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The pathology results came in four days later. Penny learned that he had peritoneal mesothelioma — a rare cancer of the lining of the abdomen almost always tied to asbestos exposure. He concluded, after consulting with a lawyer, that he'd inhaled microscopic asbestos fibers about a decade earlier while installing fiber-optic cable underground. He sued telecommunications giant AT&T.
Physicians, scientists and union officials had people like him in mind when they convened in New York in 1990 to discuss what they called the looming "third wave" of asbestos disease.
In his lawsuit, Penny alleges that BellSouth, now part of AT&T, never told him or other Danella workers that the conduit contained asbestos, even as it cautioned its own employees not to use compressed air or break the pipe without wetting it down. Such warnings were being delivered "by the mid-'90s at the latest, years before Kris ever got into a manhole," said his lawyer, Jonathan Ruckdeschel.
"BellSouth claims that they stopped installing new asbestos conduit in the early '80s, so any pipe he was working with had to have been in the ground for at least 20 years by the time he got there," Ruckdeschel said. "And yet there's nothing inside the manhole to tell the worker, 'Don't do the things that are going to cause you to get exposed. Be careful — this is asbestos-cement pipe. Invisible amounts of asbestos dust can cause you to die.' "