Outraged congressional workers who say they’ve been exposed to asbestos during the troubled Congressional Visitors Center project were promised a hearing of their own Wednesday.
Wrapping up a hearing that examined cost overruns into the center project, U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., promised he would deal with the asbestos question “at another forum.”
But the promise did little to assuage the anger of some of the workers who attended Wednesday’s hearing.
“We don’t have any faith that this is going to go further,” electrical foreman Scott Smith told The Examiner outside the hearing. “They’ve put the genie back in the bottle.”
Smith and two co-workers said they went to a specialist from Detroit late last month, who told them they were suffering from chronic respiratory ailments stemming from exposure to asbestos.
Christian Raley, an electrician and one of the three who went to the Detroit specialist, says he will probably have to quit his job because he doesn’t feel safe working in the tunnels.
“They said, ‘To hell with you,’ and that’s the end of that,” Raley said. “And there’s nothing the other guys can do, either.”
