Asbestos Exposure in Iron and Steel Mills

If you worked at a steel mill, an iron foundry, or a coke plant — 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 whether the worker was a melter, a millwright, or a laborer, because the whole mill was built out of the material.

A steel mill put a dozen trades in one building, and their dust filled the same air. On any given shift a bricklayer was mixing dry refractory, an insulator was cutting block and pipe covering, and a pipefitter was grinding gaskets, often within sight of one another, and each trade's work threw off asbestos dust, the refractory mixing heaviest of all. None of it stayed with the man who made it: asbestos fibers are light enough to hang in the air for hours and drift across a building, so the melter, the crane operator, and the laborer who never touched the material breathed it too. That bystander exposure was real dust, not a trace: even about twenty feet from active insulation and gasket work, the air still put roughly a month of ordinary city background through the lungs in a quarter hour. The chart below shows fifteen minutes of each trade's work against a year of that background 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 company's refractory or insulation was in your mill, and you don't need old job records or time cards in hand. 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 worked the blast furnaces at Gary Works" or "my husband was a millwright at Sparrows Point," we have a starting point.

Why steel mills were full of asbestos

Steel mills put workers in daily contact with asbestos for a simple reason: everything in the mill either ran hot or stood next to something that did, and for most of the twentieth century asbestos was the material the country used to contain heat and live beside it. Here's the part most people don't know, though, including some of the companies' own lawyers: the fire brick itself generally didn't contain asbestos. The asbestos was in everything around the brick. The refractory mortars and cements the brick was laid and patched with (refractory means the heat-resistant material lining a furnace), the hot top boards and liners set into the ingot molds, the insulation packed behind the linings and wrapped on every steam line, the rope seals on the furnace doors, the packing in the valves, the brake blocks in the cranes overhead, and the gloves, aprons, and leggings the men wore against the heat were the asbestos, and the mill was built out of all of it.

The asbestos companies designed and sold entire product lines for this industry; by 1930 Johns-Manville was publishing a dedicated iron-and-steel catalog placing its insulations, cements, packings, textiles, and brake materials in every department of the mill, from the blast furnace plant to the power house, including asbestos clothing pictured on the men handling hot steel. A steelworker encountered asbestos regularly because the mill was equipped with it on purpose, area by area, for decades.

And the work that kept the mill running is what put the fiber in the air. Furnace and ladle linings were patched hot and torn out cold, over and over. Insulation was cut into and stripped off every time a line or shell needed repair. Hot top boards were torn out and rebuilt continuously. All of it was old, heat-degraded, friable (crumbly and dusty) material by the time it was disturbed, and tearing out degraded material releases far more fiber than installing it new. The men did that work bare-faced, cleaned up with brooms and compressed air, 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, area by area

A steel mill wasn't one workplace; it was a dozen, spread across hundreds of acres, and asbestos ran through all of them. Where in the mill you worked shapes which products you were around, and that's part of what we reconstruct. Here's the tour.

• The blast furnace plant. The furnaces, hot blast stoves, and miles of hot piping were insulated and sealed with asbestos-containing cements, coverings, and rope. Furnace crews and laborers worked around that material every shift and breathed the dust whenever it was patched or renewed.
• The melt shop. Open hearth, and later basic oxygen and electric furnaces, ran on the same pattern: brick linings laid and patched with asbestos-containing mortars and ready-mix, insulation behind and around the linings, and asbestos cloth and rope on doors and ports. Relines came in rhythm, quick hot patches between full tear-outs, and the masonry crews cleaned salvaged brick with wire brushes, chisels, and air hammers, working in the dust of the old mortar.
• Ladles and the pouring floor. The ladles that carried molten steel were relined on a fast cycle, and ladle work was some of the dustiest in the mill: crews broke the spent lining out of a confined steel shell, then rebuilt it, a job that came around several times a month. On the pouring side, hot tops (the asbestos-containing boards and liners set into the top of an ingot mold to keep the last steel molten while the ingot solidified) were torn out and rebuilt continuously in their own shop, and the residue was chipped and scraped off the ingots afterward. The dust from that work drifted well beyond the men doing it; you didn't have to work in the hot top building to breathe what came out of it. See how asbestos refractory products, hot tops, and mortars caused exposure.
• The soaking pits and rolling mills. The pits and reheat furnaces that brought ingots back to rolling temperature were lined, insulated, and sealed the same way, and the mills themselves ran on steam lines, hydraulic systems, and equipment wrapped in asbestos insulation and packed with asbestos gaskets and valve packing.
• The coke plant. Coke ovens and the by-product plant behind them ran hot and chemical at once, with asbestos in the oven-door seals, the insulation on the gas and tar lines, and the gaskets and packing throughout the recovery equipment.
• The power house and steam system. Every mill was its own power plant, with boilers, turbines, and steam lines carrying the same asbestos block, pipe covering, and insulating cement found in any utility. The breathing-zone figures for mixing insulating cement and for cutting and stripping block and pipe covering live on the product pages that document them. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.
• The maintenance shops and the cranes overhead. The millwrights, pipefitters, and electricians who kept the mill running handled all of it: the insulation, the gaskets and packing, and the asbestos brake blocks on the overhead cranes that moved every ladle and ingot in the building. The shops concentrated material from every corner of the mill in one place.

Through every one of these areas ran the same last product: the asbestos gloves, aprons, leggings, and hoods the men wore because they worked within feet of molten metal. The gear that protected them from the heat was itself woven from the fiber, worn against the body, shift after shift, for a career.

The mills, and the companies that ran them

For a steelworker's case, the mill itself matters twice. It tells us which asbestos products were in the buildings during which years, and it identifies the company that controlled the conditions the work was done in. These are a few of the steelmakers and flagship works where this exposure happened, decade after decade:

• U.S. Steel. Gary Works in Indiana, the Pittsburgh-area works including Homestead and Edgar Thomson, the Clairton coke works, South Works in Chicago, and Fairfield near Birmingham.
• Bethlehem Steel. The home plant at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Sparrows Point outside Baltimore, Burns Harbor in Indiana, and Lackawanna outside Buffalo.
• Republic Steel. Mills in Cleveland, Youngstown, Chicago, and Buffalo, later folded into LTV Steel.
• Jones & Laughlin. The Pittsburgh South Side works and Aliquippa, also later part of LTV.
• Armco Steel. Middletown and Ashland in the Ohio Valley, and the Houston works, where the masonry and hot top work described on this page was documented in sworn testimony.
• Inland Steel. The Indiana Harbor works at East Chicago.
• Youngstown Sheet & Tube. The Campbell and Brier Hill works in the Mahoning Valley.
• Kaiser Steel. The Fontana works in California.

If your mill isn't on this list, that means nothing about your claim. Integrated mills, specialty and alloy plants, iron and steel foundries, and coke plants across the country ran on the same products, and our exposure database covers worksites far beyond the famous names. The mill's name, the department, and the years are the starting point, and we take it from there.

Two things about these companies are worth knowing up front. First, most of them no longer exist in the form your family knew: some survive under successor companies, some were absorbed in mergers, and some are gone entirely. Part of what we do is trace who, if anyone, can still be reached for a given mill in a given era. Second, who can be sued over conditions at a mill depends partly on who employed you. A steelworker on the mill's own payroll generally can't sue his employer over workplace conditions, because workers' compensation law usually stands in the way; his case runs against the companies that made the asbestos products, most of which now pay through bankruptcy trusts. The premises case against the steelmaker itself is often strongest for the contractors' men, the insulators, bricklayers, and construction crews sent into the mill by an outside employer. We sort out which side of that line a work history falls on, and it changes the channels, not whether there's a claim.

What the trade press said about the mills

The asbestos industry knew the steel mills were one of its biggest markets, and said so in print. In 1921 its trade journal, Asbestos, called the steel industry "the father of them all" and expected demand for insulation and packings to return as soon as "the wheels of the steel plants begin to hum again" (Asbestos, Sept. 1921). Johns-Manville ran its own Steel Industry Department (Asbestos, Oct. 1942). In 1928 it hired a packing expert "in the interest of the steel mills in the Pittsburgh District" (J-M Circle, July 1928). As late as 1965, its planners called steel mills "one of J-M's big customers for fire brick" (J-M News Pictorial, Jan.–Feb. 1965).

Johns-Manville's employee magazine reported orders from named mills, furnace by furnace:

The asbestos was in more than the furnaces. The trade press listed asbestos cloth shielding the motors that drove the rolls (Asbestos, Aug. 1922), asbestos-insulated cable on cranes (Asbestos, July 1934), industrial brake lining of asbestos cloth (Asbestos, Nov. 1934), and special asbestos roofings (Asbestos, Aug. 1937). It also named asbestos millboard (Asbestos, June 1959) and asbestos-cloth laminates for rolling-mill bearings (Asbestos, Oct. 1969). In one mill, molten metal spilled over an asbestos-insulated power cable on a hot metal crane (Asbestos, Apr. 1942).

The men wore it, too. In 1946 Asbestos wrote that asbestos "coats, pants, helmets, gloves, mittens, aprons, leggings were in wide use in the steel mills" during the war (Asbestos, Dec. 1946). At Bethlehem Steel, molten metal handlers had worn asbestos-cotton garments before new asbestos-cloth suits were field-tested at the blast furnace and open hearth (Asbestos, July 1964). A 1976 Asbestos Corporation ad said steel mill clothing "is made of asbestos cloth," and that without it, "our millworkers … would be virtually naked" (Asbestos, Aug. 1976).

The work went back a long way. An old pipe coverer remembered covering the bustle pipe of a blast furnace in South St. Louis around 1870. It was "so hot—a low cherry red—that the men would not work at it," so he did it himself (Asbestos, July 1922).

If your mill isn't listed here, that doesn't mean it was free of asbestos. These are only the mills the trade press happened to write about.

The trades that worked the mills

A mill employed thousands of men across dozens of crafts, and several of those trades have their own pages, because their exposure followed them across industries. If your loved one's work fits one of these better than it fits "steelworker," start there:

• Insulators and insulation workers
• Pipefitters and plumbers
• Boilermakers
• All asbestos occupations

For everyone else, the melters, the furnace and ladle crews, the masonry-department laborers, the hot top builders, the millwrights, the crane operators, and the general laborers, this page is your page, and the work described above is the exposure story we build the claim on.

Sources of compensation for steelworkers and their families

A steelworker'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 refractory mortars, hot tops, insulation, gaskets, and cloth used in the mills 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 steel career often supports filings against several trusts at once. For a worker on the mill's own payroll, this is usually the backbone of the case. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Some makers of the products used in the mills are still in business and can be sued directly for making and selling products they knew were dangerous. How product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The steelmakers that controlled the mills can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed, and this channel is often strongest for the contractors' men, the insulators, bricklayers, and construction crews an outside employer sent into the mill. 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. Civilian work at a government-owned mill or facility can support FECA (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act) benefits, military service before or after the mill 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 steelworker'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 mills, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that the arguments describe a cleaner, smaller version of the mill than the one your loved one actually worked in, 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.