Southern California Edison
Southern California Edison is among the largest electricity companies in the United States, providing electrical power to residential and business customers throughout a 50,000-square-mile range of Southern California. 1With 6,000 engineers and maintenance and clerical workers, Southern California Edison is one of the area's largest employers.
During the 1990s, the company sold all but three of its plants; some of those have since been replaced with new facilities constructed since 2000. Most are either hydroelectric or coal/oil-fired; one, the San Onofre facility, is a nuclear plant.
Asbestos Exposure
Asbestos was commonly and abundantly used frequently in almost every type of industry. Although asbestos' usefulness as an insulator as well as its low cost prevented thousands of fire-related deaths; more importantly, it has saved perhaps billions of dollars in property damage and business losses. Asbestos was used to insulate many parts of power generation for several decades prior to the 1980s, after which most types of asbestos were gradually phased out. Existing asbestos, as it aged, had a tendency to become brittle and crumble into dust. In this state, it is known as friable; asbestos materials in this condition was generally removed or sealed up with resin. However, this did not happen before workers were exposed to billions of these fibers.
Not only were workers at risk, but their families as well. Asbestos fibers could become lodged in the hair and in clothing and carried into the home. Several court cases in recent years have involved secondary exposure, in which family members contracted an asbestos disease as the result of this type of exposure.
Asbestos disease is fairly rare, but it is painful, expensive to treat and invariably fatal unless diagnosed in its earliest stages. Symptoms of mesothelioma disease often do not appear until many years or even decades after a person first is exposed to asbestos. Men and women who were employed at an Edison facility, as well as their family members, should discuss their history of exposure to asbestos with their physicians and get checked as regularly as possible.
Up until the 1980s, it was normal for industrial sites of all types to utilize the mineral asbestos because it excelled at blocking fire. It is ironic that protecting lives was almost always one of the main reasons for using asbestos in companies for the result was actually to place employees in danger of serious illness or death due to inhalation of or other contact with asbestos. The reason is that strands of asbestos, if inhaled, damage respiratory passages and cause serious health conditions such as "miner's lung" and lung cancer. The most deadly of the asbestos-related diseases is mesothelioma, which is a type of cancer that affects the cells lining the pleural cavity; it is almost always a death sentence for those who contract it as mesothelioma prognosis is often grim.
Employees who work with asbestos in present times are usually safe from inhalation due to the extensive body of guidelines controlling its use, presence at job sites and disposal. In the past, however, workers unprotected by masks or other safety equipment all too often toiled in places filled with airborne asbestos. Furthermore, if companies did not offer showers and decontamination methods, employees carried strands of asbestos to their homes on their clothes or in their hair, thereby exposing spouses and children to the risk of asbestos-related diseases.
People who worked at this site during their career, as well as those who lived with them, are encouraged to learn more about these health conditions and inform their healthcare professionals about their history of asbestos exposure, because the symptoms of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related illnesses are often mistaken for those of other, less serious conditions.
Sources
Edison International (2009). Southern California Edison.
http://www.edison.com/ourcompany/sce.asp
Southern California Edison (2009). SCE Generating Facilities.
http://www.sce.com/PowerandEnvironment/PowerGeneration/
