The 22 individual plaintiffs tentatively have accepted the Rohm & Haas offer, Philadelphia attorney Martin Krimsky said yesterday. He filed most of the suits and negotiated the settlement.
The proposed settlement of the class-action suit must be approved by Judge Murray Goldman of Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. He has scheduled a hearing July 2 to consider the matter.
None of the families would discuss the settlement proposal. One of those involved in a suit against the company said yesterday that the terms of the offer prohibited public comment.
The lawsuits, which have been initiated since April 1982, arose from the company's manufacture of bis-chloromethyl ether (BCME) from 1948 to 1971. One suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Camden and the rest in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.
BCME was used to make water-purification resins at the Rohm & Haas plant at 5000 Richmond St. in the Bridesburg section of the city. During the 1960s, employees who had been exposed to BCME began to contract a distinctive form of lung cancer that generally proved fatal.
By the early 1970s, scientists concluded that BCME was an extremely potent carcinogen in humans and that it caused the unusual oat-cell or small-cell cancer.
Vincent L. Gregory, chairman and chief executive officer of Rohm & Haas, said in prepared statement yesterday that the BCME deaths "were the most tragic event in the history of our company."
By settling the suits out of court, Rohm & Haas would avert a series of damaging trials and put an end to legal proceedings that have arisen from the deaths. If the cases went to trial, some of the evidence might have been harmful to the reputation of the company.
The principal issues in the suits are whether Rohm & Haas officials knew that BCME caused cancer and whether they deliberately concealed the information from their employees and allowed the lethal exposures to continue.
