Mesothelioma and asbestos exposure in New Orleans

Avondale Shipyards, on the Mississippi River just upriver from the city, was for decades one of Louisiana's largest employers, building Navy ships, cargo vessels, tankers and barges. During the Second World War, Higgins Industries built landing craft and other boats in New Orleans, employing a huge wartime workforce. Ship and boat construction involved asbestos insulation on engines, boilers and piping, and the trades worked in close quarters. Welders, shipfitters and electricians at Avondale often worked alongside insulators, so exposure spread well beyond the people who handled the materials directly, reaching riggers, laborers and supervisors as well.

The river parishes around New Orleans hold a dense concentration of refineries and chemical plants, including the Chalmette refinery and the Norco refinery. Their furnaces, towers and steam systems were insulated with asbestos for much of the twentieth century, and maintenance and turnaround crews handled it constantly. Many New Orleans workers moved between shipyards, refineries and offshore jobs over their careers, which makes local work histories long and varied. Dust carried home on work clothes exposed family members too, and household exposure remains a common basis for claims from the greater New Orleans area.