Ailing retirees of GE plant say they’re paying price for toxic past
Generations of workers in Peterborough had seen factory as a symbol of opportunity
PETERBOROUGH— Despite working at the plant since he was 16, Ed Condon carried himself with a gentleness factory life didn’t afford him — never swearing, smoking or drinking.
Retirement, his family hoped, would finally heal the bone-deep cracks in his hands, stop the nosebleeds he stubbornly brushed off. There would be more twilight drives down River Rd. with his wife, more rambles in the woods with his three grandchildren.
But Ed Condon always believed the chemicals would kill him first. In the end, his family says, he was right. Where he once dreamed of more woodland walks, a simple cross now commemorates him.
“He had such amazing integrity and honour. And he was such an honest man,” says his daughter Cindy Crossley, who lost her father to an inoperable brain tumour in 2012. “He was my everything.” Families like the Crossleys say a silent tragedy has ravaged a tight-knit community of Peterborough workers who’ve filed hundreds of compensation claims for often horrific and sometimes terminal diseases — from brain to bowel to lung cancer.
The cause, they believe, is prolonged exposure to a dizzying range of human carcinogens used at their former workplace, General Electric, where toxic substances sometimes registered at hundreds of times the levels now considered safe. One occupational disease expert calls the factory in its heyday a “cancer generator.”
But decades after some fell ill, even decades after some died, Cindy Crossley feels justice has yet to be served.
In 2002, a GE-commissioned mortality study obtained by the Star found male employees were up to 57 per cent more likely to die of lung cancer than the general population and female workers up to 129 per cent more likely.
A GE spokesperson, Rahim Ladha, says that when the study controlled for “other factors” such as age and smoking in a followup study, there was “no statistically significant increase in cancer at the Peterborough facility.”
Ladha noted the company’s 125-year history in Peterborough and its employment of tens of thousands of workers, whose health and safety have always been its “No. 1 priority.”
Since 2004, when a government-funded health clinic assessed GE workers for occupational disease, there have been 660 compensation claims made to Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.
Some 280 have been accepted; more than half have been withdrawn, abandoned or rejected because of apparently insufficient evidence that the conditions were work related. Now, a group of more than 60 GE retirees are challenging that outcome — and demanding recognition for blue-collar workers they say put their health on the line for their powerful employer.
“It seems like our factory workers were seen as less valuable to society,” Crossley says. “They were expendable.”
Drawing on decades of government inspections and internal documentation, hundreds of archived local news reports and dozens of interviews with retired workers and occupational health experts, the Star found the story of a city, like many across the country, still grappling with the long shadow of heavy industry.
Of grieving families thrust into conflict with a bureaucratic maze that demands what some call an unrealistic standard of proof to win cases for compensation.
Of ordinary workers, often with little formal education, who say their repeated warnings about unsafe working conditions were swept aside for decades.
And of a system that critics say still fails to recognize — and prevent —exposure to toxic substances causing thousands of cancers across Canada every year.
“Nobody is talking about it,” says Dr. Jim Brophy, an occupational disease expert who served as the executive director of Ministry of Labourfunded health clinics in Windsor and Sarnia for 18 years.
“Because disease is easy to sweep under the carpet.”
Once the city’s single biggest employer, General Electric still commands tremendous loyalty in Peterborough, a former industrial powerhouse where solid factory jobs are now ebbing away. The company is considered a leading employer; it funds science education for young people across the country, and its “Ecomagination” program invests in technology to improve and protect the environment. Workers say the still-operational but slimmed-down Peterborough plant is now spotless. But, they say, for many years that was not true.
The plant built some of the biggest motors in the world, from diesel locomotive engines, to turbines, to hydro generators, housing a complexity of operations under one roof. It had its own foundry, and made its own plastic, rubber, wires and cables.
“As was the case in many industries that operated for such a long period, the breadth of chemicals used was common, and as more information became available about chemical use, GE, like other industrial companies, reduced or eliminated their usage. GE has always followed the best health and safety practices based on the best knowledge available to us at the time,” Ladha said.
Ed Condon, like many, was grateful for much of what he got in return for his service at General Electric. For a man who dropped out of high school at 16 to support his eight siblings and later his wife and daughter, the factory gave him a sturdy living and helped him pursue personal dreams. A family photo shows a 41-year-old Condon smiling on GE’s front lawn: He has just graduated from a company-run Grade 12 math class.
His family says he had tried at first to conceal his illness; his wife of 40 years, Sandra, says she found icepacks stashed in the basement, later learning he had been trying to cool down his burning skull — one of the symptoms of his aggressively malignant brain tumour.
By the time he collapsed in a coffee shop and was diagnosed with advanced glioblastoma, Condon was also convinced that four decades of chemical exposure at the plant was to blame. In his final months, he took to carefully documenting the chemicals he worked with. The final list was 42 items long and included some of the world’s most deadly substances: arsenic; cyanide; vinyl chloride; asbestos; lead; benzene; DDT; epoxy resins; silica and cadmium.
Indeed, an inventory by the company’s joint health and safety committee in the mid-1990s found at least 3,000 chemicals actively in use at GE, according to the one-time secretary of the committee John Ball. Some 20 of the substances are now classified as definitive human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
“There were so many multiple exposures. The mix is extraordinary,” says Bob DeMatteo, an occupational disease researcher and former director of health and safety for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. “This is to me a cancer generator.”
Nine former workers interviewed by the Star, most with decades of service at GE beginning in the 1960s, described a workplace where asbestos fibres floated thick in the air, where open pots of lead and mercury dotted the shop floor, and where 23 massive dip tanks of varnishes and solvents used to coat and degrease motors belched fumes throughout the plant.
They say there was sometimes little in the way of protective equipment, at least until roughly 1980. GE denies the claim arguing that protective equipment was “generally used” at the plant.
Ed Condon’s family remembers him being so worried about fumes that he would pad the outside of his welding mask with foam. They remember an odour, which came to be known as “the GE smell,” that clung insistently to his work clothes — clothes he would never bring inside the house for fear of contaminating his family.
“Lots of times the air was so blue we could hardly see,” says Marilyn Harding, who worked at the plant for most of her life alongside her husband Gerry. She survived breast and bladder cancer; Gerry died of pancreatic cancer in 2010. Both their compensation claims were denied.
Workers with the lowest seniority were lowered into dip tanks to clean them, despite the fumes being so noxious they would sometimes pass out, according to Jim Dufresne, who for many years formed part of the socalled labour gang assigned the dirtiest tasks in the plant. They were also handed the job of “plucking the goose” — removing asbestos from the roof of the plant’s Wire and Cable department by hand, he says.
“There was 18 of us on the labour gang. There’s only three of us left. And two of us have cancer,” says Dufresne, 70, a prostate cancer survivor.
Government reports obtained by the Star repeatedly warned of poor housekeeping, shoddy ventilation, lack of personal protective equipment, and noted the sheer volume of materials now known to be carcinogenic used at GE. One report from 1968 says the plant gobbled up 40,000 lbs. of lead a week. Another from 1971 said in a single day, the plant plowed through 500 lbs. of asbestos — whose negative health effects were well-known by the 1920s and linked to lung cancer by 1955.
“What I have read and heard of the work environment in Peterborough, it is impossible there would not be, I think, a substantial number of people with illnesses and diseases related to those exposures,” says Brophy, whose groundbreaking research on factory workers in Sarnia exposed one of the biggest occupational disease disasters in Canadian history.
“They were exposed, from what I can understand, to a toxic soup.”
The Star read more than 30 inspection reports, dated from1945 to1981, by the Ministries of Health and Labour which warned of unsafe working con- ditions or found what would now be considered unsafe levels of toxic substances such as lead, mercury, beryllium and uranium. Even at the time, the levels were in excess of government regulations on at least 18 occasions.
A report from 1961, for example, found highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls at five to 11 times the legal limit of the time. Today, that would be up to 220 times the allowable amount. In1971, asbestos levels at the plant were recorded at 100 times today’s legal limit — double the allowable amount at the time.
Government inspectors did not always take air samples or issue orders to the company — even when problems were identified, the reports show. But the Star obtained hundreds of pages of minutes from the plant’s joint health and safety committee from the 1970s and 80s documenting repeated employee concerns about health and safety, as well as alarming physical symptoms shown by workers on the job.
In one entry from 1980, for example, a highly disoriented worker named Linden Jackson was rushed to hospital after spending two hours wiping down an armature with toluene — a chemical now known to severely damage the nervous system and to contain carcinogenic benzene. Ball, the committee’s former secretary, says Jackson was so confused at the time he couldn’t remember his own phone number. A medical consultant for the Ministry of Labour said Jackson’s illness was “not directly attributable” to toluene; no air samples were taken during the ministry’s inspection.
“It was like a foggy day in that building,” says Ball, who was an underwater diver in the navy before starting at GE. He now lives with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “The only protection you had was built in,” he adds, pointing to his lungs. He received a $3,000 lump sum from the WSIB for his incurable illness.
For years, Ball warned GE it was endangering its workers — many of whom were life-long employees. In 1995, a risk-mapping project by the Ministry of Labour-funded Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) concluded that working conditions in the plant’s armature department “remained poor and of great concern… and the hazards were not eliminated or substituted even in 1995.”
Ladha, the GE spokesperson, said the company has made “significant renovations” over the years, investing in “remediation, health and safety measures, new technologies and equipment, and modernization of our building space.” The armature department has since been moved to a new building, he said.
“GE remains committed to investing in our Peterborough Plant to ensure our operations comply with all present regulations and health and safety standards,” Ladha added.
But cancers take decades to show up after potentially hazardous exposures and, critics say, are poorly tracked by government. It was not until 2004 that Noel Kerin, a doctor with OHCOW, was tasked with reviewing a selection of 120 former GE employees struck by the disease.
He says he was stunned by the “unbelievable” scale and complexity of past exposures described by those he interviewed. To this day, he says the case of GE Peterborough workers is one of the largest and most convoluted in OHCOW’s history.
“It really is filling in the sordid face of the industrial revolution,” he says.
In February 2005, Kerin told the City of Peterborough’s health unit he believed at least half the illnesses he saw were work-related — and warned there could be hundreds more cases in the pipeline.
“I told them the genie is out of the bottle. And it’s not going back in.”
Ed Condon lived to watch that prediction unfold. By the time he was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, hundreds of his former colleagues had already placed workers’ compensation claims for chronic and often fatal illnesses. His family says he chose to finish life with quiet purpose, to see through the summer with his three grandchildren — and to have his story heard, too.
“He never went to that negative place. But he was passionate about making sure that the right people were held accountable for the deplorable conditions in which the workers went to work every single day,” his daughter Cindy says.
He died at 63, just hours before his three grandchildren started back for their first day of school.
But as his family would find in the years that followed, their testimony, and that of many others, was not enough to win compensation — leading some to wonder whether the system is fit for purpose.
“I would say this is one of the most striking examples of the post-modern industrial era,” Kerin says. “We went from not knowing to not caring.”
“It seems like our factory workers were seen as less valuable to society.” CINDY CROSSLEY DAUGHTER OF FORMER GE WORKER ED CONDON