The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers (IBB) was founded on September 1, 1880 in Kansas City, Kansas, when a small group of railroad shop boilermakers organized to standardize wages and working conditions across the steam-locomotive repair shops of the transcontinental rail network. From that origin, the trade grew alongside every American industry that ran on pressurized steam — the electric utility industry, the petroleum refining industry, the chemical industry, the pulp and paper industry, the integrated steel industry, and the shipbuilding industry that supplied the merchant marine and the U.S. Navy. Boilermakers were the trade that fabricated, welded, installed, and repaired the pressure vessels that carried the steam.

The asbestos era

From roughly 1920 through the late 1970s, virtually every pressure vessel an IBB boilermaker touched was assembled with asbestos-containing materials. The reasons were industrial — asbestos-bearing refractory brick, castable refractory, and block insulation withstood the interior fireside temperatures of a boiler furnace; asbestos gasket sheet and braided asbestos rope packing sealed the manway, hand-hole, and tube-sheet joints against high-pressure steam; asbestos-fabric welder pads and burn-hood curtains protected welders and burners from spatter and radiant heat during field erection.

The reasons were also commercial — the suppliers of refractory brick and castable (Harbison-Walker, NARCO, A.P. Green, General Refractories, Plibrico, Christy), the boiler OEMs (Babcock & Wilcox, Foster Wheeler, Combustion Engineering, Riley Stoker, Erie City, Cochrane), and the gasket and packing houses (Garlock, John Crane, Anchor Packing, Flexitallic) built a specification pipeline around boilermaker work that made these products the industry standard on virtually every fossil-fired powerhouse, refinery process heater, pulp mill recovery boiler, and Navy propulsion boiler for half a century.

The trade did not choose this. Members were dispatched to jobsites where these materials were specified by boiler engineers, refractory engineers, and construction managers. They welded, fitted, torqued, gasketed, bricked, and relined according to the specifications and outage schedules of their contractors — sometimes with ventilation, often without; sometimes with respiratory protection, more often not.

Selikoff, Mount Sinai, and the boilermaker cohort

In the 1960s and 1970s, federal occupational-health research — most prominently the work of Dr. Irving Selikoff and his colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York — documented that the industrial trades exposed daily to asbestos suffered mesothelioma and asbestos-lung-cancer rates an order of magnitude above the general-population baseline. Follow-up cohort studies extending the Selikoff methodology to pressure-vessel trades — boilermakers, pipefitters, and refractory bricklayers — confirmed that boilermakers rank among the highest occupational mesothelioma-incidence trades in the United States, driven by the confined-space, high-fiber-release conditions of interior refractory tear-out, casing insulation removal, and gasket scraping during turnaround and outage work.

These findings led to OSHA’s first asbestos-exposure regulations in 1971 and to a decades-long process of substituting non-asbestos refractory, gasket, and insulation systems into boilermaker specifications. By the late 1980s, engineered ceramic-fiber refractory, non-asbestos compressed-fiber gaskets, and calcium-silicate casing insulation had replaced most asbestos-bearing materials in new construction. But the disease pipeline — driven by the 20 to 50 year latency between exposure and diagnosis — continued, and continues today, for members whose careers fell within the asbestos era.

What the trade did

Through the asbestos era, IBB boilermakers were dispatched to four broad categories of work:

  1. New pressure-vessel construction — field-erection of new utility, industrial, and marine boilers; refinery process heaters; pulp mill recovery boilers; and the associated economizers, superheaters, feedwater heaters, and drums
  2. Turnaround and outage work — periodic tube replacement, refractory relining, gasket replacement, and internal inspection during planned shutdowns at power plants, refineries, chemical plants, and mills
  3. Repair and relining — refractory tear-out and rebrick, the highest-fiber-release work in the trade, typically performed inside the furnace envelope during outages
  4. Shop fabrication — welding, forming, and assembling pressure-vessel shells, drums, tube bundles, and headers at OEM manufacturing plants (Babcock & Wilcox Beaver Falls, Alliance and Barberton OH; Foster Wheeler Livingston and Carteret NJ; Erie City Iron Works Erie PA)

Each category had its own characteristic exposure profile. Refractory rip-out and rebrick inside the firebox concentrated the highest airborne fiber concentrations the trade ever documented — hours or days spent breaking out spent refractory brick and castable inside an unventilated furnace enclosure. Gasket replacement at manway, hand-hole, and tube-sheet joints released fiber every time a hardened asbestos gasket was scraped off a flange face. Field welding under an asbestos burn hood or on an asbestos welding pad released fiber directly into the welder’s breathing zone.

Allied trades

IBB boilermakers worked alongside several allied crafts that share parts of the asbestos exposure history:

  • Heat & Frost Insulators (HFIAW) — jacketing the exterior of the boiler and steam piping with asbestos block, cement, and pipe covering
  • Pipefitters / Steamfitters (UA) — fitting the pipe headers, downcomers, and steam lines that connected to the boilermakers’ vessels
  • Refractory Bricklayers (BAC) — laying the interior refractory brick alongside boilermakers on the tear-out and rebrick cycle
  • Sheet Metal Workers (SMART) — fabricating the casing, ductwork, and breeching that finished the outer envelope
  • Millwrights — installing the auxiliary mechanical equipment tied to the pressure vessel

All five trades have documented mesothelioma rates well above the general population. Plaintiffs alleged in publicly filed U.S. asbestos personal-injury and wrongful-death litigation that these five trades shared the same jobsites, the same outage windows, and the same airborne-fiber conditions across the asbestos era.

Today

The trade today has largely transitioned to non-asbestos refractory, gasket, and insulation systems. Members who entered the apprenticeship in the late 1980s or later worked through a substantially safer materials regime. But the disease tail of the asbestos era continues. Boilermakers who entered the trade in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s — now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s — are the population now being diagnosed with mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases at the highest rates.

This site exists to document that history and, where applicable, to help affected members and families navigate the claims process under the asbestos bankruptcy trusts and state-specific litigation frameworks that compensate workers and survivors of asbestos exposure.

Free, confidential case evaluation: Speak with O’Brien Law Firm — (314) 237-3332

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