaped testimony her husband recorded before he died.
      "I was operated in July 1978 and spent six months in and out of the hospital," Nobriga testified to the camera lens. "Then I was told there was asbestos in my lungs. Ever since this took effect, I just a rocking-chair boy, that’s all I do." Today Nobriga’s koa-wood rocking chair sits empty by the living room window in Fannie’s Kaimukï home.
      Fannie gladly sings the praises of her hero and remembers their last evening together.
      "It was a Saturday night, Oct. 27, 1979, at 5:30 and I was standing by the sink in the kitchen fixing him crab legs and corn-on-the-cob for dinner," Mrs. Nobriga said. "He was sitting in his chair watching a UH football game on TV when I heard him moan, and I ran to him and said ‘Tristan, don’t leave me, I’m all alone,’ and he just went. That was the end."

My Papa’s 32-year asbestos encounter
I call him Papa, but actually Clifford Akana is my grandfather. He’s the Hawaiian namesake half of my hyphenated name.
     Since I was born, Papa has been a beacon of support. For one thing, Papa made it his duty to lug around a video camera to preserve forever my hula performances.
     Recently, however, the tables were turned, and I watched in the audience as Papa took the spotlight. On Nov. 6, he gave a presentation to three UH-Mänoa journalism students (including me) on asbestos, a material my class has been studying — a substance Papa knows all too well.
      For the first time, I learned of Papa’s encounter with asbestos during the 32 years he worked at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard — and of the dark spot on his lung.
     Papa told us he began his career at Pearl Harbor at the age of 17. In December 1942, he became a pipe coverer and insulator. He was to work at the shipyard for the next 31 years.
     Papa remembers clearly his first day on the job: "The guys were throwing mud at each other," he recalled. What the workers called "mud" was a mineral named magnesium, which was processed, mixed with asbestos fibers and water and then shaped to wrap around boilers, drums and large valves.
     Papa was exposed to asbestos nearly five days a week for 32 years. His relationship with asbestos was so frequent and intimate that he took a lunch-break nap on the rolls of asbestos, completely unaware of its cancer-causing potential. "We didn’t know," Papa said. "We didn’t think anything about it."
     "One of the most critical times — as far as air pollution — was during the time they called rip-outs, repairs," he recounted. Then shipyard workers would literally rip out the insulation from ships that needed repairs, creating massive clouds of asbestos dust. "It was almost like getting a bag of flour and just shaking it," Papa said. Everyone aboard the ship was, in some fashion, exposed to the dust.
     Papa remembered coming home to his wife and four kids in his Pearl Harbor civilian housing unit, covered with asbestos dust: "I used to come home white," he told us. " I would go with blue clothes, come home white. Dust all over. Dust in your fingernails." Luckily, Papa told Grandma to wash his work clothes separately.
     About 20 years ago, Papa was told by a doctor that he had a spot on his lung, a direct result of his extensive exposure to asbestos. About 10 years ago, Papa’s doctor told him the spot hadn’t spread and that he would be fine. Without the class visit to provoke him, Papa says the spot might have slipped from his mind completely; he no longer worried.
     Because of that spot, however, Papa received settlement money in 1986 and 1987 from several manufacturers of asbestos products. He was subpoenaed several times in the 1980s to provide critical information on work conditions at the shipyard, information used in personal-injury suits filed by asbestos victims. He says he’s still getting calls from Mainland lawyers.
      Papa has outlived some of his co-workers. Today he is a 77-year-old asbestos survivor. After his presentation to my classmates and me, Papa scheduled another doctor’s appointment to check out that spot on his lung.
—Kiele Akana-Gooch