Informant38

A medical toxicologist testified that Tom's lead levels were still so high in January 2000 that at the time of exposure he had to have received doses that could easily have killed him. Co-worker Karl Moll is sick. Inmate-worker Janis Horton has suffered kidney failure, which can be caused by lead poisoning. Other inmate-workers -- who were quickly dispersed throughout the prison system when they developed lead-related health problems -- have alleged that they, too, were contaminated.

Judy Charles' health also has been affected by lead. And Moll has testified that his wife died suddenly of no apparent cause four days after the project ended.
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Prison officials' response? There was no lead in the room. Or if there was, it wasn't dangerous.

Officials refused to provide the immediate medical care that could have saved the workers' health. The bureau has successfully fought off workers' compensation and administrative law claims. Records show that, when the Charles brothers became too ill to work, they were fired for abusing their sick leave.
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Tom Charles testified that his boss, Terry Davis told him it was a rush job: Convert the long-unused room on the prison hospital's fifth floor into a laundry room for chronic-care patients in time for the hospital to pass its first inspection by the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Health Care Organizations. The hospital needed the independent group's stamp of approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds, and it needed the laundry room to get the approval. The visit was scheduled for mid-October.
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On that morning in 1999, he hadn't received a work request for the laundry room re-fit. He was told to start without one. When he asked Davis how he and his crew should charge their time, Charles testified, he was told to "put it on the mental health project" -- an ongoing maintenance job in another part of the hospital.

This job, Charles thought, isn't going to have a paper trail. No work order appeared until February 2000.

Taking apart and removing an old set of stainless-steel cabinets shouldn't be a problem, Charles figured -- until he examined them, and discovered that they were almost entirely encased in lead. He asked Davis what the room had been used for and was told that no one knew.

Safety engineer Randy Vaslik testified later that he had examined the room earlier and discovered "about 1,000 pounds" of lead bars in a corner of the room. He had them picked up by the nearby Naval Air Reserve recycling center. Vaslik said he wasn't even curious about what the room had been used for.
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This whole nightmare started, Charles believes, with a hospital administration that had run out of time to come into compliance with the Joint Commission's regulations. They decided to bypass the law to get the job done quickly and cheaply, with no clue as to the consequences of their actions.

"They didn't set out to kill me and endanger all our lives," he said. "I truly believe that." But when it began to be obvious that that was exactly what they had done, he said, they scrambled to cover up their liability.

"There was just a few of us," he said. "We were expendable, don't you see?"