Another Huge Asbestos Payout
George Barnes worked as a shipfitter at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard for 25 years, from 1967 to 1992. In 2005 he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, a condition he blamed on exposure to asbestos at the yard. A San Francisco jury agreed and awarded Barnes and his wife, both 60 years old, $10.3 million.
The jury attributed 15 percent of the legal responsibility for his illness to the Thorpe Insulation Co., the only defendant to go to trial in the case. It assigned a further 25 percent to other companies not present in the courtroom, and 5 percent to Barnes himself. And it found the predominant share of the blame-55 percent-to rest with the U.S. Navy, which operated the Long Beach Naval Shipyard from its wartime origins in 1943 through its closure in 1997.
The Navy may have been the most blameworthy party, but it was not in danger of having to write a check to Barnes or his widow. As it had done in thousands of other asbestos cases, it avoided any legal or financial responsibility through what is known as sovereign immunity-the government’s freedom from being sued except in cases where it consents to let a suit go forward. Barnes was not legally barred from suing various private companies that supplied the shipyard with asbestos-related products, but many of them were defunct, often bankrupted by earlier asbestos suits. The Thorpe Insulation Co. happened to be one of the remaining still-solvent companies, but a lawyer for Barnes said the Thorpe firm would probably not have the assets left to pay even its 15 percent share of the verdict.
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