**Document Content:**

---

**1:** conveyed grossly misleading and inadequate information to IBM regarding these dangers, knowing and intending that IBM would repeat, convey or in some fashion communicate these misleading statements to its employees, including Plaintiff and Plaintiffs' decedent who detrimentally relied upon those misrepresentations and omissions made to IBM and repeated, communicated and/or in some fashion authoritatively conveyed to them.

**113:** Defendant Shell Oil Company has knowingly provided toxic resins and solvents to IBM, knowing they would be used in the formulation and production of IBM disk drive coating and further knowing that these compounds would be mixed and formulated in so-called clean rooms which IBM maintained particle free but in which local exhaust ventilation was absent or wholly inadequate to capture escaping solvent vapors from these coatings.

**114:** Defendant Shell Oil Company has provided xylene and epoxy resins for IBM knowing IBM workers would be blending these compounds into IBM disk drive coating formulations under these conditions when Shell Oil Company's own regional industrial hygiene staff have acknowledged in written documents since the 1970s that local exhaust ventilation which draws contaminants through a worker's breathing zone is per se inadequate and must never be used where workers have any cause to lean over an operation such as an open tank or chemical mixing operation. Shell now explicitly, but much too belatedly, advises via the Internet what it could and should have advised from the outset of its decision in the 1960's to supply EPON resins and solvents to IBM: "None of these materials should be used, stored or transported until the handling precautions and recommendations as stated in the Material Safety Data Sheets for these and all other products being used are understood by all persons who will work with them." (Emphasis added.)

**115:** At all times relevant, Defendants IBM Corp., EM Science, EM Industries, Inc., Eastman Kodak, Ashland Oil, Inc., J.T. Baker, Inc., k/n/a. Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc., Fisher Scientific Company, Shipley Company, Inc., Union Carbide Corp., Hoechst Celanese Corp., E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, Aldrich Chemical Company, Sigma-Aldrich Corp., Sigma Aldrich Sales, Inc., Sigma-Aldrich Company, Sigma Aldrich, Inc., The Dexter Corporation, Electronic Materials, Inc., ITW, Inc., Devcon-Plexus Corp., Loctite Corp., and Conap, Inc., have maintained corporate departments, divisions or other for-profit sectors specifically dedicated to supplying and then

**Page 35**

**COMPLAINT FOR DAMAGES, PERSONAL INJURY AND WRONGFUL DEATH**

**MM 006986**