Oil Refinery Asbestos Exposure

If you or a loved one worked at a refinery 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 what your record shows before you commit to anything.

Refining separates crude oil into products by heating it, and then keeps heating, cracking, reforming, and treating the fractions. Almost every process in the plant runs hot, and much of it runs hot under pressure. Insulation is what makes that thermally efficient, keeps the process at temperature between units, and keeps the outside of a line from burning anyone who brushes against it.

Asbestos suited the job unusually well here. It tolerated high temperatures, it was fireproof — which matters enormously in a plant full of hydrocarbons — and it was cheap enough to apply across a site measured in square miles. Refineries also demanded materials that survived weather, because most of the piping is outdoors.

That last point creates a difference from indoor industrial settings. Outdoor lagging on a pipe rack is exposed to sun, rain, freeze-thaw, and vibration year-round. It degrades continuously, and degraded insulation sheds fiber without anyone touching it. Weathered, cracked lagging overhead on a rack is a background exposure source across the whole unit, quite apart from any maintenance work.

For reference, the federal occupational 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. Through the decades when these plants were built and expanded there was no such limit, no routine air monitoring, and no containment.

Asbestos was spread across the whole plant rather than concentrated in one unit, which is why your refinery history is built from where you worked and when, not from a job title alone.

Process piping. The largest single category by volume. Transfer lines, steam lines, and process piping ran throughout the plant on racks and through units, insulated along their full length and re-lagged at every joint after any repair.

Furnaces and fired heaters. Refractory lining, castable and brick, plus external insulation. Furnace work — retubing, refractory repair, replacing burner components — meant breaking that material open inside a confined firebox.

Distillation columns and vessels. Towers, drums, and separators were insulated over their full height, with the insulation removed and replaced for inspection.

Heat exchangers. Shell insulation, plus asbestos gaskets at every head and channel joint. Exchanger work is high-frequency maintenance and gasket-intensive by nature.

Gaskets and packing. Compressed asbestos sheet gaskets throughout the process, steam, and utility systems, and asbestos packing in valve stems and pump shafts. Replacing them meant scraping a flange face clean and cutting new gasket to shape by hand.

Pumps, compressors, and rotating equipment. Internal asbestos components supplied by the equipment manufacturers rather than the refiner — a distinction that matters because those manufacturers are generally the defendants.

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

Refinery maintenance is organized around the turnaround: a planned shutdown in which a unit is taken offline, opened, inspected, repaired, and restarted. Turnarounds are the defining exposure event in a refinery history and the first thing to establish when reconstructing one.

During a turnaround, insulation is stripped from vessels, exchangers, furnaces, and piping in bulk so the metal underneath can be inspected and worked. Removing aged, dried, weathered insulation releases dramatically more fiber than installing new material, and it was routinely done dry, by hand, at height, and inside confined spaces such as columns, drums, and fireboxes.

Turnarounds also concentrate people. A unit that runs with a small operating crew brings in hundreds of contract pipefitters, boilermakers, insulators, welders, scaffolders, and laborers for a compressed schedule of continuous shifts. Every trade works the same space at the same time, so fiber released by the insulation crew was breathed by everyone on the unit — the bystander pathway at its most severe precisely when the most people were present.

If your refinery work included turnaround seasons, your exposure profile is materially different from someone who worked only normal operations. Turnaround dates are usually recoverable from plant and union records.

The people on a refinery site fall into groups whose exposure profiles differ considerably, and the last of them is the one most often overlooked.

Refinery operators worked units for years or decades, walking outdoor racks under weathered lagging, taking readings, lining up valves, and standing by during maintenance. Lower intensity, very long duration, and present for every turnaround.

Plant maintenance employees — pipefitters, boilermakers, machinists, instrument technicians, electricians, welders, and laborers — did the day-to-day work that opened insulated systems.

Contract building trades moved between refineries on turnaround and construction work. Episodic, very intense exposure, spread across many plants and many manufacturers' products. For this group union records are often the best available employment history.

Construction workers who built or expanded the plant installed insulation at a scale nothing later matched.

Keep in mind that the most commonly overlooked group is again the short-duration contractor. People who spent three weeks at a time at each of many refineries frequently assume the exposure was too brief to matter, when turnaround rip-out is among the most intense asbestos work in any industry and a career of such assignments accumulates substantially.

The CDC puts the interval between first asbestos exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years, so the work in question generally predates any paperwork still at home.

• Social Security earnings records. An itemized statement lists employers by year and anchors the timeline. Request it first, particularly for contractors who moved between many employers.
• Union records. Local membership, dispatch and referral records, apprenticeship files, and dues history. For pipefitters, boilermakers, and insulators these frequently establish both the trade and the specific jobs.
• Refinery personnel records for direct employees, where the operator still exists or records survived a sale.
• Turnaround histories. When units were down and what work was performed.
• Co-worker testimony. Often the only source for which products were in use on a given unit in a given year. Names of anyone still living should be recorded now.
• Purchase and specification records identifying whose insulation, gaskets, packing, and equipment were installed.

Refinery ownership changes frequently, and the plant you worked at decades ago may have been sold several times. That is generally a records problem, and a surmountable one, since the claim runs against product manufacturers.

The filing deadline is a separate question from the records, and in most states it runs from the date of diagnosis. See statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

A refinery employee's claim against their own employer is usually channeled into state workers' compensation, which is a limited remedy and generally forecloses suing the employer directly.

The civil claim is normally brought against the manufacturers and suppliers of the asbestos-containing products used in the plant — insulation manufacturers, gasket and packing producers, and the makers of pumps, valves, exchangers, and fired equipment containing asbestos components. The questions are what each company made, what it knew about the hazard, and what it warned.

Contract workers frequently have an additional route. Because a contractor's employee is not the refiner's employee, compensation exclusivity does not bar a claim against the plant owner, and a premises claim may be available on the theory that the owner controlled the site and knew what conditions contractor crews were being sent into. Whether that succeeds depends on state law and the specific relationship, and it is one of the more fact-sensitive questions in this area.

Many of the product manufacturers later reorganized in bankruptcy. The GAO reported in 2011 that 60 asbestos trusts held roughly $37 billion in assets. Whether a given history supports trust claims, civil claims, or both is a product-identification question — see trust claims and tort suits.

Refinery histories turn on turnarounds — which units, which years, and which contractors. Keep in mind that short assignments often carry the heaviest exposure, so a few weeks at a time across many plants is worth reconstructing carefully.

Start wherever it is easiest: the refineries, the turnaround seasons, the contractors whose names you can still call up. The rest is ours to find, and there's no fee unless we win.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.