Pipefitters and Boilermakers

If you or a loved one worked the pipe or boiler 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 tell you what your union record supports before you decide anything.

Most occupational asbestos exposure is incidental — the material was in the building and the worker was too. For the pipe and boiler trades, handling asbestos was a necessary step in performing the job.

Any hot system is insulated. That means every point a mechanical tradesman needs to reach — a flange, a valve body, a fitting, a weld, a tube end, a bearing — is underneath insulation that has to come off first. Stripping it is step one, the work is step two, and reinstating or patching the insulation is step three. On a large job that cycle repeats continuously through the shift.

Aged lagging is the worst case for fiber release. Material that has been on a hot, vibrating line for years is dry, cracked, and friable, and taking it off by hand with a knife and a bar releases far more fiber than applying new insulation does. The work was generally done dry, frequently overhead, and often in a confined space where the fiber had nowhere to go.

The federal limit that would govern this 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. For most of these careers there was no limit, no monitoring, and no respiratory protection.

Gasket and packing work deserves its own treatment, because it is a distinct exposure that continued in some settings long after bulk insulation work had been curtailed. It may well be part of your own history.

Cutting gaskets. Compressed asbestos sheet was cut to shape by hand — traced from the flange, cut with a knife, and bolt holes made with a punch or a ball-peen hammer. That is dry manipulation of an asbestos product at bench height, in the breathing zone.

Removing old gaskets. Far worse. A gasket that has been compressed between two flanges at temperature for years bakes onto the metal and comes off only with a scraper, a wire brush, or a power wire wheel. Every one of those methods abrades the gasket material and releases fiber directly at the face of the person doing it. A power wire wheel on a baked-on gasket is among the most concentrated releases in the trade.

Valve packing. Asbestos packing was cut to length and pushed into stuffing boxes, and old packing was pulled out with a corkscrew-style tool, dry and degraded.

This work recurred constantly. A refinery exchanger job, a boiler manway, a pump rebuild, a valve repack — all gasket and packing operations, all routine, all hand work.

Boilermakers add a category the pipe trades generally do not have: confined-space work inside the fired equipment itself.

Retubing means working inside a drum or a furnace with tube ends, seals, and refractory. Refractory repair means breaking out and replacing high-temperature lining. Manway and handhole gaskets are asbestos and are replaced every time the vessel is opened. Casing and external insulation come off for inspection and go back on afterward.

The distinguishing feature is the space. A boiler interior is small, enclosed, and unventilated except by whatever forced air someone rigged. Fiber released inside it stays inside it, and the person releasing it is inside with it, generally for the length of the shift.

Boilermakers also concentrated in exactly the settings with the most asbestos: shipyards, power plant outages, refinery turnarounds, and steel mill relines.

A structural feature of the building trades shapes both the exposure and the claim.

These are dispatched trades. You work for whichever contractor has the job, for as long as that job lasts, then go back on the list. Over a career that can mean dozens of employers, scores of jobsites, and every kind of industrial facility — a shipyard one year, a power plant outage the next, a refinery turnaround after that, a hospital boiler room in between.

Two consequences follow.

For exposure, it means breadth. A career spent in the highest-asbestos settings across many different plants involved many different manufacturers' insulation, gaskets, and packing. That usually widens the set of potential defendants.

For records, it means the employer-based approach that works for a career utility employee will not work for you. Nobody has a single personnel file covering forty years. The union does, in effect, have the equivalent — which is why union records are the backbone of these histories.

Because the employers change constantly and the union does not, the reconstruction starts with the hall rather than with any one contractor.

• Union records first. Local membership records, apprenticeship files, dispatch and referral records, and dues history. Dispatch records in particular can establish which contractor a member was sent to and when, which is the closest thing to a jobsite-by-jobsite history that exists. For pipefitters, steamfitters, and boilermakers these are usually the single most valuable source.
• Pension and benefit fund records. Trades funds track hours reported by employer, which independently reconstructs a timeline and often survives when a contractor does not.
• Social Security earnings records. Lists every employer by year. Request it early as a cross-check.
• Co-worker testimony. Frequently the only source establishing which jobsites someone worked and which products were used there. Names of anyone still living should be written down now.
• Product identification. Which manufacturers' pipe covering, block, cement, gasket sheet, and packing were used at each site. Specifications, purchase records, and brand recollection all contribute.

The CDC puts the latency between first exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years, so most of this history is decades old and many of the contractors are gone. That is generally survivable, because the defendants are the product manufacturers rather than the contractors. Many of those manufacturers reorganized in bankruptcy — the GAO counted 60 asbestos trusts holding roughly $37 billion in assets at its 2011 review — and a broad product history often supports claims against several of them. See trust claims and tort suits.

For dispatched trades your defendant list rarely matches your employer list. The contractors who dispatched the work were often small, many are gone, and in most states an employee's claim against their own employer is channeled into workers' compensation, which is a limited remedy.

The civil claim is normally brought against the companies that manufactured and supplied the products these trades handled. That means pipe covering, block, and insulating cement; compressed asbestos sheet and preformed gaskets; valve and pump packing; and refractory and boiler components. The inquiry for each one is what it sold into these systems, what it knew about the hazard while it was selling it, and what it told the tradesmen who installed and removed it.

Because these trades worked as outside contractors inside other companies' plants, a second route is sometimes available. Compensation exclusivity runs between an employee and their own employer, so it does not bar a contract crew's claim against the plant owner. A premises claim may be available on the theory that the owner controlled the site and knew what conditions contract crews were being sent into. Whether that succeeds depends on state law and the specific relationship, and it is among the more fact-sensitive questions in this area.

A broad product history is what makes any of this work. A career across shipyards, power plants, refineries, and mills usually means many manufacturers, which is why the union records above carry so much weight. They are what ties a particular product to a particular jobsite and year.

For these trades the union is usually the record. Membership, apprenticeship, and dispatch files reconstruct decades of jobsites that no single employer ever held, and pension fund hours cross-check them.

We'll pull that together with you, and there's no fee unless we win. Your local and your membership dates are the most useful two things you can bring.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.