Steel Mill Asbestos Exposure

If you or a loved one worked in a mill 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 record supports before you decide anything.

An integrated steel mill runs at temperatures that destroy ordinary materials. Coke ovens, blast furnaces, open-hearth and basic oxygen furnaces, electric arc furnaces, ladles, soaking pits, and reheat furnaces all had to hold or move metal at temperatures where steel itself softens. Everything that touched or surrounded that heat was lined, insulated, or shielded.

Asbestos was part of that answer for most of the twentieth century — in refractory formulations, in block and cement insulation on furnace shells and piping, in millboard and gaskets, and in the cloth and fabricated products used as heat shields.

Mills were also enormous, enclosed, and continuously operating. Fiber released anywhere in a bay dispersed through a shared volume of air, and the plants ran three shifts, so somebody was always present while something was being torn out or rebuilt.

For reference, the modern federal limit is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter as an eight-hour time-weighted average with a 1.0 fiber per cubic centimeter excursion limit over 30 minutes. None of that framework existed while these mills were at their peak.

The material followed the heat, so it turned up wherever metal was made, moved, or held.

Furnace and ladle refractory. Brick, castable, ramming mix, and mortar lining coke ovens, blast furnaces, open-hearth and BOF vessels, electric arc furnaces, ladles, tundishes, and runners. Refractory work is demolition and rebuilding by nature.

Soaking pits, reheat and annealing furnaces. Insulated shells and refractory linings, relined on a cycle.

Boilers and steam piping. Mills generated and distributed steam and process heat, with the same lagged boilers and insulated piping found in any power plant.

Mill equipment. Gaskets and packing throughout hydraulic, steam, water, and gas systems on rolling mills, shears, and cranes.

Electrical systems. Cable insulation, switchgear, arc chutes, and panel board across a plant with very heavy electrical loads.

Buildings. Fireproofing, roofing, siding, and structural materials throughout the mill.

This category deserves separate treatment because it distinguishes primary metals from most other industrial exposure, and because it surprises most people who worked in a mill. It may well surprise you.

Work near molten metal required protection from radiant heat and splash. For decades that protection was made of asbestos: gloves and mitts, aprons, jackets and coats, leggings and spats, hoods and face shields, and blankets and curtains used to shield equipment and people.

Two things follow. First, the material was in direct contact with the worker — worn on the hands and body, handled at the start and end of every shift, and brought up to the face. Second, protective clothing wears out. Asbestos cloth that is repeatedly heated, flexed, and abraded becomes friable and sheds, and worn gear was shaken out, stored, reissued, and eventually discarded, releasing fiber each time.

Anyone reconstructing a mill history should establish what protective gear was issued and worn, because it is an exposure source independent of the plant's insulation and it is easily overlooked. It is also a detail co-workers remember clearly.

As in every heavy-industrial setting, planned maintenance produced the heaviest exposure.

A furnace or ladle reline means tearing out spent refractory and installing new. Tear-out is demolition of hot-service material that has been thermally cycled to the point of crumbling, performed inside or immediately around the vessel, generally dry, with hand tools and pneumatic hammers. Rebuild follows immediately with cutting, mixing, and laying new material.

Bricklayers and refractory crews did this work as their whole occupation, moving from vessel to vessel and often between plants. Their exposure is the most concentrated in the mill.

Plant shutdowns for major maintenance brought in contract trades in numbers, exactly as turnarounds do in refining, with the same consequence: many trades in one space, one of them generating fiber for all of them.

The American steel industry contracted sharply, and the mill you worked in may no longer exist. That complicates records but does not defeat claims, because the defendants are product manufacturers, not the mill.

The CDC places the latency between first exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years, so the relevant employment is typically decades in the past and the employer frequently gone.

• Social Security earnings records. The most reliable anchor when a mill has closed and its personnel records have scattered. Request this first.
• Union records. Steelworker and building-trades locals, including membership, seniority, and dispatch records. Bricklayer and refractory locals are particularly valuable for reline crews.
• Pension and benefit fund records, which often survive a plant's closure because the obligations did.
• Successor and bankruptcy records where the mill's owner was acquired or reorganized.
• Co-worker testimony. Frequently the only source for which department someone worked, what gear was issued, and which products were used. Names of anyone still living should be written down now, because co-worker testimony cannot be reconstructed once it is lost.
• Product identification for refractory, insulation, gaskets, packing, and protective clothing manufacturers.

An employee's claim against the mill itself is usually limited to workers' compensation, so the civil claim runs against those manufacturers. Many later reorganized in bankruptcy; the GAO counted 60 asbestos trusts holding roughly $37 billion in assets at its 2011 review. Contract workers who were not mill employees may additionally have a premises claim against the plant owner, depending on state law. See trust claims and tort suits.

Whatever the records show, the deadline is its own clock, and in most states it starts at the date of diagnosis. See statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

Many of these mills are gone, which makes it a records problem. Union books, pension fund records, and Social Security earnings routinely outlast the plant.

We'll go and find what survived, and there's no fee unless we win. If you can write down the departments you worked and the gear you were issued, that's real groundwork.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.