Electricians and Asbestos

If you or a loved one worked in the electrical trades 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 where you worked and what was in those buildings before you decide anything.

Asbestos was used in electrical work for the same reason it was used everywhere else, plus one more: it is a good electrical insulator as well as a thermal one, and it does not burn. In an application where the failure mode is arcing and fire, that combination was compelling. In practice it turned up in the products an electrician handled daily.

Cloth-insulated wire and cable. Conductors were insulated with asbestos cloth or with rubber and asbestos braid, particularly for high-temperature service — furnace and oven wiring, appliance leads, heater circuits, and industrial equipment. Stripping that insulation to make a termination means cutting and pulling the asbestos braid by hand, at the bench or in a panel, in the breathing zone.

Arc chutes and arc barriers. Inside switchgear, breakers, contactors, and starters, asbestos-containing arc chutes absorbed and quenched the arc drawn when contacts open. They degrade in service by design, because their job is to take the arc. Opening a breaker for maintenance meant handling components full of eroded, friable material.

Panel and barrier board. Transite and similar asbestos-cement board was used for panel backs, barriers, arc shields, and equipment enclosures. Cutting or drilling it releases fiber at the cut.

Insulating tape, cloth, and sleeving used to wrap splices, terminations, and joints.

Motor and generator insulation, and heat shielding around resistors, rheostats, and heating elements.

The federal limit today 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 none of it applied while these products were standard.

The second pathway is arguably larger, and it's the one electricians tend not to think of as asbestos work at all.

Running conduit, cable, and boxes through a building means making holes in it — constantly. Electricians drilled and cut through spray-applied fireproofing on structural steel and decks, through plaster and lath, through ceiling tile and wallboard, through floor tile and mastic, and through cement asbestos board and fire-stopping.

Every one of those materials contained asbestos in the relevant era, and drilling or sawing them releases fiber at the point of the cut, at head height, in an enclosed room, with the person's face close to the work because that's how you drill accurately.

Two features make this worse than it sounds. First is position: drilling into a deck or a fireproofed beam drops debris directly onto and around the person doing it. Then there is frequency, because a single fit-out involves hundreds of penetrations.

As a result, an electrician who never handled a single asbestos electrical product may still have substantial exposure from this pathway alone.

Maintenance and rebuild work concentrated the electrical-product exposure.

Cleaning and servicing switchgear meant opening cubicles full of accumulated dust: a mixture of arc products, eroded arc-chute material, and whatever else had settled. Compressed air was commonly used to clear it, with the same effect it had in a brake shop — everything that had settled went airborne in an enclosed room.

In addition, rebuilding breakers and contactors meant removing and replacing arc chutes, barriers, and insulating components that had eroded in service.

Motor and generator work meant handling insulation, and rewinds involved stripping old insulating materials out.

Accordingly, industrial electricians in plants with heavy electrical loads, such as mills, refineries, power stations, and shipyards, did this work continuously and in settings already saturated with asbestos from other sources.

Electricians work everywhere, alongside everyone. On a construction site they run cable while insulators wrap pipe overhead and tapers sand joint compound in the next room. In a power plant they work outages next to boilermakers stripping lagging. In a shipyard they pull cable in compartments where insulation is being torn out and reinstalled.

In fact, that makes the electrical trades one of the clearest examples of bystander exposure across the widest range of settings. An electrician's total exposure is often a sum of three sources: the electrical products, the building materials they cut through, and the fiber generated by whichever trade was working beside them that week.

Fiber also went home on work clothes, exposing family members — see take-home and secondary exposure.

Electricians divide into two record profiles, and which one applies determines where to start.

Construction and industrial electricians who worked out of a union hall have the same profile as the other building trades: many contractors, many jobsites, dispatched work. Union records are the backbone: membership, apprenticeship, dispatch and referral, and dues. Trades pension fund records tracking hours by employer support them.

Plant and maintenance electricians employed directly by a utility, mill, refinery, or institution have a conventional employment record, if the employer or its successor preserved it.

For both, Social Security earnings records list every employer by year and should be requested first — they anchor the timeline regardless of which profile applies.

Keep in mind that co-worker testimony matters particularly here, because the two most important facts often appear in no document: which manufacturers' switchgear and cable were installed at a given site, and what building materials were being cut through. Names of anyone still living are worth recording now.

The CDC puts the interval between first exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years, so this history is typically decades old. The defendants are the product manufacturers, both of the electrical components and of the building materials, many of which 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.

Deadlines run separately from all of this, generally from the date of diagnosis and varying by state. See statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

An electrician's exposure history is usually wider than the person living it expects, because it accumulated from three directions at once and none of them looked like asbestos work at the time.

We'll help you put that history together. There's no cost to find out what it supports, and no fee unless we win. If you'd rather begin on your own, start with your local and your membership dates, then list the jobsites you can still name.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.