<<Chrysotile long fibre asbestos does not cause asbestosis. That has been proved. The fibre is huge and easily exits the body by phagocytes and anyway can be locked in by binders. The health hazard even for bound crocidolite (short fibre asbestos) with a good binder is vanishingly small. They use it in brake pads and you don't see mechanics who blow out brakes every day with lung disease. >>
Here-in you spread a lie. Were all the fibers in brakes / clutches only chrysotile you would be correct, but there's the rub.
Maybe the makers of brakes & clutches are more picky about what goes into their parts now than 70-30 years ago, but as many after market parts come from 3rd world countries two-bit "here today gone tomorrow" holding companies, one might wonder about those as well. I'm not saying anything should be different except perhaps information.
A mechanic's epitaph: 'Someone has got to warn these kids'
Friday, November 17, 2000
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
"These kids working at gas stations have got to understand that there's still asbestos in brakes. They can't see it, feel it, smell it or taste it, but it's going to kill them just like it's killing me."
Twelve days after making this statement, Patrick Dennis Kine died. Asbestos, probably from the 5,000-plus brake jobs he'd done during 20 years as a mechanic, killed him.
The 65-year-old Olympia resident was a clown. A real one. Red nose and all.
He had a sense of humor that permeated everything he did. Even the agonizing death he was fighting from mesothelioma -- a rare form of asbestos-caused cancer that destroys cells that line the chest or abdominal cavity.
"With all this asbestos in me, I'm probably fireproof," Kine joked. "I can eat all the hot chilies there are."
After two decades of running his own auto repair shop, he spent the next 26 years teaching others how to do it. He taught mechanics to hundreds of youths in Spokane's West Valley School District, at Spokane Community College and at the Shelton High School near Olympia. At one point, he was president of the local Washington Education Association.
Photos
P-I photographer Renee C. Byer spent many hours with Patrick Kine, an auto mechanic from Olympia who succumbed to lung-related diseases last August. See her work in a special photo gallery accompanying this story.
It was a tightness in his chest, a hard time getting a full gulp of air, that brought him to the doctor in March of 1998.
"First I thought I had a bad cold, or the flu, but I couldn't shake it," Kine recalled.
Some X-rays showed how wrong he was.
"The next morning I was flat on my back in a hospital and they were draining this yellow gunk out of my right lung. Lots of it," he said.
Ultrasounds and CT scans followed immediately.
"I had this huge mass between my right lung and my ribs."
A biopsy to get a sample of the mass became major surgery.
"They started up front," Kine said, pointing to his chest, "and wound up going all they way around to the back and up over the shoulder blade. They were trying to get around the mass, but it was everywhere. It had grown through and all around my ribs."
He had mesothelioma.
"I know what it was. It was in the handouts I gave to my students. It was what I warned them about; it was the ultimate harm that asbestos can do to you if you're sloppy working with brakes and clutches," he said. "And now I'm dying from it."
See also:
Cancer victim changed his own brakes for years
Asbestos miners, producers have fought bans
Nation's mechanics at risk from asbestos
Most mechanics don't know -- or care -- about asbestos
Asbestos: An ongoing investigation
Graphic (60k): Asbestos test results
The survival rate for mesothelioma is usually eight to 12 months. Kine made it almost two years.
He fought hard. Chemotherapy, radiation treatments, dozens of them. They slowed the growth of the cancer, but didn't stop it.
"I'm not afraid of dying, but I'm terrified of leaving Donna alone," Kine said, fighting back the tears as he thought of his wife of 42 years.
"I don't want to be a burden but I really wanted to watch them live their lives," he said, speaking of his daughter, two sons and four grandchildren.
Always the clown, he quickly changed the subject.
"The worst thing about the chemotherapy is that it changes the way things that you loved all your life taste," Kine said.
"My favorite was shortbread animal crackers, but now they taste terrible. Coffee, which I used to almost inhale, tastes ghastly. Life is just funny."
He thought back to when he first learned that asbestos in brakes can kill.
"I guess it was in '83 or '84," he recalled. "We got these fliers from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) or OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) or some government agency, telling how dangerous asbestos was and how much was contaminating the average guy doing a brake job.
"It just didn't make sense. I'd been messing with asbestos for years and so had every other mechanic I knew. No one ever told us it could kill you."
While he was still debating how much attention to pay to the federal warnings, the National Automotive Education Association sent him another batch of pamphlets for his students.
"They were serious. This asbestos was bad stuff. I started think back to all the old mechanics I knew, but I didn't know a lot of old mechanics. Most of them had died of breathing problems or lung cancer and some of them never smoked," he said.
Quickly, he added asbestos dangers to his curriculum.
He remembers telling his students that medical researchers said an exposure lasting only one or two months can result in mesothelioma developing 30 or 40 years later.
"I don't think it sunk in," he said. "These kids were convinced they'd never die, especially not from something they couldn't see. But I kept hammering at them."
He became an auto-repair evangelist, spreading the word of the dangers of the invisible fibers every time he stopped at a gas station.
"God, they were bullheaded. I remember when I was young. I thought nothing could harm me."
Long before he was diagnosed, he wondered about his own exposure.
During the 20 years he ran his own repair shop in Spokane -- Grand Prix Motors -- he was doing four or five major brake jobs a week.
"There was asbestos dust all over the place," he said. "We'd sand the brakes, file them, drill them, grind them and we and everything around us would be covered in that black grit.
"I'd blow my nose and it would be black. I'd wash my hair and the tub would be black."
He said it wasn't just the brakes that had asbestos.
"It was all over the vehicle," he said. "It was in the clutches, the exhaust and intake manifold, the cylinder heads, lots of gaskets. It was everywhere," Kine said.
He was angry that the manufacturers of the cars and the replacement brakes and clutches never warned mechanics of the dangers.
"Not a damn word. Not one. Never," he recalled. "Even in the early '90s the parts salesmen were saying it was much ado about nothing.
"How could they possibly keep something so deadly a secret?"
He didn't understand, he said, why the government went silent.
"I was just amazed. The government was so serious about getting the word out about the dangers from asbestos in the '80s. Then it just stopped, silence, like someone turned off the faucet," he said.
Like almost everyone else, Kine believed that the government had banned asbestos, that new cars no longer used it and replacement parts were now asbestos-free.
"I'd go these gas stations and see the kids covered in dust. Some of the brake boxes still said asbestos on them. Most didn't, but I could tell it was full of those fibers," he said.
"The kids would just shrug. They probably thought I was an old fool."
But Kine didn't quit trying.
"It became easier to hammer my point home after the surgery," he said. "I'd lift by shirt and show them the scars and then they'd pay attention."
Kine was most proud when his students came back to show off their wives and kids.
"I couldn't help wondering, 'Do they have it? Will they get it? Do they remember what I warned them about?'
"My students were not the ones that were going to MIT, but they were going to be damn good mechanics. But would the job kill them?"
As the tumor grew, Kine became weaker, but he kept fighting it off. He had one more thing he wanted to do. In June, the National Model Railroad Association and Circus Model Builders were holding their national convention together in Boise.
Trains and circuses, two of Kine's loves. For years, as Red Nose the Clown, he entertained hundreds of children.
"These go together because in the old days all the circuses traveled by railroad," he said. His collection of model trains was extensive and he wanted to show them off one more time.
Kine went to Boise, clown costume and all, wheeling his oxygen bottle behind him.
"I had to go and I did. It was hard, but it was worth it," he said.
The disease was taking its toll.
"You can't walk anywhere. You've got to plod and I've never been a plodder," Kine said. "My right lung doesn't do anything at all and I've got less than 30 percent function in my left lung. And it's never going to get any better. I'm going to be treading water the rest of my life."
On Aug. 13, he went into the hospital for the last time. He was suffocating from the fluids in his lungs. The cancerous mass had grown so large it was blocking his intestines.
That night he talked about the importance of getting the word out that asbestos was still out there.
"I hear the burst of an air hose and I cringe," Kine said. "Even with my eyes closed I can see the clouds of dust and now, when it's too late, I can almost see the invisible fibers of asbestos. I know it's in there.
"I wish I could do more, but I'm going to die here. EPA, OSHA, someone has got to warn these kids that they're working with death. If the government doesn't do anything, no one will."
Kine died on Aug. 25.
In his will he wrote that he wanted neither funeral nor memorial service.
"I feel they work a hardship on those left behind. I want my relatives to have a good old-fashioned wake instead . . . buy a keg or two, prepare food, celebrate my life with a big party. Cab fare will be provided as needed."
Parties were held in Spokane and Olympia.
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