A Pilot’s Peril

I work at Lockheed-Martin in Eagan. The employer has known about a building wide ‘cladosporium’ problem for over a year, and I have been living in an environment where the visible colonies of the mold have grown since the tests ordered by my physician confirmed the cladosporium content was 940 c.f.u.’s per cm. and at 96 percent purity. The employer has also been removing asbestos throughout the building without the appropriate permits or safety monitoring of the air in the building, and out of about 1000+ people, about 100 have lung ailments that vary from ‘difficulty breathing’ all the way to severe, never ending ‘lung infections’ that their doctors are treating. The company retaliates and tries to fire all of us who are affected, and denies the air quality problems are real. They also do not provide us with the minimum 15 c.f.m. fresh outside air in the building, either, this being perhaps one of the exacerbating problems which continue to make so many of us sick from the mold in the air ducts.

Sure would be nice to see someone hold them accountable and fix this. Minnesota O.S.H.A. has no jurisdiction for mold, nor does the Minnesota Dept. of Health, and though I have been told that O.S.H.A. does in fact have the authority to force the employer to fix this under the General Duty provisions of the O.S.H.A. act, they have refused to use that as a means of getting the employer to fix the mold problem in the building.

There have been perhaps ‘2’ deaths that may be directly attributable to the mold, as well…but nobody is investigating those as possible “manslaughter” cases due to the negligence of the employer.

The President of the Division, John McNellis, in a letter, stated; “a good faith effort was made to resolve your concerns..” even when the company had the test results from Braun-Intertech from May of 2002 that indicated the mold problem in the room I worked in was, in-fact, very real, and very hazardous.< Large aerospace companies feel they can intimidate and threaten affected employees into quietly 'dying' or shutting up and ceasing the complaints, but the problems do not go away on their own without the company taking positive, very strong action to redress them. I am a commercial pilot with a First Class F.A.A. medical which is now "null and void" as a result of my lung's being severely wrecked by this mold in the building I work in. David S. Eagan, Minnesota

Author: Carolyn Willbanks