Navy Shipboard Asbestos Exposure

If you or a loved one served aboard a steam-powered Navy ship 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 tell you what the records show before you decide anything.

A steam-propelled warship is a heat engine wrapped in steel. Boilers raise steam at high pressure and temperature, that steam travels through miles of piping to turbines, and everything carrying it has to be insulated — for efficiency, for the survivability of the surrounding compartment, and for the crew who work beside it. Asbestos did that job better than the alternatives available at the time, it was cheap, and it was fireproof. On a vessel where fire is the defining hazard, fireproof insulation was doctrine.

Accordingly, asbestos went into nearly every system aboard: the lagging on the boilers and the steam lines, the block and blanket insulation on turbines and evaporators, gaskets between flanges, the packing around valve stems and pump shafts, brake and clutch materials, electrical cable insulation and arc chutes, and the deck and bulkhead materials of the surrounding compartments. A machinery space was built out of the stuff.

Moreover, two features of shipboard work turned that installed material into an inhalation hazard. The first is confinement: engineering spaces are small, enclosed, and mechanically ventilated, so fibers released into the air stayed in the air and recirculated. The second is maintenance: insulation on a working steam plant is constantly being opened up. It cracks, it gets removed to reach a joint, and it gets cut and reapplied — and every one of those operations puts fibers into a compartment that people are standing in.

The federal exposure limit that governs asbestos work today is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter of air as an eight-hour time-weighted average, with an excursion limit of 1.0 fiber per cubic centimeter over any 30 minutes. That standard did not exist during the decades when these ships were built and crewed. Understanding what the modern limit is makes the historical conditions legible: work that would now require containment, respiratory protection, and air monitoring was routine, unprotected, and performed in a sealed compartment.

Reconstructing a shipboard exposure begins with the propulsion plant, because that is where the concentration of asbestos-containing material was highest and where the work that disturbed it was constant.

Boilers and fire rooms. Boiler casings, refractory, and the surrounding steam drums were insulated with asbestos block, cement, and cloth. Boiler work — retubing, refractory repair, brickwork, replacing gaskets on manways and handholes — meant breaking that material open. Fire rooms were among the hottest and most confined spaces aboard, which is precisely why they were the most heavily insulated.

Steam piping. Main and auxiliary steam lines ran throughout the ship, lagged along their entire length and re-lagged at every joint and fitting after any repair. Because piping is not confined to machinery spaces, insulated lines passed through berthing, messing, and working compartments well outside the engineering plant.

Turbines, reduction gears, evaporators, and condensers. Large heated surfaces were covered in removable insulating blankets and pads, which were taken off for inspection and put back afterward.

Gaskets and packing. Compressed asbestos sheet gaskets sat between flanges throughout the steam and feedwater systems, and asbestos packing sealed valve stems and pump shafts. Replacing them meant scraping the old gasket off a flange face and cutting a new one to shape — dry, by hand, generating dust at the breathing zone.

Pumps, valves, and auxiliary machinery. Individual components carried their own internal asbestos parts, supplied by the equipment manufacturers themselves. This distinction matters later, because those manufacturers are the parties a civil claim is generally brought against.

Electrical systems and structural materials. Cable insulation, switchboard panels, arc chutes, deck coverings, bulkhead insulation, and fire-stopping materials contained asbestos in various forms, extending the exposure well beyond the ratings assigned to engineering.

Certain ratings spent their working lives inside the machinery spaces and are the most straightforward to connect to heavy exposure: machinist's mates, boiler tenders, watertenders, enginemen, machinery repairmen, pipefitters, hull technicians and damage controlmen, shipfitters, electrician's mates, and boilermakers. For someone who held one of these ratings, the exposure argument tends to follow directly from the rating and the ship's propulsion type.

Keep in mind that the list is not a boundary. Asbestos fibers released into a mechanically ventilated compartment do not stay where they were released. Sailors who never turned a wrench — radiomen, yeomen, cooks, deck ratings, officers standing watch in engineering control — worked, slept, and ate in a ship whose spaces were being disturbed continuously by someone else's maintenance. Berthing compartments sat directly above and beside machinery spaces and shared their ventilation.

For instance, this is why the assumption "I was not an engineer, so this does not apply to me" is worth testing before you act on it. The question in a claim is not which rating someone held. It is which ship they served aboard, when, what that ship's plant contained, and what work was being done during that period.

Routine steaming exposed a crew to whatever the plant shed in normal operation. Overhaul was categorically different.

During a yard period, insulation was stripped from boilers and piping in bulk so the underlying metal could be inspected, repaired, or replaced, and then reinstalled. Stripping dry, aged, friable insulation from hot piping in an enclosed compartment releases fibers at a rate that ordinary operation never approaches. Crews frequently remained aboard during these periods, living on the ship while the work proceeded, and ship's company often performed the work themselves.

As a result, anyone whose service included a shipyard overhaul, a regular overhaul cycle, a conversion, or extended repair availability has a materially different exposure profile from someone who served the same rating aboard the same class of ship without one. The dates and locations of those yard periods are recorded in the ship's history, which makes this one of the more provable elements of an exposure timeline. It is worth identifying early.

The evidentiary problem in every asbestos case is the gap between exposure and diagnosis. The CDC describes the latency between first asbestos exposure and clinical disease as usually 20 to 40 years, and reported latencies extend considerably further. Nobody documented the exposure when it happened, because nobody was treating it as an event.

That said, Navy service is unusual in how well this gap can be closed. Military service generates a documentary record that civilian employment of the same era generally does not:

• The service record establishes rating, rate, and the dates of each assignment.
• The DD-214 confirms the service period and specialty.
• Ship assignment history places a specific person aboard a specific hull between specific dates.
• Ship histories and deck logs establish that vessel's propulsion plant, its yard periods, and what work was performed during them.
• Technical documentation — plans, equipment lists, and specifications — identifies which manufacturers supplied the boilers, turbines, pumps, valves, and gaskets aboard that class of ship.

In fact, that last item is what converts a general history into a claim. Establishing that someone served in the fire room of a particular ship during a particular period, and that the boilers and auxiliary equipment in that space were supplied by identifiable manufacturers, is the product-identification evidence an asbestos case is built on.

The VA states plainly that a service-connection claim requires medical records establishing the condition, service records that list the job or specialty, and a physician's statement connecting the asbestos contact during service to the condition. The same records do double duty in a civil claim.

If you are gathering documents, start with the DD-214 and the full service record, and do not discard anything that names a ship or a date.

Be aware that, and this surprises many veterans, an asbestos claim arising from Navy service is not ordinarily a claim against the Navy or the United States. Suits against the federal government for injuries incident to military service are generally barred, and the practical target of a civil claim is elsewhere.

The defendants are typically the private companies that manufactured and supplied the asbestos-containing products installed aboard the ship — the boiler makers, turbine builders, pump and valve manufacturers, and the producers of gaskets, packing, and insulation. The legal theory is a product and premises theory: what the company made, what it knew about the hazard of its product, and what it warned. That is a different inquiry from anything involving military decision-making.

Furthermore, many of those companies later entered bankruptcy and resolved their asbestos liabilities through court-supervised trusts. In its 2011 review, the GAO reported that 60 trusts had been established since 1988 holding roughly $37 billion in assets, up from 16 trusts holding $4.2 billion in 2000. Whether a particular exposure leads to a trust claim, a civil suit, or both depends on which manufacturers' products a person can be shown to have worked around — which returns, again, to the records.

Remember that these are two different systems, and pursuing one does not forfeit the other.

VA disability compensation is a benefits determination, decided by the VA on the service-connection standard described above. A civil claim is a tort and product-liability matter against private manufacturers, decided in court or resolved by settlement, and a bankruptcy trust claim is an administrative claim against a fund established in a manufacturer's reorganization.

They run on different timelines, different standards of proof, and different deadlines. The civil deadline is the one that is easiest to lose without noticing, because in most states the limitations period for an asbestos disease runs from diagnosis rather than from exposure — a rule that exists precisely because the latency makes an exposure-based clock meaningless. That deadline varies by state and by claim type, and it is worth confirming early. See statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

If you served aboard a steam-powered ship and you have an asbestos diagnosis, the work ahead is documentary. Your DD-214, your service record, and the history of the ships you served on will say more about your exposure than your memory can be expected to, and they will say it in a form a claim can use.

We'll do that reconstruction with you. There's no cost to find out what your record supports, and no fee unless we win. If you'd rather start by simply gathering your paperwork, that's a good use of the time too.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.