Asbestos In Shipyards

Todd Shipyards San Francisco

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 opened a smaller shipyard to supplement the Oakland yard. This facility was just located inside the mouth of the Golden Gate in San Francisco Bay. This facility was an annex to the larger Alameda facility in Oakland, and like the Oakland yard operated as a dry dock and repair facility into the 1980s. The two facilities jointly concentrated on the repair and maintenance of a large variety of commercial vessels, including tugboats, freighters, and fishing boats. Between 1949 and 1959, the yards jointly took on many major commercial 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 three freighters to carry cargo vans. In addition, the San Francisco yard was involved over the years in many repairs for the US Navy.

Like the Oakland yard, the San Francisco site has never completely closed, but with an eventual slow down in shipbuilding, repair, and conversion orders, it has been mostly leased to private developers for industrial warehouse purposes.

In common with many shipyards prior to the introduction of modern safety standards, workers at the 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, and the enclosed spaces in which they worked contributed to the level of exposure. 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 (an inflammation of the lungs), 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.

Both the Alameda and San Francisco facilities have been at the center of a number of asbestos and mesothelioma related legal actions. While the company's bankruptcy and financial reorganization 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.

Todd Pacific Shipyards has continued to deal 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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