Armco Steel

Armco Steel Corporation was a large steelmaker based in Middletown, Ohio. Its asbestos story in our library is small: a trademarked line of Asbestos-Bonded steel pipe, asbestos-felt wrap offered as a pipe coating, and its part-ownership of Reserve Mining Company, whose Lake Superior discharges of asbestos-like fibers led to a federal pollution case decided in 1974 and 1975. Our library holds no record of an asbestos trust for the company.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History

Armco began in 1899 as The American Rolling Mill Company of Middletown, Ohio, and took the name Armco Steel Corporation in 1948. Its drainage and pipe products were sold by a unit called Armco Drainage & Metal Products, Inc., of Middletown, which published a catalog of welded steel pipe in 1958.¹ AK Steel bought Armco in 1999.

Asbestos products

The trademark file for Armco's "Asbestos-Bonded" mark gives first use in commerce as March 2, 1936.² Our library holds two of its labels: a trademark label with the ARMCO triangle reading "Asbestos Bonded" and "Copper Steel," and a plain shipping-style tag printed "ASBESTOS-BONDED."²⁶⁷ Armco's 1958 catalog lists ASBESTOS-BONDED among the registered trademarks of Armco Steel Corporation, and its back page lists Armco Asbestos-Bonded Pipe among the company's more than 30 products for construction and drainage.¹⁸

A July 1936 article in the trade magazine Asbestos describes asbestos-covered culvert work by the American Rolling Mill Company. It says that a joint research program set up the year before by the American Rolling Mill Company and a fellowship on protected metals at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the H. H. Robertson Company, had produced a metal culvert covered with asbestos fabric bonded to galvanized iron by a zinc coating, with the asbestos soaked in asphalt and an asphalt paving laid over it. The article gives no trade name for the culvert, so it does not show whether this was the product sold as Asbestos-Bonded.⁹

Armco's 1958 catalog also lists "asbestos-felt wrap" among the outside coatings that could be supplied on Armco welded steel pipe. It gives as one example of a complete protective coating a coal tar enamel primer, a coal tar enamel coating, an asbestos felt wrap and a kraft paper wrapping.³

Reserve Mining and Lake Superior

Reserve Mining Company made iron ore pellets from taconite rock at Silver Bay, Minnesota, and discharged the waste, or tailings, into Lake Superior. The Eighth Circuit put the discharge at about 67,000 tons of tailings a day.⁴⁵ In February 1972 the United States sued Reserve over the discharges.¹⁰ Minnesota joined as a plaintiff, and Wisconsin, Michigan and the cities of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin, took part as intervenors on the plaintiffs' side.⁴¹⁰ The United States alleged that the discharge contained amphibole fibers "identical or similar to amosite asbestos fibers" that were a public health hazard to communities that drew their drinking water from the lake.⁴

Reports on the trial, prepared for The Government Research Corp. and now a Union Carbide trial exhibit, describe Armco's part in it. A report of April 15, 1974 says the trial judge, Miles W. Lord, had joined Armco and Republic Steel, Reserve's two parent companies, as co-defendants the month before.¹⁰⁴ It says that on April 9 Judge Lord ordered Reserve, Armco and Republic to produce documents, including records of political contributions by company officers since 1969, and denied motions to quash subpoenas aimed at C. William Verity, whom it calls Armco's board chairman, and at Republic's president.¹⁰ A later report in the same exhibit says the judge called his own order on political contributions "much too big a dragnet."¹¹

In its April 20, 1974 decision the district court found that Reserve was "set up and run for the sole benefit of its owners, Armco Steel Corporation (Armco) and Republic Steel Corporation (Republic)," and described Armco as "half owner of Reserve." It found that Reserve "acts as a mere instrumentality or agent of its parent corporations," disregarded Reserve's separate corporate identity, and said that "Armco and Republic must bear legal responsibility for Reserve's actions." It ordered the discharges into the lake and the air stopped as of 12:01 a.m. on April 21, 1974.⁴

The Eighth Circuit stayed that order while Reserve appealed. In its 1975 decision it wrote that "it cannot be forecast that the rates of cancer will increase from drinking Lake Superior water or breathing Silver Bay air," and that "the best that can be said" was that the asbestos in the air and water "gives rise to a reasonable medical concern for the public health." The court affirmed the injunction but changed its terms, giving Reserve a reasonable time to build facilities to abate the pollution. It said that if Minnesota and Reserve could not agree on a site for disposing of the tailings on land, "Reserve, Armco and Republic Steel" must be given a reasonable period to phase out the Silver Bay plant.⁵

Other mentions

A list of work sites attached by the plaintiffs' lawyers to master interrogatories in Greco v. A-Best Products (Ohio, 1997) names Armco Steel plants at Ashland, Kentucky; Hamilton and Middletown, Ohio; and Houston, Texas, among others. The interrogatories ask the defendant about the sites on that list; the list itself does not say what products were used there.¹²

Bankruptcy and trust

Our library holds no record of an asbestos bankruptcy or trust for Armco, and the company page lists it as a defendant only in the two Reserve Mining decisions.¹³ The caption of a later asbestos case, Tooey v. AK Steel Corporation (Pa. 2012), sues AK Steel Corporation individually and as successor in interest to Armco Steel Corporation; that is the plaintiffs' description of the defendant, not a finding by the court.¹⁴

References

1. Armco Welded Steel Pipe for Industrial Uses (1958), p. 2
2. Asbestos-Bonded (Armco Steel), product page, citing the U.S. Patent Office trademark file
3. Armco Welded Steel Pipe for Industrial Uses (1958), p. 19
4. United States v. Reserve Mining Company, 380 F. Supp. 11 (D. Minn. 1974)
5. Reserve Mining Co. v. Environmental Protection Agency, 514 F.2d 492 (8th Cir. 1975)
6. Label: Asbestos Bonded Copper Steel, ARMCO (Armco Steel Corporation) (1936)
7. Label: Asbestos-Bonded tag (Armco Steel Corporation) (1936)
8. Armco Welded Steel Pipe for Industrial Uses (1958), p. 46
9. Asbestos, July 1936, p. 18 (R. L. Fine, "Asbestos Protected Culverts")
10. UC-3502: Reserve Mining Reports #56 and #57 on the Reserve Mining Trial in Minnesota (1974), pp. 1–5
11. UC-3502 (1974), p. 10
12. Owens Corning's Responses to Plaintiffs' Master Interrogatories in Greco v. A-Best Products (1997), p. 98
13. Armco Steel, company page: court cases
14. Tooey v. AK Steel Corporation (Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 2012)

Asbestos products

1 product our documents name Armco Steel as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Asbestos-Bonded (Armco Steel)

Court cases

2 court decisions in our case-law library name Armco Steel as a defendant, newest first.

• Reserve Min. Co. v. Environmental Protection Agcy. (1975)
• United States v. Reserve Mining Company (1974)

In our library

2 documents in our library name Armco Steel, by collection.

Other library documents (2)

• Label: Asbestos Bonded Copper Steel, ARMCO (Armco Steel Corporation) (1936) (publisher)
• Label: Asbestos-Bonded tag (Armco Steel Corporation) (1936) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

Armco Steel is named in 2 Union Carbide documents dated 1974 to 1984 (2 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• Reserve Mining Reports #56 and #57 on the Reserve Mining Trial in Minnesota, Special to The Government Research Corp. (1974) UC-3502 (mentioned)
• J. E. Walsh Joint Call Reports on Distributor and Customer Visits in Florida (1984) UC-334 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Armco Steel, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Armco Steel Corporation.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Armco Steel, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.