Asbestos Exposure in Stonemasons and Masons

If you worked as a stonemason, brick mason or block layer, or if someone in your family did, and a diagnosis of mesothelioma or another asbestos disease has come in, you may be wondering how a mason could have been exposed. It is a fair question. Brick, block and ordinary mortar were not usually made with asbestos.

But masons often worked with or beside materials that were asbestos: furnace and boiler linings, fireplace and stove work, masonry fill poured into block walls, old chimneys, and the insulation and fireproofing other trades put up on the same job. Studies in several countries have found more mesothelioma among bricklayers than expected.

We will also be honest with you. For most stone and brick workers, the bigger dust hazard on the job was silica, not asbestos. This page explains both, so you can see where your own work history fits.

Ordinary masonry was usually not asbestos

Start with what is true about the basic materials. In a 1994 letter answering a question about demolition inspections, the EPA wrote that cinder blocks, mortar, brick and cement foundations "do not typically contain asbestos" and would not normally be sampled, unless something about them raised suspicion.

That matters for your case. A mason's asbestos exposure is usually not about the brick and mortar of everyday work. It comes from the specific jobs, products and job sites where asbestos was present. When we review a mason's history, those are the details we look for.

Where masons did meet asbestos

Furnaces, boilers, kilns and ovens. Masons who built or relined anything that ran hot worked with refractory brick, castable and high-heat mortar, and with the asbestos block and cement packed behind them. A NIOSH list of trade-name products from its 1972–74 national survey, forwarded in a 1977 Celanese memo, gives Johns-Manville's #352 refractory cement and mortar as 99% asbestos. Tearing out an old lining could raise heavy dust. This is the best-documented asbestos exposure for masons. See refractory bricklayers, refractory products and insulating cement.

Fireplaces, wood stoves and hearths. EPA guidance on older homes lists paper, millboard and cement sheets used to protect walls and floors around wood-burning stoves, and artificial ashes and embers used in gas fireplaces, among places asbestos may be found. Masons who built hearths and surrounds, set stoves, or tore out old ones could cut or break these materials. See our pages on asbestos paper and millboard and testing your home.

Old chimneys and flues. Some chimney and flue products contained asbestos. In sworn answers to interrogatories, Flintkote said its Van Packer factory-built chimneys, made from 1958 to 1971, contained about 20% asbestos in the residential models, and that the commercial models that used asbestos had it only in the jackets, at about 22% (Flintkote's responses). A mason repairing, relining or tearing out an old chimney may have broken into products like these. See asbestos-cement pipe and products.

Masonry fill insulation. Loose vermiculite was poured into the hollow cores of block walls and into cavity walls as insulation. Our library holds a Zonolite Masonry Fill sample block, a small concrete block with both cores filled, with a table of how many bags to use for block and cavity walls. The EPA says a mine near Libby, Montana, was the source of over 70 percent of the vermiculite sold in the United States from 1919 to 1990, that it was often sold as Zonolite, and that it was contaminated with asbestos. A federal health report on a former Zonolite plant in Glendale, California, says it made loose fill insulation "for attics and masonry walls." Not every bag of masonry fill came from Libby, and our sample has not been tested. But masons who poured it, and anyone who later broke into those walls, may have been exposed. See Libby vermiculite, our page on contaminated products and tremolite.

Other trades on the same job. On commercial and industrial jobs, masons worked alongside insulators, pipefitters, fireproofers and drywall crews. Their dust did not stay in their corner. Researchers behind the large Italian study described below noted that bricklayers may be "in close contact with workers performing tasks entailing asbestos exposure." See bystander and proximity workers, carpenters and construction workers and drywall finishers and plasterers.

Demolition and renovation. Taking down or altering old buildings meant breaking through whatever was there, including asbestos pipe covering, boiler insulation and asbestos-cement products. See construction.

Stone that contains asbestos

Asbestos is a natural mineral, and some rock contains it. Virginia's state geologists, for example, say that asbestos minerals there occur mostly in serpentine and soapstone, and they list actinolite in soapstone quarries near Schuyler. See naturally occurring asbestos and serpentinite.

The clearest example of quarried rock causing disease is in Sicily. In the town of Biancavilla, a fibrous mineral called fluoro-edenite was found in volcanic material from a local quarry that was used in mortar, plaster, concrete and roads. Residents breathed it, and it was found to cause a cluster of mesothelioma. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies fluoro-edenite as a cause of cancer in humans.

Most masons in the United States never cut asbestos-bearing stone. If your work involved soapstone, serpentine or stone from an area known for naturally occurring asbestos, tell us. It is a less common source, and it takes careful work to document.

Silica: the larger hazard for stone and brick workers

We would not be giving you the full picture without this. OSHA says workers are exposed to crystalline silica when "cutting, sawing, grinding, drilling, and crushing stone, rock, concrete, brick, block, and mortar." Silica causes silicosis, lung cancer, COPD and kidney disease. About 2.3 million people in the U.S. are exposed to silica at work.

A large international study of lung cancer among bricklayers found a higher risk that grew with years in the trade. The authors said the most likely causes were silica and, to a lesser extent, asbestos, though they could not rule out other explanations such as smoking.

Here is why this matters for you:

• Mesothelioma points to asbestos. Asbestos is the main known cause of mesothelioma, and silica is not one of its recognized causes. A mason with mesothelioma should look hard at where asbestos was on the job.
• Lung cancer can have several causes. Smoking causes most lung cancer. Silica and asbestos can both add to the risk. An asbestos lung cancer claim depends on the evidence of asbestos exposure and on medical findings.
• Silicosis is not asbestosis. They are different diseases, and asbestos trusts pay only for asbestos diseases. See asbestosis.

What the studies found about masons

There is less research on masons than on trades like insulators or sheet metal workers, and most of it comes from outside the United States. Still, several studies point the same way.

• Italy. A study using the Italian national mesothelioma registry, covering cases from 2000 to 2018, found that bricklayers had about seven times the odds of pleural mesothelioma in the study's main analysis. The authors cautioned that the number may be inflated by how jobs were coded, and that results may not carry over to countries with different work practices.
• Sweden. A study of peritoneal mesothelioma in Sweden found that among men, bricklayers had the highest risk of any occupation, about seven times the expected rate. That figure rests on only four cases.
• Canada. A British Columbia study of 51 mesothelioma cases grouped bricklayers with plasterers and cement workers. That group had higher odds of mesothelioma, but the result could have been chance. After the authors set aside workers in jobs already known to involve asbestos, the group still had higher odds and remained "of interest." The study was small, and the estimates are imprecise.

These studies do not say which materials exposed the bricklayers. Some bricklayers in them may have done furnace and refractory work, and the Italian authors pointed to work beside other trades and to asbestos-cement products. They do show that masonry belongs on the list of trades where asbestos disease turns up.

Asbestos diseases show up decades after exposure, a gap called latency. If you did masonry work before the 1980s and have not been checked, our free screening is a chest X-ray read by a B-reader, with a CT scan if needed. It looks for asbestos-related changes. It is not a test for mesothelioma.

Families were exposed too

Masonry dust came home on clothes, boots and in the truck. Family members who washed those clothes could breathe whatever was in it, including asbestos from the job. See take-home exposure and how take-home exposure works.

Claims for masons and their families

A mason's claim depends on the details: which jobs, which buildings and plants, which products, and which other trades were there. That is why we start with your work history, not with brand names.

Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. Many makers of asbestos products went through bankruptcy and set up bankruptcy trusts to pay people they harmed. For masons, the relevant trusts often include makers of refractory products, insulation, asbestos-cement products and contaminated vermiculite. Each trust has its own trust distribution procedures and pays a share of each claim's value, called the payment percentage. See trust claims and understanding asbestos trust claims.

Lawsuits. Companies still in business can sometimes be sued directly, including product makers and the owners of plants where you worked. See understanding mesothelioma lawsuits.

Deadlines. Every state has a statute of limitations. Some are short, so call soon after a diagnosis.

We will tell you plainly whether your history points to asbestos, to silica, or to both, and what that means for a claim. We cannot promise an outcome. There is no fee unless we recover compensation for your family.