Sepco Corp

Sepco Corporation, of Pelham, Alabama, made and sold gaskets and packing for industrial equipment, and for a time made asbestos insulation sold as Insubestos, Insutube, Insutape and Wovenstone. Its account, as an insurer compiled it in 1980, says it marketed asbestos packing from 1924 and gave up its insulation products in 1972. It filed for bankruptcy in 2016, and claims are now paid by the Sepco Asbestos Personal Injury Trust.

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

History

Our trust page says the company was originally called the Sealing Equipment Products Company.² The library holds no history of its founding. Most of what the library knows about Sepco's asbestos products comes from a two-page data sheet in a binder that The Travelers Insurance Company's claim department put together for a March 1980 asbestos seminar. The binder's sheets were drawn mostly from defendants' own answers to interrogatories in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard suits, and its cover memo warns that some may be self-serving. What follows here is Sepco's account as Travelers recorded it, not an established fact.

The sheet gives Sepco's principal place of business as Pelham, Alabama, and its manufacturing plant as Pelham "Since 1970".¹ It says Sepco did not mine or mill asbestos. It got raw fiber from the GSA (the federal General Services Administration) and from Johns-Manville, and that asbestos material was imported from England, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan and Canada from 1963.¹

Asbestos products

The sheet lists four products Sepco manufactured until 1972, each with an asbestos content:¹

• Insubestos: 58% amosite and 3% chrysotile
• Insutube: 48% chrysotile
• Insutape: 34% chrysotile
• Wovenstone: 58% chrysotile

It also lists two products Sepco marketed: Sepco Braided Packing, 65 to 100% chrysotile and crocidolite, "since 1924", and Sepco Gaskets, 37.5 to 95% chrysotile with 5 to 62.5% rubber-type (elastomeric) binder.¹ The sheet says the insulation products were given up to eliminate the release of asbestos fibers into the air, and that the replacement insulated better. It adds that Sepco stopped making Insubestos in 1972 because sales were small and it wanted the production time for fluid sealing products.¹ It gives 1972 as both Sepco's first knowledge of hazards and its first labeling.¹

The dates differ between sources. In Commercial Union Ins. Co. v. Sepco Corp. (1985), an insurance case, the Eleventh Circuit's opinion says Sepco, "an Alabama company", made asbestos insulation products between 1970 and 1979.³ That does not match the data sheet's 1972. Our trust page says Sepco went on selling asbestos gaskets and packing into the mid-1980s, and certain gaskets until about 1992.²

The library has two kinds of product records for Sepco. A Travelers products printout of April 30, 1981, lists Flex Seal gaskets under the name "Sepco Metallic Gasket Co.".⁴ A photograph of a SEPCO box shows a label for asbestos TFE packing, 3/8 inch square. The label carries a federal stock number and a contract number beginning "DLA".⁵

The same trade names at Unarco

Unarco's data sheet in the same Travelers binder uses all four of Sepco's insulation names. It describes Insubestos felt, Wovenstone, Insutape and Insutube as Unarco products.⁶ It also says Unarco made Insubestos at Marshville, North Carolina, from the 1940s.⁷ Unarco's description says its listed materials were made until April 1970 unless otherwise noted.⁶ Neither company's sheet mentions the other, and nothing we found in the library explains how both came to use the same names, whether by license, by purchase of a product line or in some other way.

What the documents show

A 1976 list of customers sent by North American Asbestos Corporation, now a Union Carbide trial exhibit, puts "Sepco Corporation" among its textile customers for 1960 through 1969 and again for 1970 through 1974.⁸⁹ In the other direction, Atlas Asbestos Company's answers, also in the Travelers binder, say it had no record of any sales to Sepco Corporation.¹⁰ Sepco's own sheet says it sold non-insulation products to co-defendants in the previous five years and was not party to any relabeling agreement. It denied direct sales to Long Beach Naval Shipyard or to the U.S. Government, and it was not a member of the Asbestos Textile Institute.¹¹

Sepco also appears as a gasket supplier to Union Carbide. An undated Union Carbide purchasing plan says the Gulf Coast plants' gasket bids covered only metallic gaskets.¹² It says those agreements went to Lamons Metal Gaskets, Corpus Christi Gasket, Sepco Corporation and R & W Corporation for August 1, 1982, through July 31, 1984, and were later extended through December 31, 1985.¹³ The same plan says Union Carbide was moving away from asbestos gasket and packing materials because new OSHA limits had cut the allowed exposure tenfold.¹²¹³ A 1987 set of Union Carbide gasket-team papers lists Sepco among the Gulf Coast gasket vendors for 1982 through 1985.¹⁴

Eight decisions in our case-law library name Sepco as a defendant, from 1985 to 2016.¹⁵ In Anderson v. Ford Motor Company (D. Utah 2014), the plaintiff's medical expert addressed Sepco packing among other products.¹⁶ A 2016 Maryland federal ruling in Arbogast v. AW Chesterton Co. notes that Sepco Corporation was subject to the automatic bankruptcy stay.¹⁷

Bankruptcy and trust

Our trust page says Sepco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Ohio in 2016. A plan was confirmed in 2020, setting up an asbestos trust under Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code. The trust began accepting claims at the end of 2020.² The page says the trust was funded mostly by Sepco's insurance and its remaining value, and that the reorganized company was dissolved at the end of 2022.² Current payment figures are on the trust page.

References

1. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Sepco Product Information, p. 2
2. Sepco Asbestos Trust Claims
3. Commercial Union Ins. Co. v. Sepco Corp. (11th Cir. 1985)
4. The Travelers Insurance Company's Product Information Booklet for Its Asbestos Seminar (1980–1981), April 30, 1981 printout, p. 5
5. Label: SEPCO asbestos TFE packing material, 3/8" square (NSN 5330-00-450-3894)
6. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Unarco Product Information, p. 4
7. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Unarco Product Information, p. 3
8. UC-1118: North American Asbestos Corporation Transmittal of Textile and Fiber Customer Lists, 1954-1975 (1976), p. 6
9. UC-1118: North American Asbestos Corporation Transmittal of Textile and Fiber Customer Lists, 1954-1975 (1976), p. 8
10. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Atlas Asbestos Company Product Information, p. 9
11. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Sepco Product Information, p. 3
12. UC-2951: Union Carbide Procurement Plan: Gaskets and Packing Materials, p. 1
13. UC-2951: Union Carbide Procurement Plan: Gaskets and Packing Materials, p. 2
14. UC-2885: P. H. Day, Minutes of the Gasket Team Meeting on Purchased Goods Quality Program (1987), p. 6
15. Sepco Corp (company page)
16. Anderson v. Ford Motor Company (D. Utah 2014)
17. Arbogast v. AW Chesterton Co. (D. Md. 2016)

Asbestos trust

If you or a family member worked with or around Sepco Corp's asbestos products and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, a claim may be paid by Sepco Asbestos Trust Claims. Free case review.

Court cases

8 court decisions in our case-law library name Sepco Corp as a defendant, newest first.

• Arbogast v. AW Chesterton Co. (2016)
• Anderson v. Ford Motor Company (2014)
• Anderson v. Ford Motor Company (2013)
• Anderson v. Ford Motor Company (2013)
• Kiser v. AW Chesterton Co. (2011)
• Kiser v. AW Chesterton Co. (2011)
• Garlock Sealing Technologies, LLC v. Pittman (2010)
• Commercial Union Ins. Co. v. Sepco Corp. (1985)

In our library

1 document in our library name Sepco Corp, by collection.

Other library documents (1)

• Label: SEPCO asbestos TFE packing material, 3/8" square (NSN 5330-00-450-3894) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

Sepco Corp is named in 3 Union Carbide documents dated 1980 to 1987 (3 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• William P. Barrett, 'Not told, workers say: 6 charge DuPont hid data on asbestosis,' The Bulletin (1980) UC-1947 (mentioned)
• P. H. Day Minutes of the Gasket Team Meeting on Purchased Goods Quality Program, with Attached C&P Asbestos Phase-Out Recommendation (1987) UC-2885 (mentioned)
• Union Carbide Procurement Plan: Gaskets and Packing Materials, with Exhibit A on Kanawha Valley Orders UC-2951 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Sepco Corp, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Sepco Corporation · SEPCO.

Where this comes from

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