Secrets behind the mask
Back then, and today, 3M says it did not have to meet federal standards because the government changed its test for respirators. But that's not what happened. The test requirements remained the same, but NIOSH tinkered with its testing equipment, adding a certain kind of fan to the test process. That was enough for 3M to conclude that the standards "did not apply" and that the company no longer needed to follow the rules, Donald Wilmes, a leader of 3M's respirator unit, said in a court deposition. He said 3M continued selling the 8710 with no caution to users because the masks were safe. 3M says this was done with the government's knowledge and approval, and there is no evidence the regulators sought to force compliance. Current NIOSH officials, however, reject the argument that 3M could simply declare itself exempt from the standards. "That would not be correct by any interpretation we have today," says NIOSH's Metzler, "and I would doubt seriously that would have been the interpretation in those days."
In any case, the 8710 was already having difficulties before the test-equipment change, company records show. 3M also failed to make good on its pledge to the regulators to promptly redesign the product, records and interviews show.
3M touted the 8710 for use against especially deadly small particles. "That is what these respirators should be designed against, and they're not," says Rodney Vincent, a New Orleans attorney who represents users of the 8710 and other disposable respirators. "If you're going to stop disease, you've got to keep them out." Yet in the 8710's case, 3M's own testing showed a high penetration rate for small particles--up to nearly 60 percent. 3M attorneys today acknowledge that small particles penetrated its respirator. But they call such conditions "extreme," saying they don't represent what actually took place in the field.
3M makes that claim about field conditions even though its managers didn't test how the 8710 would perform in many work environments, nor did they know all the various kinds of dust the mask would encounter, company attorneys acknowledge. "It's like GM making an automobile and never test-driving it before they sold the damn thing," complains Frank M. Parker III, chief executive of Caliche Ltd., a Texas health and safety consulting firm. "Anybody who manufactures a product ought to have some sense of its effectiveness in the uses for which it was intended."
When 3M did venture into the field, researchers found results that surprised them. In 1977, for example, five years after the respirator was introduced, 3M managers visited several textile plants in North Carolina to size up the 8710's performance. "A larger number of small particles were found in this mill than anticipated," they wrote in a report--in other words, the more dangerous kind of particle, and the one the 8710 had trouble handling.
By the mid-1980s, the news still wasn't good, 3M records show. In some of its most comprehensive testing ever, 3M studied the mask on subjects representing the range of faces in the workplace. The results shattered 3M's claim that one size fit all, as fully a third of the subjects failed to get a good fit. And, it showed that an important, 3M-designed safety check that users were supposed to do each time they donned their masks was giving erroneous results--telling workers the mask was fitting properly, when in reality, it wasn't.
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