Family sues Rohm & Haas over cancer death

Rohm & Haas, the Philadelphia-based chemical company, was hit yesterday with another wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from a possible cancer cluster at its research-and-development headquarters in Montgomery County.

The suit was filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court by Anne Snizavich, whose husband, Joseph Snizavich, a father of two, died in September at age 63 of brain cancer.

"He was a great dad," said Aaron Freiwald, the family's attorney.

Snizavich, of Norristown, contends that Rohm & Haas, now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., exposed her husband to carcinogenic chemicals at its Spring House Technical Center and concealed information about potentially unsafe work conditions.

The company is facing seven similar lawsuits that Freiwald has filed on behalf of cancer victims who worked at Spring House. Attorneys for the company, which insists that the site is safe, are asking the Superior Court to strike down the suits, claiming that such complaints filed by its employees are workers' compensation cases that do not belong in court.

Yesterday's lawsuit could be legally significant because Snizavich was not a Rohm & Haas employee. He was a pipe fitter who worked at Spring House as a long-term contractor employed by Welsch Company.

If the chemical giant is unable to raise the workers' comp issue that has stalled the other lawsuits, Freiwald could be free to move forward with depositions and subpoenas.

"We've already gotten a lot of information, but now I'm hopeful that we're going to get access to a lot more that I know is there and we just haven't been given yet," he said of company memos and other documents. "For all the cases, this could be pretty significant."

Rohm & Haas spokesman Syd Havely declined to comment on the Snizavich suit yesterday because the company hadn't yet seen it. He has previously said that two in-house epidemiological studies uncovered no "statistically significant correlation" between brain tumors and chemicals at Spring House.

Those studies have been criticized by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. In the Snizavich complaint, Freiwald dismissed them as "scientific frauds designed to hide the truth about the number of brain cancer cases and the causes of brain cancer" among Rohm & Haas workers.

The company has identified 12 malignant brain tumors among employees who had been assigned to Spring House, which opened in 1963. But that figure does not include Snizavich, nor two Rohm & Haas employees that weren't assigned specifically to Spring House but had worked there and died of brain cancer, Freiwald said.

"I think there are others that we still don't know about," he said. *