Health issues haunt Champion mill > Widows, workers await settlement of workers’ comp claims

Before he died on July 31, Charles Kimball had testified before the Workers’ Compensation Commission about the mysterious illness he believed he had contracted from poisonous chemicals while working at the Champion International paper mill in Bucksport.

His story provides a glimpse into the allegations of chemical poisoning that claimants say also led to the death of another Champion worker last year, and left several others sick with a variety of bizarre conditions that have baffled doctors. Mill officials and the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration, meanwhile, have been conducting a battery of tests on air and water quality that so far have turned up nothing out of the ordinary.

Kimball’s widow, Irene, has a death claim pending before the commission. She joins the wife of Norman Crossman, a 34-year-old marathon runner who died of a heart attack Dec. 7, 1989, and a number of living employees who claim they have been disabled by chemicals within the mill.

Their varied symptoms include nerve and muscle damage, burning sensations, rashes, breathing problems, fatigue, depression and a host of other things. But so far they have yet to produce any medical testimony of chemical poisoning related to their work at the mill, although some say they have been diagnosed with conditions that could have been caused by chemicals.

Dr. William Rea, a toxicologist at the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, has been enlisted in Kimball’s case to supervise a study of the dead man’s blood and tissue samples. The doctor has published articles linking atherosclerosis and liver damage to sodium hydroxide, a chemical commonly used in paper mills, according to Thomas Watson, the lawyer handling the Champion cases for the claimants. Crossman, whose heart underwent rapid atherosclerosis over a few months, and Kimball exhibited “remarkably similar symptoms,” said Watson.

Kimball, a 58-year-old carpenter who worked throughout the mill, testified under oath on Jan. 17 that he started getting sick with something “like a flu or grippe” late in July 1989. A week before, he had been making wooden stakes to mark pathways for Family Fun Day, an event sponsored by the mill. He made the stakes from used planks stored in a shed in the back of the carpenter shop.

The planks had been used by a cleanup crew that had come into the plant to remove asbestos “insulation and stuff” from a room where people had complained of illness. “They had people up there that was working and getting sick, and they didn’t know what it was,” testified Kimball. Air quality tests in the room had detected Aspergillus, a mold that can cause problems in the lungs and other organs, he said.

“The planks that they had used up there is what I picked up out in the back, and I took them up and ripped them up into 2-inch-square or inch-and-a-half-square stakes and put a point on them for them to drive in the ground,” testified Kimball.

“I had the shop so full of sawdust you could hardly breathe in there. We didn’t have an exhaust fan in the shop at the time. They’ve got one there now,” said Kimball.

After conducting inconclusive medical tests, doctors in Bucksport and Blue Hill advised him to let the illness run its course.

“I just felt that that was kind of like, you know, after you die we’ll do an autopsy and find out what killed you,” Kimball said.

Kimball’s death certificate says he died of “heart failure with complications of vasculitis,” said Mrs. Kimball. Vasculitis is a poorly understood disease that involves inflammation of blood vessels, and many possible symptoms. At least one other worker has been diagnosed as having “the possibility of a collagen vascular disease,” according to a doctor’s report.

After the second doctor’s appointment Kimball began coughing up phlegm that looked like it contained sawdust. He went to the mill doctor who gave him a chest X-ray and some antibiotics to clear up what appeared to be an infection. Kimball said he decided to take some vacation time until he felt better.

A week later “I was really sick. I couldn’t even lift my head up. I had almost 103 temperature. So my wife put me in the car and took me up to Eastern Maine Medical Center,” Kimball testified.

At EMMC, further X-rays were taken, and a respiratory specialist listened to his back and chest. According to Kimball, the doctor expressed surprise. The X-ray showed he had “gotten almost 10 times more stuff in my lungs by Friday than I had on the X-ray on Monday. And he (the doctor) said when he listened, it was clear, he couldn’t hear nothing.”

Kimball said he was diagnosed by one doctor as having tuberculosis, and then by another as having “atypical pneumonia.” He spent two weeks in the hospital. They didn’t know if the Aspergillus he may have encountered while sawing wood could have been a factor. He didn’t return to work until October. But the X-rays still showed the same “stuff” in his lungs for five months until a week before the hearing Jan. 17.

Kimball testified his doctors were stumped. “There was several of them that just didn’t know … There was nothing to indicate what it was. There was no medical evidence that it was anything else, just as there was no medical evidence that it was atypical pneumonia. That’s just what they think it was. They don’t have no idea.”

Kimball testified he had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for 25 years until 1986. His last chest X-ray a week before the hearing showed nothing, but, “I can still feel something in there…..I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t show on an X-ray, I guess.”

Kimball’s medical history took strange twists and turns after he testified in January. After returning to work, he never really got over the symptoms he experienced last year, and new ones appeared, said his wife.

In June he was taken from the mill by a nurse and hospitalized for three days with symptoms of a heart attack, but he had not had one. He said he just couldn’t breathe, and had an irregular heartbeat. He had worked for two-and-a-half days on the mill’s internal sewage treatment system “in a fog of fumes” that sometimes were so thick the extension cord on his saw “disappeared into the mist,” according to Watson.

A Workers’ Compensation report filed by the company in June said, “Charles states he has possible allergies to pressure treated wood. Has (symptoms) including hoarseness, pain across chest, including sternal tenderness, rash around nose. Employee also feels past history of irregular heartbeat was due to exposure to wood.”

In mid-July Kimball was hospitalized for the last time after working intermittently for several weeks. His wife said he was having trouble breathing, his muscles ached and he had an ear infection. According to Watson an X-ray showed “his lungs were spiderwebbed.”

He died July 31, a year to the day after his medical problems started.

Mill officials have declined to comment on details of Kimball’s testimony or his case until an investigation is completed.