Asbestos Exposure in the Construction Industry

If you worked construction — or if someone in your family did — and a mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or other asbestos diagnosis has now come in, this page is the place to start. The same dust reached the spouses and children who washed the work clothes, and it didn't matter which trade the worker ran with, because for most of the twentieth century the buildings themselves were made of the material.

On a construction site, the asbestos came from every trade's work at once. It was in the products a worker cut, mixed, sanded, and nailed with his own hands, and it was in the air everyone shared, because a jobsite put a dozen trades in the same rooms: the carpenter cutting board, the finisher sanding the walls, the insulator wrapping the pipes, and the laborer sweeping it all up breathed each other's dust from the felts under the slab to the shingles on the roof. None of it stayed with the man who made it. Industrial hygiene testing measured the air across the room from a drywall sander at enough to equal about two and a half years of ordinary background in fifteen minutes, and the room during cleanup at about seven years, breathed by the plumber and electrician who never sanded a thing. The chart below shows fifteen minutes of three of those trades' own work against a year of ordinary city air.

Even ordinary city air carries a faint trace of asbestos, from natural mineral erosion and a century of industrial use, and that trace is the yardstick the chart measures against.

What these numbers mean. Asbestos in air is measured in fibers per cubic centimeter (f/cc), a unit that hides how dangerous a task was. Across this site we translate each measurement into fibers breathed, feet of fiber end to end, and years of ordinary city air, using conservative, government-sourced assumptions. See how we measure asbestos in air for the method and its limits.

You don't need to remember which brands were on your jobs, and you don't need old pay stubs or a list of every contractor you ever worked for. The bankruptcy trusts that pay many of these claims are built to compensate exactly this kind of work: for mesothelioma, even brief asbestos exposure on a worksite that used it is typically enough to qualify, so you don't have to prove a heavy dose. If you can say "I hung and finished rock through the seventies" or "my husband framed houses and did remodels his whole life," we have a starting point.

Why the buildings themselves were made of asbestos

Construction put workers in daily contact with asbestos for a different reason than the mills and refineries did. In heavy industry, the asbestos mostly wrapped the equipment. On a construction site, it was the building materials themselves: the compound on every drywall seam, the cement board and siding on the walls, the tile on the floor and the mastic under it, the felt and cement on the roof, the millboard behind the furnace, and the fireproofing on the steel. Asbestos was cheap, it was strong, and it didn't burn, so the manufacturers put it in nearly everything a building was made of. The dust never announced itself; it looked like ordinary construction dust, and cutting, sanding, and sweeping it was just the job.

None of this was incidental, and the industry said so itself. In 1963, an asbestos mining executive published a survey of the industry's construction markets that placed its fiber in every part of a building: the cement siding and shingles, the cement pipe, the floor tile, the insulation, the textiles, the roofing felts, the caulks and sealants, and asbestos sprayed directly onto walls and ceilings, with construction described as the industry's engine of growth. A construction worker encountered asbestos on every job because the products were designed and sold that way, from the foundation to the finish work.

And the ordinary motions of the work are what put the fiber in the air. Board was sawed, compound was mixed from bags and sanded smooth, tile was cut and old floors ground out, felt was cut and torn off, and at the end of the day someone swept it all up and breathed it one more time. Much of it happened in closed-up rooms with the windows in and the heat on, where the dust hung and was rebreathed instead of clearing. The men did that work bare-faced, with no warnings on the bags and boxes, and went home in dusty clothes to their families, while the companies that made the products knew what the dust was doing.

Where the asbestos was, phase by phase

A building went up in phases, and asbestos ran through every one of them. Which phases you worked shapes which products you were around, and that's part of what we reconstruct. Here's the job, start to finish.

• The site work and the slab. Asbestos cement pipe went into the water, sewer, and utility runs, cut and beveled on site, and asbestos-saturated felts and papers went down as moisture barriers before the concrete was poured. See how asbestos cement pipe and board caused exposure.
• The frame and the fireproofing. On commercial and high-rise work, asbestos fireproofing was sprayed onto the structural steel, coating whole floors in wet fiber that dried, flaked, and dusted every trade that came after. See how asbestos spray fireproofing and insulation caused exposure.
• The mechanical rooms and risers. The boilers, heating pipes, and ducts got asbestos insulation, block, and troweled insulating cement, installed by the insulators and cut into by every trade that worked near the lines afterward. See how asbestos insulating cement caused exposure.
• The walls and ceilings. Drywall crews hung the board, then mixed the joint compound and texture from bags of dry powder, a task measured as high as 54 f/cc, and sanded the cured seams smooth at 15 to 21 f/cc, filling closed-up rooms with fine dust that settled on every surface and got swept back into the air. Plaster systems ran the same way in the decades before drywall took over. See how asbestos joint compound caused exposure.
• The floors. Vinyl-asbestos tile was scored, snapped, and cut to fit over troweled asbestos mastic, and remodel work meant grinding and sanding the old floor and its hardened adhesive out first. See how asbestos floor tile caused exposure, and how asbestos mastic and adhesives caused exposure.
• The exterior and the roof. Asbestos cement siding and shingles were sawed, scored, and drilled to fit, the task behind the 83 to 124 f/cc measurements, and built-up roofs were layered from asbestos felt set in hot asphalt, sealed with asbestos roofing cement troweled around every edge and vent. See how asbestos roofing felt caused exposure.
• Renovation, remodel, and demolition. This is the phase that never ends. Every cut into an older building, every gut remodel, every tear-off and tear-out disturbed the asbestos an earlier crew had installed, and old, dried-out, friable (crumbly and dusty) material releases more fiber coming out than it did going in. Remodelers and demolition crews were exposed decades after the products stopped being sold, and careful handling of these materials still matters in older buildings today.

Two things multiplied all of it. A jobsite put every trade in the same air, so the carpenter breathed the finisher's sanding dust and the finisher breathed the insulator's, whoever held the tool. And the work repeated, job after job, for an entire career: a tract-housing crew ran the same tasks house after house down the block, and a commercial hand did them floor after floor up the tower.

Who can be held responsible for a construction site

A construction site wasn't one company; it was a crowd of them. An owner or developer hired a general contractor, the general hired the subs, and a dozen separate employers put their crews into the same rooms and the same air. For a construction worker's case, that structure matters, because the law bars a claim against exactly one of those companies: your own employer. A worker generally can't sue the company that paid him over workplace conditions, because workers' compensation law typically stands in the way. Everyone else on and behind that jobsite is a different story.

So the case is built from the rest of the crowd:

• The product makers, first. Construction is the industry where workers handled the asbestos with their own hands, bag by bag and board by board, so the companies that made the joint compound, cement board, flooring, mastic, roofing felt, insulation, and fireproofing are the core of the case. Most of the biggest names now pay through bankruptcy trusts, and the makers behind each product, trust by trust, are laid out on our asbestos product pages.
• The general contractor who ran the site. The company that controlled the schedule, the trades, and the conditions can be answerable for the dust it allowed, including the dust one sub's crew put into another crew's air.
• The owners of the buildings and plants. When construction and renovation work happened inside an operating plant, refinery, mill, or commercial building, the owner that controlled the premises can be a defendant too, the same way it is for the other industries on this site.
• The other subcontractors. The company whose insulators, sprayers, or finishers filled the air your loved one breathed can be reachable even though his own employer isn't. On a multi-employer site, one man's employer is another man's defendant.

That's why a construction case is rarely small on defendants. A forty-year construction career, run through our exposure database, typically touches products from a dozen or more manufacturers and jobsites controlled by many different companies, which means several trusts and several potential lawsuit defendants, and the workers' comp bar removes only one name from the list.

Where you did that work matters less than it does in other industries, because the materials were national: the same compound, board, tile, felt, and insulation went into office towers and tract houses, schools and hospitals, factories and military bases, from the postwar housing booms through the high-rise decades. What matters is the phases you worked, the trades around you, and the years, and that's the reconstruction we do.

What the asbestos industry's own magazine said about construction

For sixty years the trade journal Asbestos wrote for the companies that mined, made and sold asbestos, and building was one of their biggest customers. Its pages show where the products went, which codes called for them, and when the dust on jobsites became a public issue.

Building was a main market

As early as 1920, the magazine said "great quantities" of asbestos paper and millboard went into "the new buildings going up on every hand." It added that cities and towns were requiring fireproofing behind ranges, above heaters and in switch boxes (Asbestos, July 1920). A federal report the magazine reprinted in 1944 said building activity had "a decided influence on asbestos sales," because asbestos insulation, fireproofing, shingles, siding and wallboard "are used extensively" (Asbestos, Apr. 1944). In 1965 the head of a fireproofing maker wrote: "Without knowing it most of us have asbestos overhead and underfoot" (Asbestos, Jan. 1965).

Codes that called for asbestos

Building codes sometimes wrote asbestos in by name. Chicago's ordinances, as printed in 1920, said magnesia blocks for lining chimneys and stacks must contain "50 per cent asbestos fibre" (Asbestos, Dec. 1920). A 1924 survey of codes from thirteen cities found many required hot air pipes in wooden partitions to be "securely covered with asbestos" (Asbestos, Apr. 1924). Ohio's code called for theatre curtains of "pure asbestos fibre" (Asbestos, Apr. 1923).

Named buildings

For the 1939 World's Fair alone, the magazine counted over 60,000 feet of asbestos-cement pipe and at least 3,000,000 square feet of asbestos roofing felt (Asbestos, May 1939). It said at least 38 Fair buildings held "large quantities of asbestos products" (Asbestos, May 1939).

Sprayed fireproofing on steel

By the 1960s asbestos was sprayed straight onto steel. Baldwin-Ehret-Hill's Pyrospray, "a fireproofing, spray-on asbestos and mineral fiber material," went on steel beams and columns. It came "directly from the spray gun nozzle" while other trades kept working floor by floor (Asbestos, Nov. 1963).

The companies behind the spraying measured and wrote about the dust. In August 1960 J. W. Roberts, the Turner & Newall company that licensed the Limpet spray machine, sampled the air while Limpet was sprayed in a new research laboratory building for Pilkington Brothers in England, and counted 140 to 520 dust particles per cubic centimeter around the sprayer (J. W. Roberts report, 1960, p. 1). In the United States, Limpet's applicator, Armstrong Contracting and Supply, told its spray crews to wear a dust respirator "at all times during the application process" and to clean "all excess damp fibers" from surrounding surfaces at the end of each day (Armstrong operating instructions, pp. 2, 7).

In 1969 the sprayers' trade group, the New York plasterers and Mount Sinai agreed on rules for New York City jobs (Asbestos, Oct. 1969). They required "complete containment" of the spray on construction sites (Asbestos, Oct. 1969). In 1970 the city issued interim orders on spraying any insulation containing asbestos (Asbestos, July 1970). The makers said the rules reduced the risk to the men spraying "and to other workers at construction jobs" (Asbestos, Aug. 1970). By December 1972, spraying was "pretty much at a standstill," having been "banned in several major cities" (Asbestos, Dec. 1972). A 1979 report said sprayed asbestos had been used "until 1973 in many buildings" (Asbestos, Feb. 1979).

Dust on the jobsite

The magazine also recorded the human cost. In 1975, state doctors were to examine some 80 Buffalo plasterers who had done "fireproofing work utilizing sprayed asbestos" (Asbestos, July 1975). In 1976 a wrecking company was convicted over its demolition of a New Orleans hospital; its workers testified "they were never warned" (Asbestos, May 1976).

If a building you worked on isn't listed here, that doesn't mean it was free of asbestos. These are only the jobs the trade press happened to write about.

The trades that worked the sites

Construction is a collection of crafts, and many of them have their own pages, because each trade's products and tasks tell their own story. If your loved one's work fits one of these, start there:

• Carpenters
• Drywall finishers
• Flooring installers
• Roofers
• Insulators and insulation workers
• Pipefitters and plumbers
• All asbestos occupations

And if the work didn't fit one craft, that's construction too. The laborers, helpers, and cleanup crews who moved between the trades, carried the materials, and swept the floors at the end of the day worked in every phase's dust, and their claims are built the same way: from the phases, the products, and the years.

Sources of compensation for construction workers

A construction worker's recovery usually comes from more than one place, and the different channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The companies that made the joint compound, cement board, flooring, roofing, and insulation and later went bankrupt set aside money in trusts to pay the people they harmed. These are paper claims that don't require a lawsuit or a courtroom, and a construction career often supports filings against several trusts at once. Because construction workers handled so many different products, this channel is usually the backbone of the case. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Some makers of construction products are still in business and can be sued directly for making and selling products they knew were dangerous. How product liability lawsuits work.
• Claims against the companies that ran the jobsites. The general contractors that controlled the sites, the owners of the buildings and plants where the work was done, and the other subcontractors whose crews filled the air can all be answerable, and the workers' comp bar removes only your own employer from that list. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid in addition to the trust and lawsuit recovery. Construction at military bases or federal facilities can support FECA (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act) benefits for federal employees, military service before or after the construction years can support VA disability benefits, and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

When a construction worker's case goes to court, the companies raise the same handful of defenses they raise in most asbestos cases, plus a few tuned to the jobsite, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that the arguments describe a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers them. The detail is below for anyone who wants it.

All of this applies only to the lawsuit side of a case. The trust claims are a paper process: no opposing lawyer raises defenses, no one is deposed, and no one goes to court.