Greed and deceit define the history of vinyl chloride, which tops the list of chemicals unleashed in East Palestine

A few weeks ago we began exploring the history of vinyl chloride, the industrial chemical that’s always at the center of discussions about the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Our journey led us to a number of research papers, newspaper stories, agency reports, books and one documentary.

We knew vinyl chloride played a key role in making plastic products part of our everyday lives, and in the process generated massive profits for the plastics and chemical industries. It also popped up in products that surprised us. For example, vinyl chloride played a role in holding together those incredible beehive hairdos so popular among women in the 1960s. And before the 1970s, vinyl chloride was used as a refrigerant.

Evidence that vinyl chloride threatened human health began to emerge nearly a century ago. As proof piled up, industry leaders felt they had to make a choice: protect their employees or protect the bottom line.

Of course, workers took it on the chin. As Dr. Irving J. Selikoff of Mount Sinai School of Medicine noted in 1974, “The workers are the ‘canaries.’ They give us hints of what we might find in the population at large.”

The Feb. 3, 2023, derailment resulted in the release of more than 115,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. Much of it was intentionally dumped from damaged railcars and then burned, creating a black cloud that blanketed the region.

Vinyl chloride breaks down in the air within a few days, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says on its website that vinyl chloride poses no risk to the community. Low levels of vinyl chloride have been found in soil samples in only a few industrial areas, and that soil has been removed, the agency says. Air sampling found no vinyl chloride in or around the derailment site and weekly testing of East Palestine’s municipal water system has revealed no vinyl chloride, according to the EPA website.

But toxicologists and researchers say vinyl chloride could linger in places lacking sunlight and fresh air — the water table, for example — and eventually find its way into homes and buildings. A University of Pittsburgh study involving air and water testing, as well as screenings for liver health, is looking into this.

Other questions remain. For example, the derailment released a unique “cocktail” of chemicals, not just vinyl chloride. What impact will this mixture have on human health? Will those exposed to toxic substances experience health problems in the years ahead? And what about the symptoms so many residents continue to report?

The history of vinyl chloride is one of deceit and greed. We’ll never know how many people died in the past half-century as a result of exposure — illnesses sparked by vinyl chloride often take decades to kill. This ignorance has a purpose and says much about the values held most dear by decision-makers whose actions continue to impact the lives of communities all across the country.

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Our journey into vinyl chloride’s history quickly led us to a 1974 story in the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, which focused on a man named Bernard Skaggs. Skaggs grew up in Grayson County, Kentucky. His father, Virgil Skaggs, was a farmhand and World War I veteran who moved to the Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, to work on a Ford assembly line.

Bernard followed his father’s path into military service and then industrial work. After completing his obligation to Uncle Sam, Skaggs went to work at a B.F. Goodrich plant in the Louisville neighborhood of Rubbertown, so named because of all the synthetic rubber factories that sprang up there during World War II. Synthetic rubber became a big deal in the early 1940s after Japan conquered Southeast Asia, rendering most of the world’s natural rubber supply unavailable to the U.S.

Government officials offered contracts to B.F. Goodrich and several other companies to develop and improve synthetic rubber. B.F. Goodrich’s Louisville plant, part of a complex of chemical manufacturing facilities, was the first in the country to make synthetic tires needed for the war effort. And, of course, after the war, synthetic rubber and chemical industries continued to grow. The B.F. Goodrich plant expanded to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resin, a key ingredient in plastic production. For this, the company needed vinyl chloride.

A German chemist first synthesized vinyl chloride in 1835, but more than a century passed before a B.F. Goodrich scientist figured out a way to make the substance useful and profitable. That scientist, Waldo Semon, was attempting to develop an adhesive in 1926 when he inadvertently created a plastic that was flexible, waterproof and fire resistant.

By the time Bernard Skaggs went to work at the B.F. Goodrich plant in June 1955, the plastics industry was enjoying explosive growth. Plastic was cheap and could be molded into thousands of products, from furniture to garbage pails to squeeze bottles to wire insulation. Advertising campaigns supercharged plastic’s growth. Why purchase a product made of wood, steel or glass when you could buy one made of sleek, modern and easy to clean plastic? Suburban women held Tupperware parties; children twirled Hula Hoops. 

At the Louisville plant, workers converted vinyl chloride gas into a dough-like mix that became the raw material for PVC plastic. One of Skaggs’ duties was to climb inside the tanks where the mixing process took place and, with a hammer and chisel, chip off the plastic residue left behind — employees called it “kettle crud.”

Even before climbing into the tanks, workers such as Skaggs were exposed to high levels of vinyl chloride. The Louisville plant was a mess of leaks, Skaggs told the Courier-Journal. Workers could see waves of vinyl chloride vapor in the sunlight, and they could smell it. Bosses said vinyl chloride wasn’t a problem unless the dose was so powerful it caused you to lose consciousness. That happened to workers on tank-cleaning duty. Sometimes they’d chip off chunks of plastic that released pockets of vinyl chloride potent enough to knock them out.

Within a year on the job, Skaggs developed health problems. His hands swelled, and his fingertips became painful — so much so that Skaggs could no longer dial a telephone or button his shirt. His wife urged him to see a doctor. He put it off until 1959. A doctor X-rayed Skaggs’ hand. Most bones appeared normal, showing up as white. But beyond the final finger joints, Skaggs saw something different — blackness. Where were the bones? A doctor told Skaggs they were dissolving.

Many of Skaggs’ colleagues had the same issue. Their fingers shortened and began clubbing; blood flow was reduced. Fingernails curved around the ends of digits.

The chemical industry already suspected vinyl chloride posed dangers to workers. Animal study results published in 1930 and a 1949 study of workers in the USSR linked the substance to problems with a variety of organs, including the liver, lungs and kidneys, as well as the vascular system. By the time a physician examined Skaggs in 1959, Dow Chemical was quietly conducting animal tests that would reveal exposure to vinyl chloride at 100 parts per million (ppm) caused liver abnormalities. The exposure limit for Skaggs and other workers was, at the time, 500 ppm. Dow published its findings in 1961, and company toxicologists recommended the industry establish an exposure limit no higher than 50 ppm. No one listened. Workers at B.F. Goodrich continued to absorb dangerous levels of vinyl chloride.

By 1964, Dr. John Creech, a company physician at B.F. Goodrich, had discovered four cases in which the bones of workers’ fingers were dissolving. Workers at facilities in Belgium and Romania experienced the same problem (called acroosteolysis). The company’s medical director asked a physician at a separate B.F Goodrich plant to determine if workers there had the same issue — but to do so quietly. “We do not wish to have this discussed at all, and I request you maintain this information in confidence,” the director wrote. 

B.F. Goodrich kept this information from its employees and government regulators until 1967, when company researchers prepared a scientific paper noting the bone destruction in the hands of 31 workers. An early draft of the paper identified vinyl chloride as the suspected cause, Creech later testified, but that information was edited out of the final version.

Meanwhile, evidence showing vinyl chloride’s link to cancer continued to mount. Studies by Italian researchers in the late 1960s and early ’70s panicked industry executives, who feared their companies’ bottom lines would suffer if the information became public. So in 1972 U.S. manufacturers collaborated with European chemical companies to sign an agreement keeping the dangers of vinyl chloride a secret. Companies who signed on included B.F. Goodrich, Shell, Dow, Cononco and Union Carbide.

Industry bigwigs became especially worried about a massive study by Dr. Cesare Maltoni, director of the Addari Institute of Oncology in Bologna, Italy. Maltoni’s effort would eventually involve 7,000 animal subjects over 10 years and reveal evidence of cancer in the liver and kidney in animals exposed daily to levels of vinyl chloride at 250 ppm, at the time half of the allowable limit for workplace exposure in the U.S.

Maltoni announced his preliminary results during a symposium in Bologna in 1973. No one outside of the chemical industry seemed to notice. A few months later, industry representatives, still operating under their secrecy agreement, met with the newly formed government agency National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health but did not reveal Maltoni’s findings.

The secret would soon be revealed for one reason: Workers in Louisville were dying.

What caught the attention of company physicians was the cause of death, an extremely rare form of cancer called angiosarcoma of the liver. Two B.F. Goodrich employees died of the disease in 1973, one in March and another in December. The first worker at the plant diagnosed with the disease had died in 1968, another in 1971. Angiosarcoma of the liver strikes 10 to 20 people in the U.S. each year. Four cases in the same workplace? This alarmed Creech, the B.F. Goodrich physician who’d earlier seen the dissolving finger bones of Skaggs and his co-workers. In January 1974, he alerted his bosses, who notified NIOSH. A month later, B.F. Goodrich discovered two more cases, bringing the total to six. 

NIOSH suspected vinyl chloride was killing the workers. Leaks of the chemical occurred at a number of stages during the manufacturing process. The Courier-Journal reported that the levels of vinyl chloride reached levels as high as 1,000 ppm at one place in the plant.

All workers sickened were longtime employees at the B.F. Goodrich plant and were exposed to high levels of vinyl chloride early in their careers, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before getting promoted to jobs that put them less at risk. This created difficulty for researchers tracking vinyl chloride’s links to worker illnesses.

“The problem is that it takes so long for [the cancer] to develop,” Dr. J. Bradford Block, medical consultant for the Kentucky Department of Labor, told the Courier-Journal in late January 1974. “The shortest period each of these three took to get it is 16 years. One of the men worked at the plant for over 20 years. So it’s not the type of thing where you’re exposed to it and the next week you’ve got the disease.” 

In a chilling moment from the 2001 PBS documentary “Trade Secrets,” which chronicled industry efforts to cover up the dangers of vinyl chloride, Dr. Irving Selikoff of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine tells B.F. Goodrich workers that cancer isn’t the only problem posed by vinyl chloride.

“Scarring can occur in the liver,” he said. “Fibrosis. The blood vessels can break, veins can break, and you can get a fatal brain hemorrhage.”

The camera then focuses on the concerned faces of workers, suddenly confronting the knowledge that their jobs could be killing them.

“Once you find that a man has this cancer from vinyl chloride,” one worker asks, “will you be able to cure it?”

Selikoff answers with brutal simplicity, “No.”

Kentucky acted quickly to establish the nation’s toughest standard for vinyl chloride exposure — 200 ppm, less than half of the federal standard of 500 ppm.

Then something akin to a miracle happened — the federal government itself moved quickly to protect workers. In less than a year, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration brushed aside industry protests to establish a vinyl chloride exposure limit of 1 part per million. Manufacturers challenged the new regulation in court (and lost) and screamed that the limit would lead to job losses and plant closures. That didn’t happen. In fact, the industry continued to grow.

Still, researchers had questions. Did vinyl chloride affect other systems in the body? And can exposure levels as low as 1 ppm be considered safe? One answer came in 1979, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer stated vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen associated with cancers of the liver, brain and lungs, as well as leukemia and lymphoma. The agency determined there was no safe level of exposure.

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The list of B.F. Goodrich workers claimed by angiosarcoma of the liver included Carl Strahl, 43, who died Jan. 7, 1968. He was survived by his wife, Mary Jo, and three sons and two daughters. Another, Ezra Dinwiddie, worked as a salesman, peddling food and drug products, before taking what was then considered a well-paying and stable blue-collar job at B.F. Goodrich. Wife Eddie, daughter Diane Bartlett and two grandchildren buried him on an unseasonably warm Saturday, Dec. 22, 1974, while homes throughout Louisville glowed with red and green Christmas lights.

Even as these men were dying, the vinyl chloride industry quietly tried to deal with the chemical’s threat to another group of workers: hairdressers. All those bouffant and beehive hairdos so popular in the 1960s and early ’70s defied gravity with the help of aerosol hairspray, which used vinyl chloride as a propellant. Workers in beauty salons spent their days engulfed in clouds of hairspray applied within inches of the faces of unsuspecting customers.

Instead of warning hairdressers of the danger, vinyl chloride producers, fearful of lawsuits, quietly removed their product from hairsprays, which was a small market for them anyway. The real money was in plastics. In 1975, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the use of vinyl chloride as a propellant. It was replaced by the paint stripper methylene chloride, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1989 over concerns it, too, posed a cancer risk.

A 2009 study examined two cases in which people who worked with vinyl chloride-laced hairspray developed angiosarcoma of the liver. One of the cases involved a 76-year old woman who in December 2004 was admitted to a hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after feeling ill and coughing up small amounts of blood. She died two days later. An autopsy revealed she’d suffered from the rare liver cancer that had killed the Louisville workers.

Researchers discovered she attended a beauty school in the mid-1960s and then worked two years in a Baltimore beauty shop where she used several hair spray products known to contain vinyl chloride, including Miss Clairol, Summer Blonde, Aqua-net and Perfect Net. In all, the woman worked at four beauty shops in addition to cutting and styling hair at her home, and used a variety of hairsprays. Researchers estimated her peak exposure to vinyl chloride ranged from 129 ppm to 1,234 ppm. The latency period from her initial exposure to vinyl chloride in 1966 to her death in 2004 was 38 years.

The second case involved a 61-year-old barber who died of angiosarcoma of the liver one month after admission to a Kansas City hospital in October 2003. He’d experience about four years of exposure to vinyl chloride while using Miss Clairol and Shining Touch hairsprays in the early 1970s. His exposure levels, however, were lower than the first case — an average of 70 ppm over a 40-minute period. The latency period between his initial exposure in 1970 to his death in 2004: 33 years.

No one knows how many men and women died as a result of their work as hair stylists or barbers, or from spraying their hair before going to work each morning. The 2004 study concluded, however, that “had manufacturers acted in a responsible manner, VC never would have been introduced as a propellant into consumer products such as hair sprays, pesticides and paints.”

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The EPA announced last year that vinyl chloride was one of five substances it was designating as “high-priority chemicals.” This triggers a process that could lead to higher regulations or even bans.

The future of that process remains uncertain. It’s expected to meet stiff opposition from industries that utilize vinyl chloride, and the Trump administration has voiced opposition to any regulations that could hamper business.

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Sources for this story include several articles published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, accessed through newspapers.com, and the New York Times, accessed through the newspaper’s website; Jim Morris’ book “The Cancer Factory: Industrial Deception, Corporate Deception and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers,” published in 2024 by Beacon Press; the 2001 PBS documentary “Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report”; “Vinyl Chloride: A Sage of Secrecy,” part eight of the European Environment Agency report “Late Lessons from Health Hazards”;”Vinyl Chloride Propellant in Hair Spray and Angiosarcoma of the Liver among Hairdressers and Barbers: Case Reports,” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, January 2009; Public health statement on vinyl chloride, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Deptartment of Health and Human Services; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updates on East Palestine; family histories of workers researched through ancestry.com.

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