Mesothelioma and asbestos exposure in Pittsburgh

For most of the twentieth century, mills along the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers produced a large share of the nation's steel. U.S. Steel's Homestead and Edgar Thomson works and the Jones and Laughlin mills employed tens of thousands of people across the valleys. Furnaces, ladles and hot-metal equipment were lined and insulated with asbestos-containing materials, and workers wore asbestos gloves, aprons and leggings to protect themselves from heat and sparks. Relining a furnace or ladle meant tearing out old material and installing new, and the dust from that work hung in the air of the mill for whole shifts.

The region's heavy industry went well beyond the mills. Westinghouse manufactured turbines, generators and electrical equipment in East Pittsburgh, and power stations up and down the rivers ran asbestos-insulated boilers. Bricklayers, millwrights, boilermakers, electricians and pipefitters moved between these sites during repairs and outages, often working for several employers in a single year. When many mills closed in the 1980s, demolition and salvage work disturbed decades of accumulated asbestos insulation once more. As a result, Pittsburgh work histories are often long and complicated, and a thorough claim usually involves more than one workplace and many product manufacturers.