Mesothelioma at Owensboro Municipal (Elmer Smith Station) in KY (Podcast)

In this episode, John Maher speaks with Paul Kelley, a partner at Satterley & Kelley, about asbestos exposure at Owensboro Municipal’s Elmer Smith Station in Kentucky. Paul explains how asbestos-containing materials in the plant led to worker exposure, the types of asbestos found in equipment like boilers and turbines, and the legal steps employees and contractors can take if they are diagnosed with mesothelioma or other asbestos-related diseases. He also provides insight into the statute of limitations and what people affected should do if they believe their illness is tied to asbestos exposure at the facility.

John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher and I’m here today with Paul Kelley. Paul is a partner with the Kentucky personal injury law firm, Satterley and Kelly, which has over 45 years of collective experience in litigating mesothelioma and asbestos claims. Today we’re talking about Owensboro Municipal, or the Elmer Smith Station in Owensboro, Kentucky. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Kelley: Hey, John. How are you doing this morning?

Maher: I’m doing well. How are you?

Kelley: Doing great, thank you.

Learn About Owensboro Municipal and Asbestos Exposure

Maher: Paul, tell me a little bit about Owensboro Municipal, also called the Elmer Smith Station, and where they’re located and what they do.

Kelley: Sure. Owensboro Municipal, or OMU. It’s a power energy company, and the Elmer Smith Station is one of the facilities that OMU historically owned, and it was one of the old coal-fired electric generating stations. There’s still quite a few around, but over the last 15, 20 years, coal-fired stations have started to be decommissioned as different energy sources.

But prior to the 1980s, coal-fired electricity generation was where it was at. The Elmer Smith station, located basically in the heart of Owensboro, for people that are familiar with the area on highway 144. It was built in the early 1960s, and we’ll get into it a little bit more in detail, but the Elmer Smith Station had two units.

First unit came up in 1964, and I believe the second unit came up in 1974. Power generation statement or power plant has a boiler. Boiler heats steam, which ultimately generates power for a turbine, and a turbine generates the electricity that goes into people’s homes and businesses.

Each unit consists of a boiler and a turbine, and then there’s all kinds of other equipment that’s associated with a power plant. The first unit came up in 1964, operated for eight or nine years, and then as the community grew, they decided they needed to expand and they built the second unit.

As we’ll get into it a little bit, unfortunately this power plant was built at a timeframe when asbestos was prevalently used all throughout the United States, and this plant was no exception. There was a lot of asbestos that was there, and quite frankly, the building still is there today, and a lot of that asbestos is still there.

What Should Elmer Smith Station Employees Know About Mesothelioma Claims

Maher: Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that and how Owensboro Municipal, and in particular, this Elmer Smith station is related to asbestos and mesothelioma clams.

Kelley: Sure. In a power plant, typically the pieces of equipment that contain asbestos are going to be the boiler. For people that aren’t familiar with boilers and powerhouses, these are multi-story pieces of equipment. If you passed it on the road, it would look like an apartment complex, both in height and width and its dimensions. It’s not a small piece of equipment.

Again, as I mentioned before, its intended purpose is to heat steam, and the steam goes to the turbine, and the turbine generates electricity. In order to do that, it has to be a pretty significant piece of equipment. The boilers, because they engage in a really high temperature process, a lot of the boiler is insulated with asbestos.

There’s fire brick material that goes inside the boiler. There’s insulation that frequently goes outside the boiler in order to maintain the heat as well as for safety purposes, because again, this is a couple thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You don’t want people getting burned.

There are related pieces of component equipment that’s inside the boiler that sometimes is wrapped in asbestos insulation. Then you’ve got the turbine, and the turbine is not quite as large as the boiler, but it’s still a pretty solid piece of equipment. Probably 30, 40-feet long, maybe longer. Probably five, six, seven feet tall.

It has a lot of piping that’s connected to it, because the steam lines come in from the boiler, then it goes out to other parts of the plant. There’s all these pipes that are connected to the turbine. All those pipes are insulated with asbestos insulation. The turbine itself is frequently insulated with asbestos.

As the years progressed, fortunately they moved into other types of materials. But in the 30s, ’40s, all the way through the 1980s, the insulation that went on the turbine itself contained asbestos, and they usually had multiple layers of asbestos that were in these turbines.

You had an outer shell that was covered with asbestos. Inside that shell was covered with more asbestos. The valves that turned off and on the steam that came in to the turbine, frequently those valves were covered with asbestos. Again, all of the piping. There were gaskets that were on the turbines and the piping associated with it that also contained asbestos.

There was a lot there just associated with the two main pieces of equipment that are in the powerhouse. Well, then you’ve got miles and miles of steam that goes throughout the plant, and that steam piping again, was primarily to carry steam from the boiler to the turbine, but also frequently it was used to warm the facility.

There were lots of tanks and vessels that carried chemicals and other volatile substances, and lots of those required high-temperature applications or involved high-temperature applications. They were all insulated. Some of these tanks would be relatively small, the size of a file cabinet, and some of them would be 30 by 30 rooms, facilities, things like that.

All those things would be insulated with asbestos-containing materials for a long period of time, and that really persisted from the time that this plant was built in the 1963, ’64 timeframe, and it still stands today. It doesn’t generate power anymore.

But I’m fairly confident that if we went in there today, there would still be miles of asbestos insulation that was contained on the pipes and many of the equipment in there. It’s just unfortunately the way things worked back in that timeframe, and it still hasn’t been completely remediated today.

How and When Were Employees At Owensboro Municipal Exposed to Asbestos?

Maher: Right. How and when were employees at Owensboro Municipal subjected to or exposed to asbestos and then potentially could develop mesothelioma years later?

Kelley: There’s just unfortunately so many different ways that people were exposed. You had all of the people, the various crafts and trades that constructed the plant. These are multiple football field-sized facilities, and it took hundreds of people to construct the plant, from millwrights to carpenters, electricians, insulators, pipe fitters.

Wide variety of crafts that participated in the construction of the plant. All of those folks, particularly when the insulation came on to all these pieces of equipment and the piping that we’ve mentioned, if they’re not doing it themselves. The insulators of course, did the insulation. But if they’re not doing it themselves, they’re still right there when it’s happening.

There’s thousands of linear feet of pipe insulation, thousands of square feet of insulation on the boilers and the turbines and the vessels and the tanks. All of the fire brick and refractive material that goes into the boilers. Hundreds of square feet of those materials.

Everybody that worked during construction is there when some aspect of the insulation occurred. Typically, the thermal insulation, the things that goes on the pipes and the boilers, that’s typically the last thing that happens during the construction of these plants.

But even the fire brick and refractive material, that stuff goes on kind of mid-project, and it takes weeks, if not months to put all that in. The way they did it is pipe insulation, for example, it doesn’t come in this nice pre-formed material that can just be taken out of a box and put onto a pipe. It has to be cut to certain specifications.

The insulators would take a piece of pipe insulation. They take it out on the floor, measure how much they need. Maybe they can put a full length on, but now they have to put some additional on a piece of pipe and they cut it, they saw it, and it created an incredible amount of dust.

There were so many studies that were being conducted long before Owensboro, the Elmer Smith station was put up that showed that there were very excessive levels of dust exposure, asbestos exposure just from the simple act of cutting the insulation. The same is true for the type of insulation that went on the boilers and the turbines, frequently with something called a block insulation. It would have to be cut. It had to be drilled into. It’d have to be sawed.

In 2024, we have something called permissible exposure limits, and those exposure limits for asbestos are 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter of air per eight-hour day of work. That’s a relatively small amount of asbestos exposure. The studies showed that people who were doing that kind of work of sawing and cutting and drilling thermal insulation back in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were getting 20, 30, sometimes 100 fibers per CC of exposure to asbestos when they did that kind of work.

Just because you were an electrician or a millwright that might have been doing something else at the time that the insulation was occurring doesn’t mean that somehow you were immune to getting that dust exposure. Everybody that was there during that process.

Pipe fitters handled gaskets. Gaskets typically went on the flanges between two pipes, and gaskets contain asbestos for years. Frequently they had to be cut in order to properly fit onto the flanges, and so the pipe fitters would frequently cut and form the gaskets, and that created a lot of dust exposure.

The boiler makers and bricklayers put all the fire brick into the boilers, and so they’re heavily exposed. That’s just during the construction process. Well, once the plant is constructed, then you have the operation part of it. As you can imagine, in a facility that size with the kind of operation that was occurring, there’s lots of needs for maintenance activities.

Pipes would fail. Boilers would go offline. Turbines would have problems. It would require various trades to come in and do work on those pieces of equipment. For example, if a pipe had to be replaced, the insulation has to come off that pipe, and then it has to be re-insulated, and various trades would come in and do that work.

Maybe it was the insulator that removed the insulation. Maybe it was the pipe fitter directly that did it. If it was work that was being conducted on the turbines, typically that was done by millwrights, and so the millwrights would have to remove the insulation in order to work on that piece of equipment.

If there was a vessel, a tank of some sort that had a problem, electricians worked on those. There was all kinds of electrical applications inside pieces of equipment that had asbestos-insulated wire. Frequently folks would have to work on the insides of these pieces of equipment, strip the asbestos insulation off the wire and cable, so they get exposed in that way.

Turbines and boilers are not the type of equipment that you construct, and then you don’t touch them again for years, because of the wear and tear. Imagine your car. You change your oil every three months or 5,000 miles. You rotate your tires. Everybody probably gets annoyed when they go the car dealership and then they tell you, “Well, this is your 25,000-mile checkup. You got to put $1,000 worth of work into it.”

Well, these pieces of equipment are the same. Every two years, every three years they have to be completely overhauled. When you do the overhaul, you essentially strip everything off of it from top to bottom, inside and out, and then you put it back on, and that typically required all kinds of different trades to come in and do that work.

The insulation has to come off. The gasketing has to come off. Frequently the wire and cable inside these pieces of equipment have to come off. The valve insulation has to be removed. The fire brick and refractory would have to be removed, and then of course, all that has to be replaced.

These are weeks long, if not months long projects that occurs. What they would want to do is they can’t stop generating power while they’re doing this work, and so when you have at least two units like the Elmer Smith Station did, unit one can operate and it can still generate the power necessary to provide electricity to its customers, and unit two is being torn down, then vice versa.

All the people that are just showing up to their jobs every day to operate the equipment, the control operators that run the boilers, run the turbines, run all the equipment in there. Even though they’re not doing anything specifically as it relates to the overall, they’re getting exposed when that work is being done. All of the maintenance people that also work on these pieces of equipment.

Later on, there was situations involving abatement that occurs, removal. As the regulatory agencies became a lot more diligent in controlling asbestos exposure in the workplace, as employers started to understand or at least acknowledge and be a little more safety conscious, they worked on getting rid of a lot of it or covering a lot of it.

Well, unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of situations where the process of making it safer was not safer. Basically, the entire history of this plant being in operation at all levels, there was not only opportunities, but there was in fact asbestos exposure suffered by hundreds, if not thousands of people over the history of this plant. I’m not singling the Elmer Smith facility out by any means. It was no different than most powerhouses built or all powerhouses built during this critical timeframe in American history.

Where Contractors Working in the Facility Impacted by Asbestos?

Maher: Right. You mentioned getting in people to do the insulation and getting in pipe fitters and things like that. Were those insulators and those pipe fitters and some of the other trades, would they typically not be direct employees of the Elmer Smith Station or Owensboro, but they’d be working for some sort of a third party company that would be hired to come in and do that work?

Kelley: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the big issue is Owensboro Municipal didn’t have the workforce to construct a power plant, and it takes a lot of specialized labor in order to do that. All of your trades that constructed the plant, they were all outside contractors that worked for companies that OMU hired, and OMU had an engineer that designed the facility and helped oversee the construction of the plant.

The turbine manufacturers had dozens of engineers that were present during the installation and construction of the turbine. The same is true with the boiler manufacturers. They had scores of engineers. None of those folks worked directly for OMU as, “Employees.” They were outside contractors. That typically was true for the overhauls and some of the major renovation that occurred. Those were typically outside third party contractors that came in and did that kind of work.

You’ve got hundreds, if not thousands of Owensboro Municipal employees that were exposed to asbestos over the history of this plant. But you also have hundreds of employees from all kinds of different trades over a 30, 40-year period of time that also was exposed or had opportunities for exposure at this plant from the work that they were doing that certainly had to be done in order to keep this power plant functional.

Can Contractors Sue Owensboro Municipal?

Maher: Right. Those people who are brought in, one of the issues that we’ve talked about before is that in Kentucky and in most places, you can’t sue your direct employer. If you were an employee of Owensboro Municipal, you wouldn’t be able to directly sue Owensboro for getting mesothelioma or asbestos exposure. But these third party companies, when they’re brought in, they’re not direct employees. Would they be able to sue Owensboro Municipal directly because of their exposure?

Kelley: Yeah. There’s certainly caveats to that, but generally speaking, all of these outside contractors would be able to file a lawsuit against Owensboro Municipal. There are some defenses that OMU has that we don’t need to worry about today, but for the most part, they can sue OMU, and OMU can be held responsible for causing their disease.

Something else that we haven’t really touched on, and unfortunately this is a frequent problem that we’ve encountered a lot, is there are spouses and children of employees of OMU or companies like OMU that have developed mesothelioma, whose only asbestos exposure was from the asbestos contaminated clothing brought home by their parent or their spouse who worked at the plant. Those type of people, the wives, the husbands, the children of the worker, they can file a suit against OMU, because they’re not bound by any workers’ compensation laws or anything like that.

We’ve represented quite a few clients over the years who have worked at places like OMU who have suffered that kind of exposure. Certainly, OMU employees, direct employees, while they don’t have a case necessarily against OMU, there are certainly other parties that can be held accountable for causing their cancer. Equipment manufacturers. Some of these contractors we’ve talked about. Some of the insulating companies. Other entities. But unfortunately for them, OMU is kind of off the table.

What Should You Do If You Have Mesothelioma?

Maher: Right. If you have mesothelioma or asbestosis or lung cancer that might have been caused from asbestos exposure and you worked at the Owensboro Municipal plants like Elmer Smith Station, whether you were an employee there or otherwise, what should you do next?

Kelley: Well, we haven’t talked about this a whole lot in this podcast, but mesothelioma, it’s a terrible disease. It’s almost universally fatal. You hear of very few people who survive the cancer. While survival rates are certainly increasing, the average is still six to 18 months from diagnosis to people passing away, and that’s not a lot of time.

When people are hit with this diagnosis, the first thing that they really have to come to terms with is the severity of the disease and the treatment that is necessary in order to prolong life and all of those things. Obviously, it’s something that’s very unique to each individual and it’s very personal to the victim and their family.

Certainly, everybody that gets this cancer or other asbestos-related cancers, they have to come to terms with how they’re going to treat the cancer. There’s a lot of different treatment options, and that’s not really my role in what we do, but we do know a lot about that having done this for almost 30 years. Folks have to come up with a medical plan that makes sense for them and their families and figure that out.

Unfortunately, time doesn’t really stop from a legal standpoint to give people time to figure out their medical care and how they’re going to deal with that, so they can focus on that. We have very limited time in order to pursue a lawsuit. If you’re diagnosed with this cancer and you worked at OMU or some other powerhouse or some other occupation, it’s really important that you determine what your legal rights are as quickly as you possibly can.

I would strongly encourage people to contact a lawyer immediately. Do your research. We live in the golden era of information and people ought to be able to get online and research and try to identify the best lawyers for them, and I encourage you to do that.

I think it’s really important to retain attorneys that have unique experience with asbestos exposure or asbestos cases. What I do, and there are certainly other lawyers that do it, but what I do, it’s not something that you dabble with. It’s highly specialized.

We have the benefit of literally 40, 45 years of files and materials. It’s important that you find somebody that has that kind of background and that kind of knowledge. It’s really important, in my opinion, that you retain somebody that’s familiar with the jurisdiction that you’re in, the state, the case.

In this instance, if you had a case against Owensboro Municipal or if you had a case involving exposure, you want somebody that has experience in Owensboro, Kentucky, somebody that has experience in Western Kentucky, because the judges, the laws, the courts, the rules, everything is different. It’s important to retain somebody that’s familiar with those jurisdictions.

Importantly, if possible, it’s important to retain somebody that’s very familiar with the particular plant or particular location of exposure that you had. OMU, for example. I’ve had half a dozen cases out of that plant over the course of my career. If I somebody came to me and said, “I’m a lifelong employee of Owensboro Municipal,” I could have a lawsuit filed in a week.

If they said, “I worked for a contractor that constructed Owensboro Municipal,” I could have a lawsuit filed in a week. There’s a lot of other variables. Typically speaking, John, when I get a client that says they worked at OMU, they worked at a bunch of other places, and so we have to figure that out, too.

But generally speaking, you don’t want to have to hire somebody who has to recreate the wheel for every possible exposure that you could have had. You want somebody that’s going to ask you the right questions, who’s then going to be able to get the information they need in order to pursue the case.

If you go to a lawyer who doesn’t ask you many questions, then they don’t know what to ask you, and that ultimately is not going to assist you in getting to where you want to be. It’s important to find somebody that does this kind of work, that’s familiar with your jurisdiction, that’s familiar with the areas that you worked at.

That’s not always possible, but it usually is. I very rarely encounter something that we haven’t seen before or haven’t seen something like that before. It’s important to get somebody in that regard. Then obviously, just like with your doctors, you want somebody you feel comfortable with.

You want somebody that you feel is going to fight for you, that’s going to do things that are in your best interest. That’s hard to figure out from the get go. It does require a bit of a leap of faith, but what we try to do is try to sell the results, sell our experience.

Tell people, “We’re going to treat you like we’ve treated hundreds of clients over the last 30 years. My mission is to figure out a way to make this horrible situation that you’ve been handed, to try to make it better for you and your family.” If that’s not the goal of your lawyers, then go get different lawyers.

Is There a Statute of Limitations for Filing Against Owensboro Municipal?

Maher: Right. Then finally, is there a statute of limitations on filing a case in Kentucky against Owensboro Municipal, the Elmer Smith Station?

Kelley: There is, and that’s an excellent question and something that people need to know. Kentucky is one of the few states that has a one-year statute of limitations. Some states have two, and there’s a handful that have three, four, and five. What that means is that we only have a year from the date that we know or should know that we’re injured and what the cause of that injury is in order to file a lawsuit.

Think about it in these terms. If you go to a store and you slip on something that’s sticking out of the wall that’s hidden, you know immediately that you’re injured and what caused your injury. You’ve got a year to file that lawsuit. Asbestos is a little bit different.

I think most people in 2024 generally are aware that asbestos causes mesothelioma, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you know where you were exposed. I can’t tell you how many people that come in and the first question I say is, “Well, where do you think you were exposed to asbestos?” They say, “Well, I haven’t got the slightest idea,” because they were an accountant or worked in an office.

Maher: It would have happened 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Kelley: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s an important point as well, because it takes at least 20 years for most people, and sometimes as much as 50, 60 years in order to contract this cancer. That having been said, I want to file your case within a year of your date of diagnosis, even though technically speaking your statute could be a little bit longer than that depending on how you could figure out how you were exposed and that sort of thing.

But we don’t want to tempt fate. We don’t want to leave anything to chance, because ultimately whether you file your case on time is going to be decided by a judge. We have so many great judges in Kentucky, and they want to do what’s legally right, and they certainly don’t want to dismiss people’s case without giving them their day in court per se, but the law is pretty harsh in that regard.

Even if the judge wants to help you out, if they think you haven’t filed your case timely, they have no choice. There’s no wiggle room. It’s very important to get a case filed, which is another reason why you should talk to a lawyer immediately, even if you don’t think you’re going to pursue a case or even if you don’t know where your exposure was, because we can figure it out. If we can’t, well it’s not going to be from lack of trying.

But what you don’t want to have happen is you don’t want to get diagnosed in January, and then October go to somebody like me. You have a unique set of circumstances where your exposure is not obvious, and we do have to dig in and conduct some investigation and we’re running out of time.

It’s important to talk to lawyers immediately and give yourself and give them an opportunity as quickly as possible to pursue, investigate, and pursue whether case. Then of course, overall our biggest goal of course, is for you to get compensation that’s going to help you and your family in this terrible time of need.

But an ancillary goal is we want for you to be able to have an opportunity to participate in your case. The earlier you come to us, the earlier we get the case filed, the better chance you have to participate in it. We want to get your deposition as quickly as possible.

We want for you to testify just like you were in court in front of a jury, and tell me, the defense lawyers, the judge, the jury what’s happened to you, how were you exposed, how this cancer has impacted you, what you fears and concerns are as a result of the cancer. Doing all that as quickly as you can gives you the best chance of being able to participate in your case.

Certainly, the earlier the case gets filed, the better chance you have of actually being there at trial and being able to do it in front of the jury in person. But regardless, you have to make sure it gets done within a year from the date or should know what your injury is and what caused it.

If you don’t do that, then unfortunately in the state of Kentucky, it doesn’t matter. What you’re going through is going to be left without a remedy. You got to hustle a little bit. I hate to put that additional burden on top of people when they’re already dealing with a significant health problem, but it’s just kind of the way it is, and that’s what we’re here for. You worry about your medical. You hire us or hire lawyers that do this kind of work and you let us worry about figuring out your case and how to be successful.

Can A Lawsuit Be Filed for Asbestos Exposure After a Diagnosis of Mesothelioma?

Maher: The good news is, like you said before, you know all about Owensboro Municipal, you know all about a lot of places in Kentucky that have asbestos exposure, and so you’re able to put together that case right away. Even if somebody came to you after 10 months or something like that, you’d be able to get something filed right away.

Kelley: That’s right. That’s the good thing about this particular facility is we would be able to file something very quickly, and hundreds of facilities throughout Kentucky, the same thing. It’s absolutely true, and certainly if it is the 11th hour, so to speak, still contact the lawyer.

Don’t assume that it’s a lost cause. Don’t assume that nobody can help you. Get advice from somebody that knows, and if for some unforeseen reason it doesn’t work out, at least you tried. But if you do and it works out, most of the time there can be significant compensation for you and your family that will really help you in this terrible time of need.

Maher: All right. Well, that’s really great information, Paul. Thanks again for speaking with me today.

Kelley: Thank you, John. I appreciate it.

Information About The Law Firm of Satterley & Kelley

Maher: For more information about mesothelioma and asbestos exposure, you can visit the law firm of Satterley & Kelley at SatterleyLaw.com or call 855-385-9532.