Asbestos. Cancer. A Six-Year Clock. A Dead Worker.

They Knew the Insulation Had Asbestos. They Sold It Anyway. Then They Used a 1967 Law to Try to Walk Away.

Investigation: Brand Insulations, Inc. / ARCO Cherry Point Refinery / Washington Supreme Court No. 102782-6 / Filed April 30, 2026

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Was Actually Taken From Lee Hetterly

Lee Hetterly went to work. That is the whole story, in its most compressed form. He showed up at the Cherry Point oil refinery in 1971, took a job as a maintenance technician, and spent more than a decade doing the physical work that keeps industrial facilities running. He worked with pipes. He worked with equipment. He worked around insulation that crumbled and broke and turned to dust in the air around him.

He did not know the dust was killing him. Nobody told him. The people who put that insulation there, who selected it and bought it and installed it throughout the facility, knew it contained asbestos. Asbestos exposure can cause mesothelioma, a cancer that attacks the lining of the lungs and abdomen. There is no cure. There is rarely a survival measured in years.

Hetterly did not find out he was sick until 2021. Fifty years after he first breathed that dust. He filed a lawsuit against 53 defendants. He was trying to get some form of accountability before he died. He did not make it. He died before the case could be fully resolved.

His executor carries the case now. The man himself is gone. What remains is a legal fight over whether the law will even allow his family to pursue the company that chose and supplied the material that ended his life. That is the indignity at the center of this story: a man worked, was poisoned without his knowledge, died from that poisoning decades later, and the company responsible has spent years arguing in court that the law says they are simply no longer reachable. That the clock ran out. That the system worked as intended and the answer is no.

The Washington Supreme Court, to its partial credit, said the answer is not entirely no. The case survives on a product seller and negligent supplier theory. But the fact that Hetterly’s estate had to take this case to the state’s highest court, years into the fight, to preserve even the right to continue suing, tells you everything about who the legal system was built to protect.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Record Actually Says

The following are direct verbatim quotes from Washington Supreme Court Opinion No. 102782-6, filed April 30, 2026. These are not summaries. They are what the court wrote.

“Lee Hetterly worked as a maintenance worker at the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) Cherry Point refinery for many years. As part of his job, he worked with asbestos-bearing insulation. That insulation had been selected, bought, and installed by Brand Insulations Inc. Asbestos exposure can cause mesothelioma, a deadly disease. Decades later, Hetterly was diagnosed with mesothelioma from which he died.”

• This establishes the core factual chain: Brand selected, purchased, and installed the asbestos-bearing insulation. The causal link between Brand’s procurement decisions and Hetterly’s fatal disease is stated on the record at the opening of the majority opinion.
• The phrase “from which he died” is not background color. It is the documented outcome of Brand’s material choices, stated plainly by the state’s highest court.

“ARCO relied on Brand’s insulation expertise. Brand selected insulation products, purchased those products from manufacturers, arranged for their delivery to the refinery, and installed them during construction. ARCO purchased the insulation materials, through its contract with Parsons, from Brand at a marked-up price.”

• Brand was the expert. ARCO deferred to Brand’s specialized knowledge in choosing which insulation products to use. This is critical to the seller liability theory: Brand was not simply a labor crew following orders. It exercised independent professional judgment in selecting the products that contained asbestos.
• Brand profited twice: once as a contractor, and once as a product seller marking up the insulation price. The court identifies Brand as both installer and commercial vendor in the same transaction.

“Brand contends Hetterly’s claims should be dismissed, even though Hetterly did not discover his injury until 2021, because the six-year construction statute of repose period passed sometime in the 1970s.”

• Brand’s argument, stated on the record: a sick man dying of a disease caused by their product should have no legal recourse because the statute of repose expired while the asbestos was still quietly doing its work inside his body, decades before he could have known.
• The discovery of injury occurred in 2021. Brand’s construction work ended in approximately 1972. The gap is roughly 49 years. Brand argued those 49 years, and Hetterly’s ignorance of his own poisoning, worked in Brand’s favor.

“The construction statute of repose does not apply to claims outside its scope. In Pfeifer v. City of Bellingham, we held that when ‘builders also engage in the activity of selling, they should face the liability of sellers.'”

• The court draws a line that Brand tried to erase: a company wearing both a contractor hat and a seller hat cannot use its contractor status to shed the legal duties that come with being a product seller. The activity determines the liability.
• This ruling preserves the estate’s right to proceed. Brand remains exposed to product seller and negligent supplier claims precisely because it did not just install the insulation. It chose it, bought it, and sold it.

“Insulation was relatively unimportant, because it’s a heat concentration. It is a matter of saving energy in most cases… But most refineries can operate without insulation.”

• This is a quote from ARCO engineer Abe Johnson, submitted by the estate to argue that insulation was not integral to the refinery, and therefore Brand’s installation work should not qualify for statute of repose protection. The court ultimately rejected this framing after examining the full deposition in context.
• The court found that Johnson’s complete testimony showed he meant only that it was “theoretically possible” to design a refinery without insulation, not that any real-world refinery actually operates without it. Johnson himself acknowledged elsewhere that insulation “is a basic and integral component of any completed refinery.”

Supply Chain Complicity: How Asbestos Got Into the Refinery

The harm in this case did not begin with a single act. It traveled through a documented commercial chain, from manufacturers to a specialized insulation contractor to an oil company’s facility, landing finally in the lungs of the workers who had no say in any of it.

• Brand Insulations, Inc. occupied a pivotal position in the supply chain: it sourced asbestos-containing insulation products directly from manufacturers, marked up the price, and resold those products to ARCO via the general contractor Parsons. Brand was the link between the manufacturers and the worksite.
• ARCO, the refinery owner and buyer, relied entirely on Brand’s expertise to select which insulation products to purchase. The court record establishes that ARCO deferred to Brand’s professional judgment in this selection. Brand had the knowledge and the discretion.
• General contractor Ralph M. Parsons Co. served as the intermediary in the commercial contract structure: ARCO contracted with Parsons, who subcontracted with Brand. This layered structure distributed contractual relationships across multiple parties, each one potentially providing a layer of distance from direct liability.
• After Brand’s installation work concluded in approximately early 1972, unused asbestos-containing insulation material that Brand had supplied remained on-site at the refinery. This material continued to be available for use by workers like Hetterly during maintenance work long after Brand’s formal construction role had ended.
• Hetterly’s exposure was documented as occurring not just during Brand’s construction phase but throughout his employment as a maintenance technician, a period spanning more than a decade. Insulation was regularly broken and knocked off pipes during maintenance and shutdowns, generating the dust that ultimately caused his disease.

Regulatory Gray Zones: The Law That Swallowed a Dying Man’s Claim

Washington’s construction statute of repose, RCW 4.16.300-.310, was written in 1967 to protect architects, engineers, and contractors from open-ended liability stretching decades into the future. Brand tried to weaponize it against a man whose disease was physically impossible to discover within the law’s six-year window.

• A statute of repose is different from a statute of limitations. A statute of limitations starts running when an injury is discovered. A statute of repose terminates the right to sue after a fixed number of years, regardless of whether the injured person could possibly have known they were harmed. In Hetterly’s case, the six-year clock started ticking when Brand finished construction in approximately 1972 and expired sometime in the late 1970s. Mesothelioma from asbestos exposure typically takes 20 to 50 years to develop. The law structurally made it impossible for Hetterly to sue within the window.
• Brand’s legal argument was an attempt to use the construction label to cover its seller and supplier conduct. Brand did not just build. It also selected the hazardous product, purchased it for resale at a markup, and provided specialized expertise in choosing which products to use. By pressing the construction statute of repose, Brand attempted to convert its commercial product-selling role into a construction defense, shielding conduct that product liability law was specifically designed to address.
• Two separate Washington Court of Appeals decisions, Maxwell (2020) and Welch (2023), reached opposite conclusions about whether Brand’s insulation work at Cherry Point qualified for statute of repose protection. The conflict between these decisions required the Washington Supreme Court to step in on direct interlocutory review. This legal ambiguity directly benefited Brand, allowing it to argue shifting interpretations in different courts over years of litigation while Hetterly’s estate waited.
• The statute was amended twice after the 1984 Condit decision but the legislature did not address the gap that allows a product seller embedded in a construction project to potentially escape product liability by invoking the construction repose period. The Washington Supreme Court was left to draw that line itself in 2026, more than 50 years after the insulation was installed.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs: What Brand Was Actually Doing at Cherry Point

Brand Insulations, Inc. was not a passive labor crew. The court record documents a company that positioned itself at the center of the insulation supply chain, profiting from both the labor and the product, while bearing expert responsibility for the selection of the materials that would define every worker’s exposure.

• Brand agreed to furnish both labor and insulation materials for installation throughout the ARCO Cherry Point refinery. The contract designated Brand as the “seller” of insulation materials and ARCO as the “buyer.” This is documented in the court record. Brand was operating a commercial product sales business embedded inside a construction contract.
• Brand purchased insulation products from manufacturers, then resold them to ARCO at a marked-up price through its contract with general contractor Parsons. The markup was Brand’s direct financial gain from the product sales component of the arrangement, separate from its labor compensation.
• Brand held the expertise that justified its position. ARCO relied on Brand’s specialized insulation knowledge to make product selection decisions. This expertise was a commercial asset: it is what made Brand valuable and what justified the arrangement where Brand, rather than ARCO’s own engineers, chose which materials would be installed throughout the facility.
• The insulation Brand selected and installed contained asbestos. The court record does not include any finding that Brand disclosed asbestos content as a hazard to refinery workers or that Brand took any steps to protect workers like Hetterly from exposure to the material it chose, purchased, and installed.

Legal Minimalism: The Letter but Not the Spirit

Brand’s defense strategy demonstrates a textbook case of using the technical language of a statute to achieve a result that its drafters never intended, while the people the law was not designed to protect pay the price.

• RCW 4.16.300-.310, Washington’s construction statute of repose, was enacted to protect architects, contractors, engineers, and similar construction professionals from open-ended liability for construction defects discovered long after a project is complete. The Washington courts have documented this purpose explicitly: “to protect architects, contractors, engineers, surveyors and others from extended potential tort and contract liability.” Brand’s invocation of this statute to shield product seller liability for a hazardous material it selected, purchased, and sold was precisely the kind of result the Washington Supreme Court’s Condit decision warned against: using the construction repose statute as an “end run around product liability law.”
• The Washington Supreme Court’s majority opinion acknowledged directly that “the construction statute of repose does not bar the Estate from bringing claims arising from Brand’s independent duties as a product seller or supplier even if such claims may relate to construction activities.” Brand’s defense had attempted to collapse the distinction between its role as a construction subcontractor and its role as a commercial product seller, treating both under the construction repose shield. The court rejected that collapse.
• The concurring/dissenting opinion authored by Justice Gordon McCloud argued that the majority went beyond the specific issue that the court had agreed to review, which concerned only the construction statute question. The dissent’s position underscores how Brand’s legal strategy was designed to maximize procedural advantages at every stage, pressing for the broadest possible reading of the statute before the state’s highest court even when the issue hadn’t been properly raised for interlocutory review.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay: Time as a Corporate Weapon

Brand’s defense strategy across this litigation illustrates how delay, procedural complexity, and legal ambiguity function as structural assets for well-resourced corporate defendants against individual claimants.

• The core of Brand’s defense was built on time itself. The construction statute of repose argument depends entirely on the fact that Hetterly could not have known he was harmed until decades after the legal window closed. Brand did not argue that it didn’t cause harm. It argued that enough time had passed to make accountability legally unavailable. This is the entire mechanism: use a law designed for a different purpose to make the gap between harm and discovery work as a corporate shield.
• Brand sought direct discretionary interlocutory review of the trial court’s order, an unusual procedural move that the concurring/dissenting justice noted is generally disfavored. This added another layer of appellate process, forcing the estate to litigate at the state’s highest court before the underlying case had even gone to trial.
• The conflict between Maxwell (2020) and Welch (2023), two Court of Appeals decisions reaching opposite conclusions about Brand’s construction work at the same refinery during the same time period, created years of additional legal uncertainty. This conflict was in part the product of Brand’s litigation choices: in Welch, Brand did not submit evidence showing its insulation was integral to the refinery. In this case, Brand did submit such evidence. The strategic deployment of evidence, timed to particular cases and courts, kept the legal question unsettled and litigation ongoing.
• Hetterly sued in 2021 after his diagnosis. He died before the case produced a final result. His executor now carries the litigation. Brand’s strategy of pressing every procedural defense to its limits outlasted the plaintiff himself.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The documented harm in this case is a fatal cancer caused by a substance that was known to be hazardous and was nonetheless installed throughout an industrial facility where workers would spend their careers.

• Mesothelioma is a malignant cancer of the lining of the lungs and abdomen. It is caused primarily by asbestos exposure. There is no cure. The court record documents that Lee Hetterly was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma, that this disease was caused by asbestos exposures at his workplaces and residences from the 1950s through the early 2000s, and that he died from it.
• Hetterly is one of 53 defendants named in his lawsuit, meaning his alleged asbestos exposure extended across multiple sites and sources. The Cherry Point refinery is one documented site. The scale of the defendant list reflects the pervasive industrial use of asbestos across workplaces throughout the mid-twentieth century.
• The court record notes that Brand finished its installation work by early 1972, but asbestos-containing insulation remained throughout the facility, and unused material remained on-site. Workers like Hetterly were exposed not during Brand’s construction phase but during routine maintenance over a decade, as insulation broke off pipes and equipment, generating dust. The health risk persisted long after Brand left the site.

Economic Inequality

This case concentrates the economic dimensions of asbestos liability into a single stark picture: a maintenance worker with no power over his workplace’s material choices, against a corporate defendant with the resources to press litigation to the state’s highest court before the underlying case reaches trial.

• Hetterly had no role in selecting the insulation materials he worked around. He had no knowledge of their asbestos content. He had no ability to refuse or remove himself from exposure within the normal scope of his job as a maintenance technician. The entire decision-making chain, from which products to buy, to where to install them, to how much to charge for them, ran entirely through corporate actors: Brand, Parsons, and ARCO.
• The legal mechanism Brand deployed, the construction statute of repose, functions asymmetrically by class. It benefits companies who can afford to have their construction-related liability expire after six years, and it harms workers whose occupational diseases, like mesothelioma, are physically incapable of manifesting within that window. A worker cannot accelerate the latency period of a cancer to meet a corporate filing deadline.
• Hetterly died during the litigation. His executor now carries the case. The financial and emotional burden of sustaining a complex multi-defendant lawsuit against more than 50 corporate entities, through trial court dismissals, reconsiderations, and a state supreme court interlocutory appeal, falls on the surviving family, not on the defendants.

The Contractor Shield: How Corporate Structure Diffuses Liability

The layered contract structure at the Cherry Point refinery, with ARCO at the top, Parsons as general contractor in the middle, and Brand as a subcontractor at the bottom, created a documented framework through which liability could be diffused and contested even when the chain of causation was direct.

• Brand’s primary defense was to characterize itself as a construction subcontractor, a classification that activates the statute of repose shield. By operating as a subcontractor to Parsons, Brand occupied a legal category whose protections it then attempted to extend over conduct, specifically product selection and sale, that would ordinarily fall under product liability law. The subcontractor label was doing double work: structuring its commercial position within the project and providing the legal classification it needed to escape accountability.
• ARCO purchased the insulation materials through its contract with Parsons, who subcontracted with Brand. This arrangement put at least two contracting layers between ARCO and the actual product seller. The court record establishes that ARCO was the “buyer” and Brand was the “seller” per the contract terms, but the commercial relationship was mediated through the general contractor, complicating direct claims.
• The Washington Supreme Court ultimately held that the contractor structure does not eliminate Brand’s seller liability. The court’s ruling in Pfeifer, applied here, establishes that “when builders also engage in the activity of selling, they should face the liability of sellers.” The construction subcontract arrangement did not convert Brand’s product sales activities into construction work for purposes of liability.

This Is the System Working as Intended

The Hetterly case is not a story of a broken system. It is a story of a system performing its designed function. Every element that made accountability difficult was a feature, not a malfunction.

• A 1967 statute designed to protect construction professionals was available, decades later, to be pressed into service as a shield against a product seller’s liability for a fatal disease. The statute’s broad language, applied to asbestos cases, produced exactly the kind of outcome the Washington Supreme Court’s Condit decision had warned against: an end run around product liability law. The system allowed Brand to argue this theory for years, through multiple trial court rulings and an interlocutory appeal to the state’s highest court.
• Asbestos was extensively used in industrial construction for decades. The latency period of mesothelioma is measured in decades. The construction statute of repose is measured in six years. This combination guarantees that workers who develop asbestos-related diseases from occupational exposure at construction sites will almost always find the statute of repose clock has already expired before their disease is diagnosable. This is not an accident of timing. It is a structural feature of how asbestos liability was contained.
• The contract structure documented in this case, manufacturer to Brand to Parsons to ARCO, placed multiple corporate layers between the hazardous product and the workers exposed to it. Each layer provides a potential point of liability deflection. Hetterly sued 53 defendants. The number of defendants does not reflect the complexity of the harm; it reflects the complexity of the corporate structures that surrounded it.
• Hetterly died before his case was resolved. His executor continues the litigation. The documented mechanism that most directly contributed to this outcome was not a failure of legal principle. It was the design of litigation economics: a well-resourced defendant pressing every available procedural defense, across multiple courts and years, against a plaintiff with a terminal illness and a finite lifespan.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

The following are editorial recommendations based on the documented failure modes of this case. They are clearly labeled as editorial analysis and do not represent findings of the source document.

The core structural failure this case exposes: Washington’s construction statute of repose can be deployed to eliminate product seller and supplier liability for hazardous materials, even when the seller exercised expert discretion in choosing those materials, because the seller was also a construction subcontractor in the same project.

Regulatory Track

• Washington’s Labor and Industries agency and relevant occupational health regulators should establish clear rules requiring that construction subcontractors who also function as product sellers and material specifiers bear product seller duties, including hazardous material disclosure, that are not extinguished by the construction statute of repose. The activity determines the liability; regulators should codify this principle in guidance applicable to toxic material cases.
• Any asbestos-containing material installed in an industrial facility should trigger a mandatory on-site disclosure requirement, documented and preserved, identifying the material, its asbestos content, and the specific locations of installation. This documentation should be maintained and transferable to subsequent owners and employers so that workers hired decades later have access to the information they need to protect themselves.

Legislative Track

• The Washington Legislature should amend RCW 4.16.300-.310 to explicitly exclude from the construction statute of repose any claims arising from a contractor’s independent duties as a product seller or supplier of hazardous materials, regardless of whether those materials were incorporated into an improvement on real property. The Washington Supreme Court drew this line in the current case, but a legislative fix would make it durable and remove ambiguity for future asbestos and toxic material cases.
• The Legislature should consider a separate, extended repose or limitation period for latent disease claims arising from occupational toxic exposure, specifically designed to account for the documented decades-long latency periods of asbestos-related diseases. A six-year clock written in 1967 was not calibrated for mesothelioma. The Legislature should update the statute to reflect medical reality.

Corporate Governance Track

• Companies that operate as both construction subcontractors and product sellers of hazardous materials should be required, as a condition of licensing and bonding, to maintain product liability insurance that covers their seller and supplier duties independently of their construction liability insurance, with coverage periods commensurate with the documented latency of the hazardous materials they handle.
• Internal compliance systems for companies handling hazardous materials should require documented disclosure protocols at the time of installation, including written records identifying hazardous material selections, the basis for those selections, and the individuals responsible. These records should be preserved and transferable. The absence of such a system, in a company like Brand that was entrusted with expert material selection authority, is itself a documented governance failure.

What Now?

The case Polinder v. Brand Insulations, Inc., No. 102782-6, is now remanded to the superior court for further proceedings on the seller and supplier liability claims. The corporate defendant is Brand Insulations, Inc. Additional defendants in the underlying lawsuit include more than 50 other companies spanning the full industrial supply chain of the ARCO Cherry Point refinery.

Relevant oversight and accountability bodies:

• Washington State Legislature (Senate Labor Committee / House Labor & Workplace Standards Committee): The body with authority to amend RCW 4.16.300-.310 to close the gap between the construction statute of repose and hazardous material seller liability. Contact your state representative directly. This is a state-level legislative fix.
• Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (L&I): The agency responsible for worker safety standards in Washington. Advocate for stronger toxic material disclosure requirements in industrial construction projects.
• Washington Courts (Whatcom County Superior Court): The case returns here for further proceedings. Public court records are available and the proceedings will be ongoing.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): Federal regulator for workplace asbestos exposure standards. File complaints about ongoing asbestos hazards through osha.gov.

For mutual aid and grassroots organizing:

• If you or a family member worked at an industrial facility and was exposed to asbestos-containing insulation or other hazardous materials, connect with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) and local mesothelioma patient advocacy networks. Medical and legal resources exist specifically for workers in your situation.
• Union members and tradespeople: push your local and international unions to maintain pressure on state legislatures to close latent disease loopholes in statutes of repose. Workers in construction, refining, shipbuilding, and related industries are disproportionately affected.
• Advocate for toxic material transparency laws in your state. The documented absence of worker-accessible records about hazardous materials installed in the facilities where they work is a solvable problem that requires political will, not technical innovation.