Insulators are the occupation most directly identified with asbestos disease, because asbestos was not incidental to their trade. It was the trade. Pipe covering, block insulation, and insulating cement were the insulator’s daily materials for decades, and the National Cancer Institute lists insulation work among the occupations where asbestos health hazards were recognized (NCI asbestos fact sheet). The same source identifies asbestos exposure as the primary cause of mesothelioma, typically appearing 20 to 50 years after exposure.
What the work involved, hands on
An insulator’s day was a sequence of dusty tasks. He measured and sawed sections of asbestos pipe covering, and the saw threw dust. He mixed insulating cement, called mud, from bags of dry asbestos powder, and the pour threw dust. He trimmed block insulation to fit boiler walls and breechings, and the trimming threw dust. On tear-out jobs he ripped old lagging off pipes and vessels by hand, and that threw the most dust of all. The work was often done overhead, with material crumbling at eye level, in engine rooms, boiler houses, and pipe tunnels with little moving air. Helpers and apprentices got the same dose from their first day, sweeping scraps and carrying material long before they ever ran a job.
Why this trade’s exposure stood apart
Most trades met asbestos as bystanders. Insulators generated the dust themselves, at arm’s length, for entire careers. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry notes that no safe level of asbestos exposure has been established (ATSDR); insulators worked at the far end of the exposure spectrum from that baseline. The trade’s history is also unusually well documented, because insulators and their union locals became central witnesses in decades of asbestos litigation. That documentation now helps their families prove claims. Much of the medical literature on asbestos disease was written by studying this trade, which is one reason insulator claims rarely face serious dispute about whether the work involved exposure.
Where Pennsylvania insulators worked
The trade followed heat and steam, and Pennsylvania was full of both:
- Shipyards on the Delaware, including the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where insulators lagged boilers and piping below decks in confined engine spaces
- Generating stations, including the PECO power plants around Philadelphia
- Steel mills, refineries, and chemical plants across the state, each with miles of insulated pipe
- Commercial and institutional buildings, wherever steam heat ran
Insulators anchor our occupations with asbestos exposure index. The trades that worked beside them, especially plumbers and pipefitters and boilermakers, absorbed much of the same dust.
The dust went home too
Insulating cement and lagging dust saturated work clothes. The National Cancer Institute notes the risk to family members from fibers carried home on clothing (NCI). Wives who laundered an insulator’s coveralls, and children who rode in his car, carry a recognized secondary exposure history of their own. Some locals eventually warned members to change clothes before leaving the job, but for most of the trade’s history the coveralls simply came home.
What this means for your family
Insulator cases benefit from the strongest product-identification record in asbestos litigation. The manufacturers of pipe covering, block, and cement are well known, their sales records have been examined in thousands of cases, and many funded bankruptcy trusts, which the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported held roughly $30 billion (GAO-11-819). For a Pennsylvania insulator or his survivors, that usually means several claim paths at once: trust claims plus a lawsuit in the state courts. The filing window is generally two years from discovery of the disease under 42 Pa. C.S. § 5524, and families of insulators who have already died are not shut out: wrongful death and survival actions under 42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8301-8302 generally allow filing within two years of the death.
If insulation work runs through your family’s history and mesothelioma has followed it, request a free case review and we will put the union records, job sites, and product lists to work.