Asbestos In Shipyards

Todd Shipyards Oakland

The Todd Pacific Shipyards Company, based in Seattle, Washington, has acquired and operated a number of shipbuilding and repair facilities on the West Coast since 1916. While the company has grown and shrunk over the years, it continues to be a major player in the shipbuilding industry.

In 1949, Todd Shipyards acquired the former United Shipbuilding site in San Francisco Bay, which adjoined the Oakland Inner Harbor on the south between the Naval Supply Center Annex and Main Street, and operated it as a dry dock and repair facility into the 1980s The Oakland facility concentrated on the repair and maintenance of a large variety of commercial vessels, including tugboats, freighters, and fishing boats. Between 1949 and 1959, the yard took on many major repair and conversion projects. Some of these included a large repair job on the engines of the Swedish tanker Atlantic Queen and the conversion of freighters to carry cargo vans. Throughout the 1960's the yard took on many "jumboizing" projects including four Keystone T-2 tankers. The yard gained notoriety by constructing the largest drilling boat ever to hit the water. In the 1970s, the yard was kept busy with a rush of orders for Navy repair work. The yard has never completely closed, but with an eventual slow down in shipbuilding, repair, and conversion orders, the yard has been mostly leased to private developers for industrial warehouse purposes.

The former Todd Shipyard facility is currently being examined for eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places. The facility as a whole comprises an assortment of structures built over a span of more than 50 years, for a wide variety of purposes, in a wide variety of designs, materials, and workmanship.

In common with many shipyards prior to the introduction of modern safety standards, workers at the Alameda/San Francisco shipyard were routinely exposed to asbestos, which was commonly used as fireproofing and insulation material for the boilers and steam pipes on ships. Workers were rarely issued protective equipment such as gloves and respirators to protect them from asbestos fibers. Exposure to asbestos fibers has been established as a strong precursor to the development of lung cancer, asbestosis ( a crippling inflammation of the lungs), and mesothelioma, a virulent cancer of the pleural membranes of the chest and abdomen.

Despite research dating from the late 1800s that showed a link between asbestos and various illnesses, and despite legislation and legal actions resulting from that research that date from the 1920s, industries were slow to change working conditions at their facilities and exposure to asbestos continued. Tens of thousands of deaths and illnesses of former shipyard employees have been attributed to asbestosis, mesothelioma, and other conditions related to asbestos exposure. Over the last thirty years, legal actions related to these damages have resulted in many hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of jury awards and settlements.

The Alameda / San Francisco facilities have been at the center of a number of asbestos and mesothelioma related legal actions. While the company's bankruptcy in 1990 slowed the progress of many of the lawsuits, claims for the damage caused by the shipyard's practices related to asbestos and those of its suppliers are still being filed and acted upon.

As of 2003, Todd Pacific Shipyards revealed that it was still dealing with over 350 separate lawsuits involving over 500 claimants, although these were spread over all of the company's West coast facilities.

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