Rohm And Haas

Warner-Lambert has filed a $55 million dollar lawsuit against Rohm and Haas, charging that the release of Warner's cholesterol-lowering drug was drastically delayed due to a contaminated ingredient it bought from the Philadelphia company. The suit seeks to recover lost profits and other damages resulting from the delayed launch of Cholybar, the new cholesterol-lowering "confectionary bar" marketed by the New Jersey-based Warner's Parke-Davis Group. The complaint, filed in New Jersey Superior Court in Morristown, alleges that Rohm and Haas sold cholestyramine resin - the active ingredient in Cholybar - that was adulterated with dicofol, a pesticide similar to DDT. Rohm & Haas' stock closed unchanged yesterday at $33. The complaint says Rohm and Haas notified Bristol-Myers - one of Warner's competitors - of the contamination a month before Warner was told.

As Rohm and Haas sees it, the company's land development plan is a simple one, just an addition of a few painting sheds, a 120-square-foot storage house, a storm sewer and a new parking lot to accommodate more workers at the headquarters at McKean Road, near Route 309. To the Lower Gwynedd Planning Commission, however, those changes are no small task. At its meeting Thursday night, the board told the company that township solicitor Stephen Yusem defined the storm-water sewer as a "structure" - no different than a building - and that Rohm and Haas, a chemical firm, had to apply to the Lower Gwynedd Zoning Hearing Board for permission to build it. On the blueprints, the sewer is outside the designated area where the firm is allowed to build.

Rohm and Haas Co., of Philadelphia, and International Business Machines Corp. said today that they agreed to jointly develop a new generation of nano-scale transistors for the semiconductor industry. The research in "implant lithography" is aimed at creating circuits on a scale of 32 nanometers - the latest hurdle in the ongoing race to create smaller, faster electronic and computing devices. Work on the collaboration will take place at IBM's East Fishkill, Yorktown and Albany facilities in New York, and at Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials' Advanced Technology Center in Marlborough, Mass.

Rohm and Haas Co. plans to reduce the workforce at its Bridesburg plant from 800 to 500 within the next two years, a company spokesman said yesterday. "We are optimistic that the entire reduction can be accomplished without layoffs, but rather through normal attrition plus some transfers to other Rohm and Haas facilities," said John F. McKeogh, director of communications. "The process will be a gradual one. " The company concluded that fewer workers will be needed by 1993, McKeogh said, because it has plans to discontinue two product lines now manufactured at the plant, on Richmond Street near Kennedy.

Jim Hartman said he was "taking this personal. " He's worried about the plume of chemical contamination that is creeping under his Bridesburg block from the sprawling chemical company across the street. Rohm and Haas recently told its rowhouse neighbors that groundwater tainted with irritating and toxic chemicals - toluene, xylene, ethylbenzene - had seeped under dozens of homes across Bridge Street. "I'm not worried about myself," said Hartman, 33, a Bridesburg native and security guard.

Jim Hartman still keeps his father's blue work uniform hanging in the closet. For 30 years, Fred Hartman marched a block and a half through the Bridesburg neighborhood to his job as a chemical operator at Rohm and Haas. Jim's dad, who died in the early 1980s, started work at the plant when it was Bridesburg's prime employer. But now, after decades of cutbacks, half the production area north of Bridge Street has darkened into a chemical ghost town. Within weeks, the company will finish sealing up 17 buildings on the end of the plant next to the Delaware River - with no plans to use the area again.

Rohm and Haas, the Philadelphia-based specialty chemical company, will hold open houses at its local plants to try to improve both the company's and chemical industry's image. Vincent L. Gregory Jr., Rohm and Haas' chairman and chief executive officer, said polls conducted by the chemical industry show "the public ranks chemical companies somewhere near the Mafia. " "In South Philadelphia, the chemical industry would be ranked below the Mafia," Gregory told shareholders during Rohm and Haas' annual meeting at the Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut St. Gregory said there is a public perception that the bad things that chemical companies do outweigh any benefits.

The Bridesburg Outboard Club, facing eviction from its riverfront boating spot, is sailing into legal waters to attempt a rescue of the 41-year-old organization. The club filed suit in Common Pleas Court on April 6, arguing that its landlord, Rohm and Haas Co., had no right to evict it from the Delaware River site at the foot of Jenks Street. It seeks a hearing by April 30 for a preliminary injunction barring Rohm and Haas from kicking members out. The firm wants the club to move so it can sell 40 acres and warehouses between the river and its chemical plant.

Over the last 30 years or so, members of the Bridesburg Outboard Club have created for themselves and other neighborhood residents a cozy niche along the Delaware riverfront. At the end of a rutted dirt road, on a 1-acre sliver between the river and some railroad tracks, lies their boat club, with its launch ramp, a modest but well-kept cinderblock clubhouse and even a playground for kids. The site was opened to them by members of the Haas family, founders of the Rohm and Haas chemical firm, which has owned the land next to its chemical plant for more than 30 years, club members said.

John C. Haas, retired chairman of Rohm and Haas Company and a tireless champion of community service both regionally and nationally, died Saturday morning at age 92. He was a son of Otto Haas, co-founder of the global chemical company headquartered in Philadelphia and Phoebe Waterman Haas, who was among the first women to receive a doctorate in astronomy. Mr. Haas died at his family home in Villanova of natural causes, a family spokesperson said. Family members were at his side.

Joseph Snizavich started having seizures and stroke-like symptoms in July 2005, and within three years, the longtime pipe fitter was dead of brain cancer. His widow blamed the illness on his exposure to chemicals at a Rohm & Haas research facility, where a study found that employees had developed brain cancer at twice the expected rate. But proving a connection between the chemicals and any one particular brain cancer could be difficult, if a judge's ruling this week is any indication.

Donald Louis Felley, 90, a research chemist who rose to become president and chief operating officer of the former Rohm & Haas Co. in Philadelphia, died of a stroke Sunday, Dec. 4, at his home in Rydal. Mr. Felley spent his entire career, starting in 1949, with the chemical giant, which has headquarters on South Independence Mall West. The firm has since been acquired by the Dow Chemical Co. In 1957, he and his family moved to Paris, where he spent eight years building and directing the company's operations in France and other western European nations.

John F. McKeogh, 68, of Churchville, a retired vice president and director of public affairs for Rohm & Haas Co., died of an aneurysm Thursday, Aug. 4, at St. Mary Medical Center. Mr. McKeogh joined Rohm & Haas in 1976 as director of corporate communications and public relations. He became a vice president in 1999. Brian McPeak, former vice president of communications and public relations for Rohm & Haas and a colleague of Mr. McKeogh's for more than 20 years, wrote in a tribute Friday: "John McKeogh was the consummate communications professional.

John C. Haas, 92, retired chairman of Rohm & Haas Co. and a tireless champion of community service regionally and nationally, died Saturday, April 2. He was a son of Otto Haas, cofounder of the global chemical company headquartered in Philadelphia, and Phoebe Waterman Haas, who was among the first women to receive a doctorate in astronomy. Mr. Haas died of natural causes at home in Villanova, a family representative said. Relatives were at his side. "Our father was a kind and charitable man, and that was reflected in every aspect of his life," said a statement from his children.

John C. Haas, retired chairman of Rohm and Haas Company and a tireless champion of community service both regionally and nationally, died Saturday morning at age 92. He was a son of Otto Haas, co-founder of the global chemical company headquartered in Philadelphia and Phoebe Waterman Haas, who was among the first women to receive a doctorate in astronomy. Mr. Haas died at his family home in Villanova of natural causes, a family spokesperson said. Family members were at his side.

James Maynard Gant Jr., a chemist for Rohm and Haas for 40 years, a Marine veteran of the Korean War and an active member of the Lutheran church who traveled to Africa on a missionary trip, died Saturday. He was three weeks from his 81st birthday and lived in Ambler. Jim Gant, or "Buddy," as he was known to family and friends, was born in Ambler as one of the seven children of James Maynard Gant and Viola Stewart Gant. He was active at Ambler High School, where he belonged to numerous clubs, played sports, was a member of the jazz ensemble and the marching band, of which he was president for three years.

In the city's Bridesburg section, neighbors park cars in a surplus employee lot at the once-huge Rohm & Haas Co. plant, which employed 2,000 workers at one time. Later this year, the final two dozen workers will lose their jobs there when Dow Chemical Co. closes the plant for good. Farther south on Independence Mall, 286 employees at the Rohm & Haas headquarters lost their jobs in the last six months - also laid off by Dow. Several miles west, DuPont Co. has hung a "for sale" sign on the Marshall Labs, its technical facility in the 3400 block of Grays Ferry Avenue.

Pierre Brondeau, a highly regarded executive who was supposed to preserve the Rohm & Haas Co. culture and legacy in Philadelphia when Dow Chemical Co. bought the company this year, has taken a new job as the chief executive of FMC Corp. FMC, which manufactures industrial and agricultural chemicals and has headquarters in Center City, announced Brondeau's hiring yesterday. Brondeau, 52, will join the FMC board and assume his new position as chief executive officer and president Jan. 1. He will earn a base salary of $900,000 and receive a signing bonus of $3 million in FMC stock that vests in three years, according to an FMC regulatory filing.

Dow Chemical Co. will close the former Rohm & Haas chemical plant in Philadelphia's Bridesburg section, the company told its remaining 45 workers at the 63-acre complex yesterday. About 25 employees at the Jetted Copolymer Facility, which makes ion-exchange materials for water-filtration systems that the company builds elsewhere, will lose their jobs when production ceases "by the middle of 2010," company spokesman Bob Plishka confirmed yesterday. The 20 other workers, employed at an herbicide unit that Dow's AgroSciences division bought from Rohm & Haas two years ago, will be gone by the end of the month, Plishka said.

The once-reluctant Dow Chemical Co. is expected to close today on its giant acquisition of Philadelphia's Rohm & Haas Co. A March 9 agreement in Delaware's Court of Chancery calls for the merger to be finalized by 3 p.m. The Midland, Mich., company had been expected to seal the deal in January but balked because of the weak economy and financing issues. Rohm & Haas sued Dow to honor the agreement, signed in July. A Dow spokesman said yesterday that the closing appears to be on schedule.