00:00Tyler Jordan always planned to take over his father's small business,
00:04fashioning stone slabs into countertops.
00:07I was a hard worker. I loved that job.
00:10Instead, the dust that Tyler breathed in at work upended his life,
00:16and his father ended up donating him a kidney.
00:18I would wake up soaked in sweat, so I had fever, night sweats, chills.
00:24My daughter, who would have been, I think, nine at the time, kind of learned how to set up the
00:30dialysis machine.
00:31Tyler is one of a dozen countertop fabrication workers I've met with around the country
00:36who've contracted silicosis, an incurable, debilitating, often deadly disease
00:43caused by breathing in respirable crystalline silica.
00:47These workers, and hundreds of others, are now suing the manufacturers of artificial quartz.
00:54A trendy product that contains much more crystalline silica than old-fashioned marble or granite.
01:00Their lawsuits accused the manufacturers of peddling a needlessly toxic product and misrepresenting its risks.
01:08They told us to treat it like natural stone, so treat it like granite.
01:13Australia approved a ban on artificial stone in 2023,
01:17and California regulators are moving towards a similar prohibition.
01:21The U.S. Congress is pursuing a different approach, a ban on lawsuits against the manufacturers.
01:27Something that I could lick, and it isn't going to hurt me.
01:31Conservative lawmakers and manufacturers like Cambria argue that the slabs themselves are safe,
01:37and that the problem is third-party fabrication shops not following safety rules.
01:43Cambria says that its own in-house fab shops,
01:46where no workers have reported contracting silicosis show that the product can be fabricated safely.
01:53The company says it keeps the silica exposure levels at its in-house fab shops below the action level set
02:00by OSHA.
02:01But records we reviewed, which were released in litigation and shared with California regulators,
02:07show that action level has been exceeded dozens of times over the past decade in Cambria's in-house fab shops.
02:14The problem is the process, not the product.
02:18Well, you've got to go through the process to have the product.
02:23If they had this with asbestos, that you couldn't sue asbestos companies,
02:30that we would still have asbestos in the walls of every home.
02:36In April, a jury issued a mixed verdict in the lawsuit brought by Tyler Jordan and his wife,
02:42finding Cambria partially at fault for what happened to him.
02:45Cambria is now trying to get that verdict, which says the company owes $7.7 million, overturned.
02:52Tyler is hoping cases like his will help force the manufacturers
02:56to switch to safer alternatives than artificial stone.
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