Asbestos Exposure in Shipyards and Maritime Work

If you worked in a shipyard or aboard ship — 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 an insulator, a pipefitter, a machinist, or a sailor, because the ship itself was packed with the material from the keel up.

A ship was the most enclosed workplace in heavy industry, and that put every trade's dust into the same air. In one small steel compartment an insulator might be cutting and ripping out pipe covering while a pipefitter ground gaskets off the flanges a few feet away, with a machinist, a welder, and a boiler tender all working the same space, and each trade's work threw off asbestos dust into a box that couldn't clear it. None of it stayed with the man who made it: asbestos fibers are light enough to hang in the air for hours and drift through a compartment, so a man breathed not just his own dust but everyone's. That bystander exposure was significant: even twenty feet from active insulation and gasket work the air still put about a month's worth of ordinary city background through the lungs in a quarter hour. Making matters worse, a ship's compartment was far tighter than twenty feet. The dustiest work of all was overhaul, tearing the old, degraded lagging back out for weeks at a time, which the Navy's own hygienists singled out as where the heaviest exposures happened. The chart below shows fifteen minutes of insulation and gasket 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 company's insulation or gaskets were aboard, and you don't need old service records or yard badges 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 lagged pipe at the Navy yard" or "my husband was a machinist mate in the engine room," we have a starting point.

Why ships were built out of asbestos

Shipbuilding put workers in daily contact with asbestos for a structural reason and made it worse with a spatial one. The structural reason is the same as every other heavy industry: a ship ran on steam and heat, its engine and boiler rooms passed 1,000 degrees, so workers needed to be protected. Fire at sea meant death with nowhere to go, so the Navy and the shipping lines insulated and fireproofed everything with the one material that could take the heat - asbestos. Ships put one more demand on top of the heat. The material had to survive a salt environment, and amosite (brown asbestos, an amphibole, a more hazardous fiber type) resisted seawater and corrosion better than the alternatives, which is much of why so much marine insulation and board ran on amosite rather than chrysotile alone.

In September 1934 the passenger liner SS Morro Castle caught fire off the New Jersey coast and burned with a heavy loss of life, a disaster that pushed maritime fire-safety rules toward exactly the kind of asbestos fireproofing, including rigid asbestos board like Marinite, that would fill ships for decades after. Read how the Morro Castle fire drove Marinite into shipbuilding.

The spatial reason is what set ships apart. A ship is the most enclosed workplace in heavy industry. It's basically a steel box divided into small steel compartments, so when insulation was cut, fitted, or torn out in one of those spaces, the fiber had nowhere to go but into the air the crew breathed and back into their lungs.

The people who studied this most closely were the Navy's own doctors and hygienists. As early as the 1940s, Navy medicine had flagged that pipe coverers and insulators in the yards were showing lung scarring, and by the late 1960s the Navy's industrial hygiene program was measuring the dust task by task and screening the workforce with chest X-rays. What they found was that the pipe coverers and insulators who handled the material had by far the highest rate of lung abnormalities, the boilermakers with intermittent exposure had less, and the office workers with none had fewer still. The Navy's shipyard findings are documented on our asbestosis page.

Their other central finding was critical: installation studies understated the hazard, because the worst exposures came during overhaul. Ripping degraded, heat-baked insulation off the lines and boilers during a repair put far more fiber in the air than laying new lagging ever did. The men did that work for weeks, often cleaneingup with brooms and air hoses that made the dust worse. And they went home in dusty dungarees to their families, while the companies that made the products knew what the dust was capable of doing.

Where the asbestos was, from the engine room to the yard

A shipyard worker's exposure depended on where he worked the ship and where he worked the yard, and both matter to reconstructing the case. Here's the tour.

• The engine and boiler rooms. The heart of the exposure. Boilers, turbines, and the steam lines running off them were lagged in asbestos pipe covering and block, the joints were sealed with asbestos gaskets, and the valves and pumps were packed with asbestos. Much of the pipe covering was amosite (brown asbestos, an amphibole, a more hazardous fiber type), sold under names like Unibestos, and the confined heat of the space meant the lagging was worked and reworked constantly.
• The machinery and pipe spaces. Beyond the main spaces, miles of piping ran throughout the ship, every foot of it insulated and every joint gasketed, cut and fitted by pipefitters and coverers working shoulder to shoulder in passages and voids.
• Below decks and the living spaces. Fireproofing didn't stop at the machinery. Bulkheads, overheads, and berthing compartments were insulated and faced with asbestos board, much of it Marinite, a rigid structural board that was often made with amosite, the same more hazardous amphibole fiber used in the pipe lagging. Between the board and the troweled or sprayed materials over the framing, even the crew's quarters were built of it.
• The ways and the drydocks. New construction on the building ways and repair work in drydock put dozens of trades onto and into the same hull at once, so a man breathed not only his own dust but the dust of every other trade working the compartment.
• The shops. The pipe shop, the insulation shop, and the machine shops cut, sawed, and fabricated asbestos materials to fit. Mixing asbestos cement and cutting block at the bench was among the dustiest work in the yard, and sawing rigid asbestos board like Marinite to fit a bulkhead or panel threw the same amosite-bearing dust in an enclosed shop.
• Overhaul and repair. The dustiest phase, and the one the Navy's hygienists singled out. Tearing old, friable (crumbly and dusty) insulation out of a ship during a repair availability filled closed compartments with fiber for the duration of the job, and repair and overhaul work went on in the yards continuously, ship after ship.
• Life at sea. The exposure didn't end at the pier. Aboard ship, engine room crews, boiler tenders, machinist mates, and the sailors berthed near the machinery lived in the insulated spaces around the clock, and crews did their own underway repairs on lagging and gaskets. Merchant mariners on commercial vessels faced the same shipboard asbestos as Navy crews.

Two things multiplied the exposures. The compartments were small and poorly ventilated, so the fiber concentrated instead of dispersing, and the work repeated for a career: a yard insulator or a career machinist mate did these tasks on ship after ship, availability after availability, for thirty or forty years.

The yards, and how the work gets paid

For a shipyard worker's case, the yard matters twice. It tells us which asbestos products were aboard the ships and in the shops during which years, and it sorts out how the claim gets paid, because shipyards fall into two groups that lead to different benefit channels.

The Navy yards. The government-run yards built, repaired, and overhauled the fleet, and their civilian workforce did the insulation, pipe, and machinery work at the heart of the exposure. A few of the major ones:

• Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington, where the yard's own industrial hygiene program documented the shipyard asbestos exposures this page describes.
• Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, and Newport News nearby on the private side, together the center of East Coast naval work.
• Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and Boston (Charlestown) Navy Yard, longtime submarine and surface-ship yards.
• Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York and Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on the Delaware.
• Mare Island, Hunters Point, and Long Beach on the California coast, the Pacific Fleet's building and repair yards.
• Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii, the fleet's forward repair base.

The private and commercial yards. The private yards built and repaired both Navy and merchant ships, often under the same roof. Among them: the Kaiser yards at Richmond, California, and elsewhere, which turned out Liberty ships by the hundred; Bethlehem Steel's shipbuilding yards at Sparrows Point, Quincy, and other locations; Ingalls in Pascagoula, Mississippi; Avondale in Louisiana; Todd Shipyards on both coasts; and the Great Lakes builders in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

If your yard isn't named here, that means nothing about your claim. Naval and private yards, repair facilities, and dry docks all ran on the same asbestos products, and our exposure database reaches far beyond the famous yards. The yard, the shop or trade, and the years are the starting point.

Which group you worked in shapes the benefits, and this is where a shipyard case is different from most:

• Civilian workers at a Navy yard were federal employees, which can open FECA (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act, the federal workers' compensation system) benefits. As with any employer, a worker generally can't sue his own employer over workplace conditions, and for a federal yard that employer was the government. The case runs against the companies that made the asbestos products.
• Workers at private yards may be covered by the LHWCA (the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, the federal compensation system for maritime workers), and depending on how they were employed, the yard itself may be reachable in the case.
• Navy service aboard ship can support VA disability benefits, which run in parallel with everything else. Sailors and veterans should see our military and veterans page.

In all of these, the claims against the product makers and their trusts run the same way, alongside whichever benefit channel fits.

The shipyards didn't make the asbestos; they installed it, by the ton, from the companies that did. The insulation makers supplied the pipe covering and block, the gasket and packing makers built lines for marine service, and the manufacturers behind each product, and which of their trusts pay today, are laid out on the product pages. See the makers behind asbestos pipe and block insulation, and the makers behind asbestos gaskets and packing.

Ships and shipyards named in the trade press

The asbestos industry's own trade journal, Asbestos, and Johns-Manville's employee magazines wrote about ship insulation for sixty years. They named the ships, the yards, the products and the insulation contractors. These notices were written to sell insulation. Today they help families confirm what went into the ships where someone worked.

In 1921 the magazine wrote that "a large percentage of 85% Magnesia Pipe and Boiler Covering is used in naval construction," along with asbestos packings, millboard and paper (Asbestos, Dec. 1921). By 1937 a writer in the same journal called asbestos "practically mandatory in ship construction" (Asbestos, Sept. 1937).

The wartime yards

The scale of World War II shipbuilding shows up in the insulation trade. Asbestos reprinted a 1943 report that the country had gone "from 21 shipyards and 100 ways to 70 yards and more than 300 ways" in two years (Asbestos, Oct. 1943). Reid Hayden said it had insulated over 500 ships in eight southern states since Pearl Harbor (Asbestos, Sept. 1943). Together with H. W. Porter & Co., it had insulated "over 2,000 ships for the Navy and U. S. Maritime Commission" (Asbestos, May 1946). The government rationed asbestos textiles in 1943 because the Navy and Maritime Commission ship program needed more "insulation cloth, gloves and safety clothing" (Asbestos, Mar. 1943).

How the work was done

Pipe covering was cut, fitted and wrapped by hand. Asbestos cloth went "as lagging over thermal insulation" (Asbestos, July 1971). Pipe hangers were wrapped in "cut-to-measure asbestos cloth" (Asbestos, Sept. 1937). In 1944, Bay Area women trained as asbestos pipe coverers put in 200 classroom hours. They were taught sewing because "there is considerable sewing connected with asbestos work" (Asbestos, Aug. 1944).

Asbestos was also sprayed aboard ships. In April 1960, while the liner Empress of Canada was on the stocks at the Vickers-Armstrong yard at Newcastle-on-Tyne in England, J. W. Roberts, the Turner & Newall company behind the Limpet spray machine, measured the air as its blue and white asbestos grades were sprayed on board. Its report gives counts from roughly 6,000 to 14,000 dust particles per cubic centimeter, and found that the machine's water damping made no statistically significant difference (J. W. Roberts report, 1960, pp. 1–2).

Play the film from 8:28: Safer Ships for Our Merchant Marine from 8:28

What came later

In 1970 the insulation industry's hygiene program took air samples from ship compartments in Gulf Coast yards (Asbestos, July 1970). In 1975 the union at Electric Boat in Groton said 22 pipecoverers who worked with asbestos had died of respiratory failure in 17 years (Asbestos, July 1975). In 1976, in an item supplied by the asbestos industry's trade association, two Navy medical officers said predicted excess disease among wartime yard workers had "not materialized" (Asbestos, Sept. 1976). In 1980 the same magazine reported abnormal chest X-rays in up to 85% of 300 General Dynamics workers examined at Quincy. It also reported lung damage in more than 86% of long-time workers studied at Bethlehem Steel's Key Highway yard in Baltimore (Asbestos, Mar. 1980).

If your loved one's ship or yard isn't listed here, that doesn't mean it was free of asbestos. These are only the ones the trade press happened to name.

The trades that worked the ships and yards

A shipyard employed dozens of trades, and several of them 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 "shipyard worker," start there:

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

For everyone else, the shipfitters, the pipe coverers and laggers, the machinist mates and boiler tenders, the welders and chippers, the riggers, and the yard laborers, this page is your page, and the work described above is the exposure story we build the claim on.

Sources of compensation for shipyard and maritime workers

A shipyard 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 insulation, gaskets, and packing installed in the ships 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 shipyard career often supports filings against several trusts at once. For a worker whose employer can't be sued, this is usually the backbone of the case. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Many asbestos product makers, especially in the gasket and packing world, 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 reachable premises and yards. Depending on how the work was done and who controlled it, a private yard or a shipowner may be answerable for the conditions aboard, separate from the companies that made the products. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and veterans' benefits, which carry real weight in these cases. Civilian work at a Navy yard can support FECA (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act) benefits; work at a private yard can support LHWCA (the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act) benefits; Navy service aboard ship can support VA disability benefits; and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. These are paid in addition to the trust and lawsuit recovery, and sorting out which ones fit a given career is a core part of a shipyard case. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

When a shipyard 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 yards, 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.