Jackson County Courthouse Asbestos Exposure Settles for $80 Million

In 1983, U.S. Engineering Co. of Kansas City began work on the air handling units and asbestos wrapped pipes inside the Jackson County Courthouse in downtown Kansas City. Employees who worked in the building during and after the project said the air handling units were left running while the work went on, and that asbestos dust settled on desks, coated ventilation grates and was tracked through hallways and stairwells for years afterward.

Nancy Lopez, an administrative assistant to a Jackson County judge, spent her career in the courthouse. She was diagnosed in 2009 with mesothelioma, a cancer linked almost exclusively to asbestos exposure, and died the following year. Her family sued Jackson County and U.S. Engineering and settled that individual case in 2011.

Two other former courthouse employees, David M. Elsea and Jeanne Morgan, sued U.S. Engineering and Jackson County in 2010 on behalf of everyone who had worked in or spent significant time in the building since the renovation. One of Lopez's co-workers described dust from the removal project being spread through the courthouse. Rather than seeking damages for injuries that had not yet developed, the suit asked the court to establish a supervised medical monitoring program, arguing that thousands of people who passed through the courthouse, including employees, jurors, jail inmates and attorneys, faced an elevated cancer risk decades later. After a four day evidentiary hearing, Jackson County Circuit Judge Jack N. Peace refused to certify the class, finding that individual questions of exposure would predominate over common ones. On March 17, 2015, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District reversed him and reinstated the case as a class action in Elsea v. U.S. Engineering Co. Rehearing and transfer to the Missouri Supreme Court were denied later that year.

The case was set for trial in the Circuit Court of Jackson County in late October 2016. A jury had already been selected when the parties settled, before the case went to trial. Louis C. Accurso and Burton S. Haigh were listed in the appellate opinion as counsel for the class representatives. Accurso called the outcome 'a good day for the folks that are in the class.'

The settlement totaled $80 million, funded through U.S. Engineering's insurers rather than county tax dollars. Of that, $25 million covered the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees and litigation costs. The remaining roughly $55 million went into a medical monitoring fund, reported at the time as the largest of its kind in Missouri, to pay for diagnostic screening administered through the University of Kansas Medical Center. Up to 7,500 people stood to be covered, including county employees, jurors, jail inmates and attorneys. Those who could show at least 80 hours in the building during the 1983 to 1985 asbestos removal qualified for annual exams including chest X-rays and blood screening; those who spent at least 80 hours there in any single year from 1986 through 2007 qualified for screening every five years. The program was designed to run for 30 years.

The agreement still needed a judge's approval, which reporting at the time expected in late December 2016. The settlement pays no lump sums to named individuals. It funds testing meant to catch asbestos related disease early in the exposed group. No appeal of the settlement was found.