$2.25 Million Asbestos Judgment for a Wife Who Washed Her Husband's Work Clothes, After Judge Added Pain Award

William Berry worked at the West Monroe Paper Mill from 1961 until he retired in 2010, as an electrical and instrumentation technician. In the mid-1960s the mill hired Foster Wheeler, an engineering and construction contractor, to install two boilers roughly five stories tall to generate power. They were covered in insulation panels and custom-fitted insulating cement, all of it asbestos. Every year the boilers went on a one-to-two-week outage for inspection and repair, and Foster Wheeler stripped the asbestos off and put it back. Berry described the work as spawning a dust storm inside the building. Foster Wheeler was still doing it when he retired.

He wore his work clothes home every evening. They came home caked with dust and dirt, and his wife Lynda washed, dried and folded them daily, for decades.

In early 2015 she began having stabbing pains in her stomach. In March 2015, at 65, she was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a cancer of the abdominal lining, which her doctors ascribed to the asbestos fibers on her husband's clothes. It caused a bowel obstruction that required surgery.

She sued 26 defendants in August 2015 in the Fourth Judicial District Court in Ouachita Parish. Because most of her exposure predated 1980, the court applied Louisiana's pre-comparative-fault law: each defendant found at fault would owe a virile share of the whole. By the time the jury retired after a six-day trial before Judge James H. Boddie Jr., sitting ad hoc, Foster Wheeler was the only defendant left in the case.

The jury found Foster Wheeler's asbestos a substantial factor in her disease and its products unreasonably dangerous for failure to warn, and found Olin Corporation, the mill's former owner and not a party, negligent as well. It awarded her medical expenses and nothing at all for physical pain, mental anguish or loss of enjoyment of life. The court entered judgment for $1,500,000, Foster Wheeler's one-half share after Olin's.

Both sides moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. The court granted hers, awarding $3,000,000 in general damages the jury had, in the appellate court's word, inexplicably denied; granted Foster Wheeler's in part, reducing past medicals to $500,000 and future medicals to $1,000,000; and refused Foster Wheeler's request to assign virile shares to defendants that had settled or been exonerated. Final judgment against Foster Wheeler: $2,250,000, one-half of $4,500,000.

Foster Wheeler appealed on five grounds. On May 22, 2019 the Louisiana Second Circuit affirmed in full, with costs to Foster Wheeler.

Lisa White Shirley of Dean, Omar, Branham, Shirley represented Lynda Berry, with Jody E. Anderman of Waddell Anderman.