Chemical Plant Asbestos Exposure

If you or a loved one worked in a chemical plant and has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you may have a valid claim — and you may not be aware of the full range of compensation available to your family. We can look at which units you worked and what was installed on them before you decide anything.

Chemical manufacturing imposes a demand that most industries do not: materials have to survive heat and chemical attack simultaneously. A gasket in a steam line only has to handle temperature and pressure. A gasket in a process line may have to handle temperature, pressure, and a corrosive stream that destroys most organic materials.

Accordingly, asbestos was well suited to that combination. It was thermally stable, chemically resistant to a wide range of media, non-combustible, and available in forms that could be compounded into sheet, packing, and board. In a plant handling flammable and reactive materials, non-combustibility was a requirement.

Asbestos therefore appeared in chemical plants in the same places it appeared in refineries — insulation and refractory — plus a heavier concentration in the sealing components, because chemical service demanded materials that ordinary gaskets could not match.

Chemical plants also mixed indoor and outdoor process areas. Outdoor lagging weathered and shed fiber continuously without anyone touching it; indoor process buildings concentrated whatever was released. Both conditions applied on the same site.

For reference, the current federal limit is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter as an eight-hour time-weighted average, with an excursion limit of 1.0 fiber per cubic centimeter over 30 minutes. Keep in mind that through the decades of plant construction and expansion there was no such standard.

Asbestos was distributed across the plant rather than concentrated in any one system, which is why a job title alone rarely settles the question of exposure.

Reactors, columns, and vessels. Insulated over their full height for process control and personnel protection, with insulation removed and replaced for inspection and repair.

Process and steam piping. Transfer lines, jacketed and traced lines, and utility steam ran throughout the plant, lagged along their length and re-lagged at every joint after any repair.

Heat exchangers, dryers, and evaporators. Shell insulation plus asbestos gaskets at every head and channel joint. Exchanger work is frequent and gasket-intensive.

Fired equipment. Refractory lining in heaters, incinerators, and furnaces, torn out and rebuilt on a cycle.

Pumps, compressors, agitators, and valves. Packing, seals, and internal asbestos components supplied by the equipment manufacturers, not by the plant operator — the distinction that determines who the defendants are.

Electrical and structural materials. Cable insulation, switchgear, transite panels and duct, fireproofing on structural steel, and building materials.

Maintenance workers in these plants accumulated exposure faster than in most heavy industry, and the sealing components are why.

Chemical service is hard on seals. Corrosive and high-temperature streams degrade gaskets and packing faster than clean steam does, which means they are replaced more often. A plant with thousands of flanged joints, hundreds of pumps, and constant exchanger work generates a continuous stream of gasket and packing jobs.

Moreover, each of those jobs is hand work on an asbestos product. Cutting a gasket from compressed asbestos sheet means tracing, knife-cutting, and punching bolt holes, dry, at the bench. Removing an old gasket that has been compressed at temperature in a corrosive stream means scraping, wire-brushing, or power-wheeling it off the flange face — the most concentrated release in the sequence, directly at the worker's face. Repacking a valve or pump means pulling out degraded packing with a corkscrew tool and cutting and seating new rings.

Because this work is high-frequency, it accumulated steadily across an entire career instead of clustering in shutdowns. In fact, a millwright or pipefitter who spent thirty years in a chemical plant did gasket and packing work in most weeks of it.

Planned shutdowns produced the same pattern as refinery turnarounds. Units come offline, insulation is stripped in bulk so vessels and piping can be opened and inspected, repairs are made, and everything is reinsulated. Removing aged, weathered insulation releases far more fiber than installing new material, and it was routinely done dry, at height, and inside confined spaces.

In addition, turnarounds multiply headcount. A unit that runs with a small operating crew brings in large numbers of contract pipefitters, boilermakers, insulators, millwrights, scaffolders, and laborers on compressed continuous shifts. Everyone occupies the same space, so fiber released by the insulation crew reached every other trade on the unit.

Be aware that contract workers are the group most often overlooked. If you spent a few weeks at a time at each of many plants, you may have assumed the duration was too short to matter. Turnaround rip-out is among the most intense asbestos work in any industry, and a career of such assignments accumulates — while also involving many different manufacturers' products, which usually widens the set of potential defendants.

The CDC puts the interval between first exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years, so the relevant work is decades old and the plant has frequently changed hands or closed.

• Social Security earnings records. Lists employers by year and anchors the timeline. Request it first, especially for contract workers with many employers.
• Union records. Membership, apprenticeship, dispatch and referral, and dues history — the backbone for contract building trades.
• Plant personnel records for direct employees, where the operator or its successor preserved them.
• Turnaround and outage histories. When units were down and what work was performed.
• Co-worker testimony. Often the only source for which products were used on a given unit. Names of anyone still living should be recorded now.
• Purchase and specification records identifying whose insulation, gaskets, packing, and equipment were installed.

Keep in mind that a direct employee's claim against the plant operator is usually limited to workers' compensation, so the civil claim runs against the product manufacturers. Contract workers, not being the operator's employees, may additionally have a premises claim against the plant owner — a fact-sensitive question that depends on state law and on the owner's control of the site. Many product manufacturers reorganized in bankruptcy; the GAO counted 60 asbestos trusts holding roughly $37 billion in assets at its 2011 review. See trust claims and tort suits.

Plant work is rarely one employer and one unit, and that's usually a good thing for a claim. The more places you worked, the more manufacturers' products you were around, and the wider the set of parties who may be responsible.

We'll sort out which of them applies to your history. There's no cost to find out, and no fee unless we win. If you'd rather start on your own, request your Social Security earnings statement and write down every plant you can remember, even the short assignments.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.