A Perth man has been granted over $2 million from the James Hardie compensation fund after contracting cancer after exposure to asbestos as a young child.
As a 4 year-old Simon Lowes played in the toxic asbestos dust left by building materials business James Hardie at a Christian Brothers orphanage at Castledare, where a miniature railway had been built to amuse children.
Mr Lowes, 42, now suffers from the deadly disease mesothelioma, that is linked incontrovertibly to asbestos.
“I live each day like it’s my last, and if I wake up in the morning then I’m pretty happy,” he mentioned.
“My health is never going to return to the way it was before I was sick.”
James Hardie’s compensation fund fought against the claim in the WA Supreme Court.
It was usually the company’s worst horror that people who developed cancer from its private dump sites around the country would start gaining settlement in the courts.
A company attorney wrote ten years ago that any duty to clean up its websites can be ruinous.
While Mr Lowes’s parents nor the many others who attended the orphanage knew of the dangers, Hardie’s own documents reveal it clearly did.
“By the time it began dumping asbestos at Castledare, it knew that even trifling exposures to asbestos were possibly deadly,” mentioned Mr Lowes’s attorney, Michael Magazanik.
“In 1971, it sent one of its own employees, John Winters, down to Castledare to report back on what was happening.
“Mr Winters told James Hardie that there was a risk of exposure to asbestos at Castledare and there was very a risk that young people might be exposed and he urged James Hardie to find somewhere else to dump its asbestos.
“Mr Winters’s urgings were ignored and Hardies continued to dump.”
Mr Lowes finds that hard to believe.
This didn’t happen in a dictatorship or the Middle Ages. This was an Australian business that in 1970 decided it was okay to dump toxic waste on an orphanage and a miniature railway.
“It’s hard to fathom, really,” he mentioned.
“I mean, there must be a lot of people that work for James Hardie even that are walking around with guilty consciences because what they did was just