Exposure in Shipyard Shops
Some shipyard workers were assigned to shops. Others worked daily on board ships that were tied to the piers or laid up in dry dock. Within the shops, a crew was assigned to support a ship overhaul or project on the waterfront. These crews worked closely with the other shipyard industrial trades to remove the various pieces of equipment to the shipyard shops for repair or overhaul, and return these same pieces of equipment to the ship when the repairs or overhauls were completed.
As the old and damaged asbestos insulation, gaskets, and packing were removed from the machinery, asbestos dust was released. Asbestos dust was also created when asbestos insulation, gaskets, and packing were reinstalled. The shipyard workers who were on board the ship during repairs worked side by side in close proximity to each other, as did the workers in the various shops. All of these workers regularly breathed the asbestos dust generated by the repair and maintenance of the ship’s equipment.
There were as many shops as there were specific items on the ships requiring repair. For example, there was an insulation shop, a boiler shop, a pump shop, and a sheet metal shop, to name just a few.
The tempo of shipyard operations drove the urgency of routine shipboard work and unscheduled repairs involving the various industrial shops sometimes pushed this pace to the extreme. For example, the Navy’s facilities at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard provided logistics resources for its support during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. This required a constant and heavy workload for the shipyard.
Similarly, over the fifteen years following the war, the Navy retrenched to tackle a major backlog of deferred maintenance on a host of tired ships–thus there was not a reduction of industrial effort at Navy shipyards that one might have expected. In the 1980s, while pursuing the achievement of a 600-ship combatant fleet, the Navy simultaneuously began downsizing the number of active shipyards it ran. This caused additional work to shift onto the remaining operating shipyards.
The workers in the various shipyard shops worked side by side to accomplish the needed repairs to the naval fleet, during both war and times of peace. The insulation shop workers did their work while other trades were nearby. The asbestos-filled debris they created was often left behind, exposing others until the material could be removed before the job ended. Each of these workers faces the risk of contracting mesothelioma because of their exposure to this deadly hazard.
