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Aline Browning set out to find answers when her father died from lung cancer following a 25-year career at what was once Lackawanna County’s largest employer.
“My dad was not ready. He had time,” the 45-year-old Dunmore resident said. “My dad was fit. He was adventurous.”
Browning’s father, Charlie Browning, was 62 years old when he succumbed to lung cancer Nov. 9, 2023. He had worked at the WEA Manufacturing plant in Olyphant, which later became Cinram, from 1985 to 2010, where he held various positions in molding and printing, initially working on cassettes and later CDs and DVDs, said his daughter, who contends employees were exposed to carcinogenic chemicals without proper protective equipment.
“Before my dad got sick, before he even knew he had cancer, his friends started dying in pretty high numbers,” Browning said. “He said, ‘There’s something not right here. If something happens to me, you’ve got to do something, because this isn’t right.’”
The plant at 1400 E. Lackawanna Ave. employed thousands of Northeast Pennsylvania residents at its peak in the mid-1990s, though that number declined to less than 200 by the time it closed in 2018. The major local manufacturer began as Specialty Records in 1950 at 210 N. Valley Ave., later relocating to the Midvalley Industrial Park and becoming WEA Manufacturing, then Cinram and finally Technicolor amid ownership changes.
The 1-million-square-foot production and warehousing facility was subsequently torn down in 2020 to make way for Canpack Group’s 1-million-square-foot aluminum can manufacturing plant. Canpack, which became operational in 2021, is unaffiliated with the previous facility.
Browning has now spent more than a year compiling a list of former employees, confirming more than 200 who died from cancer based on the causes of death listed in their obituaries, plus 96 cancer survivors.
To gather more information, Browning organized a town hall May 17 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Throop Civic Center, 500 Sanderson St., called “WEA Have a Right to Know!” It will feature a question-and-answer session for exposure victims.
She hopes legislators and a representative with the state Department of Health will attend.
“I want to get everybody together because, first of all, just not being seen and heard is starting to get to some of the survivors,” Browning said, later adding, “We need somebody to kind of step forward and champion this. Out of all the people we elected, the guy who stepped up the most is no longer a politician.”
France-based Technicolor, the most recent operator of the plant, did not respond to an emailed request for comment by press time Friday.
Federal support
Late last year, shortly before his term ended, former U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-8, Moosic, penned a letter in December to the state Department of Health asking it to investigate “strikingly high” rates of cancer, other illnesses and deaths among former employees of the plant, including a “notable number of middle-age deaths.”
Since then, Cartwright’s successor, U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-8, of Dallas Twp., announced his support for the investigation Friday.
“Rep. Bresnahan is concerned about the significant amount of cancer cases affecting those who used to work at the Cinram plant in Olyphant. He would like to see a full investigation, and his team is tracking the issue closely,” Bresnahan’s communications director, Hannah Pope, said in an email Friday afternoon. “Rep. Bresnahan will continue to communicate with officials at the state and local levels as well as those at the federal level to ensure accountability and answers for his constituents.”
In Cartwright’s December letter, he said he had been contacted by a number of constituents who are former employees, or family members of former employees, of Specialty Records, WEA Manufacturing and Cinram.
The legislator pointed to a lengthy list of health complications among former employees and an equally long list of potentially hazardous chemicals that were used in “relatively liberal and incautious” ways.
Those health complications are: numerous instances of cancer, including mesothelioma, other lung cancers, leukemia, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer, kidney cancer, prostate cancer, thyroid cancer, lymphoma, rectal cancer, melanoma, and other cancers; myasthenia gravis, heart conditions, lupus, other autoimmune diseases, other lung and respiratory diseases and cysts.
The chemicals, which workers used without personal protective equipment or measures, according to Cartwright, include trichloroethylene (TCE), titanium acetylacetonate (TAA), methanol, ammonium hydroxide, methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK), positive photoresists, nickel sulfamate, sulfuric acid, boric acid, black lacquer, Cobehn solutions, cyanide, benzene and other potentially hazardous complex substances.
Cartwright’s two-page letter presented four requests to the Department of Health:
1. Initiate an effort to formally intake reports and data from former Specialty Records/WEA/Cinram employees and family members, including surviving family members.
2. Analyze the input.
3. Acknowledge the level of health problems and health risk/danger that the reports and data represent.
4. Offer any health care-related assistance that is warranted and possible, including health advice, to surviving former employees who came in prolonged contact with potentially hazardous chemicals in their jobs.
He then directed the department to Browning, asking the agency to work with local activists and advise them on what additional information is needed.
In an email Thursday, state Department of Health press secretary Mark O’Neill said, “The Department of Health is continuing to gather and review available data associated with the request.”
Seeking help
Browning hopes the state’s findings will benefit survivors and ensure that “every victim is counted.”
“I want it officially recognized by the commonwealth and declared a disaster so that people can get medical or burial assistance from the government in some measure,” she said.
She also aspires to have a memorial statue placed near the site “so that nobody forgets what happened there. I want it recognized like that.”
Including the 200-plus former employees whose obituaries listed their cause of death as cancer, Browning said she has a total of 306 deceased employees in her records.
“There are a bunch of unknowns, which, right now, we are trying to get to the bottom of,” she said.
Browning, who worked at the plant for 11 months from 2002 to 2003, believes the most prominent cancers have been adenocarcinoma — a glandular cancer that can affect various organs — multiple myeloma, lymphoma, leukemia and breast cancers.
She has nodules in her right lung, she said.
“A lot of the people that are still alive are reporting nodules in their lungs and in their thyroids,” she said.
For more than a year, she has been engaging with former employees and their families.
“I know each and every single one of their stories, and it’s heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s abysmal because every time I turn a corner, it’s another story.”
Browning acquired copies of patents, as well as facility inspection reports from environmental regulators, to determine what chemicals the plant used, she said. She also pointed to photos of various stages of the production line appearing to show workers in a “chemical room,” record plating and lacquer processing without personal protective equipment.
For example, in one Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection report Aug. 24, 1993, inspectors cited the plant for mismanagement of hazardous waste and containers of hazardous waste that were not managed to prevent leaks.
Browning additionally cited four April 26, 2001, violations through the DEP’s air quality program involving the plant’s ventilation system, including for failing to obtain a plan approval for the construction, modification and reactivation of sources and/or a cleaning device, and operating an air contaminant source or cleaning device without an operating permit.
In an April 2021 memo regarding the property, the DEP said it had taken 50 soil samples and six sub-slab soil and gas samples looking for volatile organic compounds, semi-volatile organic compounds and metals. It found cobalt and selenium above the nonresidential statewide health standards in three areas. Six groundwater monitoring wells were also installed on site. Two wells at the center of the site contained concentrations of aluminum, iron, lead and manganese above the nonresidential statewide health standards, though the groundwater impacts were localized and minor.
The soil was excavated, and new samples showed the results were below the health standards. Likewise, the groundwater impacts did not extend beyond property lines, but an environmental covenant was placed on the site to restrict the use of groundwater for potable and agricultural purposes, according to the DEP.
To assist her research, Browning is trying to raise money to hire a private investigator, which will cost $3,000 to $5,000. She is selling cancer survivor pins for $3 and cancer awareness bracelets for $5.
“I know it’s not in a scale of 9/11. It’s maybe 400 instead of 4,000, but those are hundreds of families that were devastated like mine was,” Browning said.
A history of production
In its heyday, the production plant in Olyphant was the largest employer in Lackawanna County. Its production lines changed with technological advancements throughout the decades, from records to high-definition and Blu-ray discs.
Artists whose music was produced in Olyphant included U2, Talking Heads, Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Van Halen, Neil Young, Yes, Peter Gabriel, the Pretenders, ZZ Top, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, the Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, The Cars, The Spinners, Foreigner, Rod Stewart, Stevie Winwood, Genesis and Prince.
The local Marquardt family formed Specialty Records in 1950 and opened a facility at 210 N. Valley Ave. in a former dress factory, pressing phonograph records for independent labels. The family had been in the record business since 1916, when they supplied phonograph records to Thomas Edison’s companies.
In October 1978, entertainment giant Warner Communications Inc. acquired Specialty and renamed it WEA Manufacturing Inc. the following year. WEA was an acronym for the trio of labels whose music it pressed and replicated: Warner, Elektra and Atlantic. The plant’s laboratory pioneered digital technology that led to compact discs. The following year, officials broke ground on a WEA Manufacturing facility in the Midvalley Industrial Park, constructing a 240,000-square-foot plant to manufacture 33 and 45 RPM records, cassettes and 8-track tapes.
Its footprint would later expand to 1 million square feet of warehousing and production space.
The plant produced its first CD in 1986 — “No Jacket Required” by Phil Collins, which took 36 tries to get the first master disc right because the company had never made CDs.
Although it was best known for producing music recordings, WEA moved into DVD production in 1996, with representatives from the company sitting on a panel that established the technical standards for DVDs.
While reported employment figures vary, the plant employed a peak of at least 3,200 workers by 1995, though that number would dwindle over the next 23 years.
In July 2003, Toronto-based Cinram International Inc. purchased WEA Manufacturing from AOL Time Warner for $1.05 billion. Cinram was established in Montreal in 1969 as a manufacturer of prerecorded 8-track cartridges and audiocassettes before evolving into videocassettes, CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs. At the time of the sale, WEA still employed more than 2,000 workers.
However, from 2004 to 2010, multiple rounds of layoffs hacked away the workforce, and in 2010, Cinram also lost a service agreement with Warner Home Video.
By April 2012, Cinram announced its manufacturing facility in Olyphant could be sold by the end of the quarter, though that did not materialize until November 2015, when French company Technicolor purchased Cinram Manufacturing.
Layoffs continued from 2016 through 2018 until Technicolor shuttered the plant in June 2018, laying off the final 160 workers as demand for prerecorded products decreased amid the rise of digital downloads and streaming.
The plant was finally torn down in 2020.
