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June 20 2007

Shipyard families waiting for answers

Pushing for clinic to determine industrial impact on community - "What we feel we deserve from (WHSCC) would obviously be compensation for all these families, men and the widows that have been left behind,"

ALISHA MORRISSEY
The Telegram

For 12 years, Bernadine Bennett was telling her children that their grandfather died of lung cancer because he smoked.

"I didn't know until one year ago ... and then when I realized, my father didn't die of smoking, he was murdered - well, he wasn't murdered, but it definitely wasn't smoking that killed him," she says.

The real culprit was likely chemicals and asbestos that he worked with on a daily basis for decades at the Marystown shipyard, she says.

"You don't have to go on a big hunt to find families ... all you have to do is go to the local mall or drive down the road and in every house somebody is connected to that yard."

Bennett is the chairwoman of a community group called the Marystown Shipyard Families Alliance, which represents about 40 Workplace Health Safety and Compensation Commission (WHSCC) complainants. The alliance was formed in 2006 when shipyard workers and their families were frustrated by an "incompetent" study on cancers and their causes in the community.

The study found 88 cases of cancer diagnosed in workers at the yard, which researchers considered to be a high number.

As well, shipyard workers were twice as likely to develop cancer as those working in offices, according to the study.

The provincial committee that completed the study recommended the town lobby the province for a health clinic to be held in the community.

According to documents obtained by the alliance through the Access to Information Act, when the province sold the shipyard to Friede Goldman in 1998, government accepted legal liability for any contamination of the site, marine habitat and the town as well as any workers harmed by working at the yard.

Aside from compensation, the alliance is asking the province to set up an intake clinic at the yard site.

"What we feel we deserve from (WHSCC) would obviously be compensation for all these families, men and the widows that have been left behind," Bennett says.

"What we expect from those clinics is how to get a handle on how these toxins are still affecting these men."

A decision on an intake clinic is expected from WHSCC soon, but WHSCC officials couldn't be reached by press time.

A clinic of their own

In the meantime, the alliance will hold a public meeting and intake clinic of its own over the weekend in Marystown and invite the public as well as officials with the Federation of Labour, the union, business and government.

The alliance will bring in Dr. Noel Kerin, who runs Kerin Occupational Health Consulting in Toronto, to conduct the intake clinic.

In a telephone interview from his Toronto office, Kerin says about 30 per cent of all cancers are caused by industrial work.

"Trying to prove the science of exposures causing illnesses including cancer is complex," Kerin says, adding that industrial disease often goes unreported and that many doctors blame cigarettes, when industrial disease is a possible cause.

"The other difficult problem in the equation here is the long, long period of time between exposures and the appearance of the diseases."

There are thousands of chemicals and chemical combinations that were used in industrial settings that have since been ascribed to cancer, Kerin says.

Kerin says the province shouldn't just look at Marystown as a compensation issue, but as an opportunity to act as an example to other areas affected by outbreaks of industrial disease.

"This is the cost of industry, that was a very dirty, dangerous industry, and one of several, and it is an issue that has to be dealt with by the community, by the public, so it's a problem for Newfoundland," he says. "If we study it and make people aware, then people will ask the question 'What am I being exposed to?'

"That's the message I'd like to take to Marystown. Not one of woe hand wringing, that's been done, there's been enough of that sadness."

Bennett urged people to attend the weekend intake clinic.

"Anybody who ever passed through the gates of the Marystown shipyard needs to come into this clinic and this one-day clinic will be a prototype for a permanent clinic in Marystown for these men," Bennett says.

"No matter what their job or classification was, they need to come into this clinic and be documented."

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http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=38795&sc=79

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