Electrician who worked for ICI wins mesothelioma legal battle

Initially, as a 15-year-old boy, Mr J worked in a ‘gang’ at the ICI Winnington Works in Northwich. The gangs were responsible for cleaning the plants at ICI. During that time, he recalls cleaning up asbestos chippings that had come off the pipework.

Mr J and his colleagues were not informed by ICI of the dangers of asbestos nor were they given any protective clothing or respiratory devices. As young lads, they even played football with the asbestos!

Having spent 3 months as a cleaner, Mr J trained for 6 months to be an electrician.

He was then sent out to various different plants to carry out his apprenticeship. These included The ICI Avenue works, ICI Winnington works, ICI Waltershaw works, and ICI Lockstock works. Often the wires that needed repairing were close to pipework that was lagged with asbestos.

The pipes were often in a very bad state and asbestos lagging would be chipped and the asbestos was easily disturbed when electrical maintenance work needed to be carried out.

Mr J regularly worked alongside fitters and laggers who were repairing pipework. This resulted in swirls of asbestos dust in the atmosphere, and asbestos was often left lying around for a few days. There were miles of asbestos lagged pipework at ICI which had to be regularly maintained. There were also various passageways under the plants and Mr J often crawled between the pipework and chipped off asbestos.

Mr J left ICI in 1962 but returned in 1976 and went back to the ICI Wallerscote works, where he was put into another gang called MCEG (Mid Cheshire Engineering Group). The gang was required to attend all over the works to carry out the heavy maintenance work. Much of the old machinery, pipework and cables were coated with asbestos, which had to be broken down and became damaged as the machinery was removed, so they were in direct contact with asbestos.

At the ICI Winnington works, asbestos readings were carried out to ensure that all the asbestos had been removed. The asbestos reading monitors still showed positive readings even though this was being carried out in the late 80s and early 90s. ICI had supposedly ensured that all the asbestos had been removed and these checks were being carried out to essentially rubber stamp this. Workers were still not provided with any respiratory devices to protect from the asbestos dust.