Asbestos Podcast EP26 Transcript

Episode 26: The Shipyards Never Sleep

Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.

Episode Information
Series	Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making
Season	1
Episode	26
Title	The Shipyards Never Sleep
Arc	Arc 6 — The War Effort (Episode 2 of Arc)
Produced by	Charles Fletcher
Research and writing	Charles Fletcher with Claude AI
Listen	Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Amazon Music

Episode Summary

December 1941. Howard Zinn is nineteen years old — an apprentice shipfitter walking through the gates of Brooklyn Navy Yard for the first time. He would later become one of America's most influential historians, the author of A People's History of the United States. But on that December morning, he was a young man entering what he would later describe as "a kind of nightmare of sounds, noise, and smells" — crawling into four-by-four-by-four-foot compartments accessible only through a small hole in the hull, sweating through salt pills in summer heat, breathing air filled with asbestos dust from the shift before his and the shift before that.

By December 1943, 1.7 million shipyard workers labored around the clock in conditions like those Zinn described — three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the duration of the war. An Iowa-class battleship contained 465 long tons of thermal insulation. A destroyer carried 85,000 to 90,000 pounds. The Maritime Commission built over 5,500 vessels between 1939 and 1945. Every one of them was packed with asbestos. Every trade that worked in the yards breathed it: pipe coverers handling insulation that was 85–95% asbestos by content, welders wearing asbestos protective gear, boilermakers and electricians and carpenters working in compartments where the dust accumulated shift by shift.

In 1944, Dr. Philip Drinker — Harvard professor and Chief Health Consultant to the Navy — documented dust counts at Bath Iron Works as "very much higher than anyone would recommend." The Navy Bureau of Medicine conducted its own measurements and found concentrations "well above the accepted maximum of eight million particles of dust per cubic foot." Their conclusion, in a 1944 internal letter: "a dangerous hazard to personnel."

That letter never reached the workers on the shipyard floor. Clarence Borel — industrial insulation worker, thirty-three years, 1936 to 1969 — testified under oath that no one ever told him asbestos could cause serious or terminal illness. He thought the dust was "bothersome." He believed it "dissolves as it hits your lungs" — like sugar in water. He learned the truth in January 1969. He died June 3, 1970, four months later. His case became Borel v. Fibreboard, the landmark asbestos liability decision.

Today, thirty percent of all mesothelioma diagnoses are veterans. The 20–50 year latency clock is the reason: workers exposed in 1943 wouldn't develop disease until 1963 at the earliest. The executives who signed the 1944 memos were retired before the workers they managed started dying. Cases from wartime shipyard exposure are still being diagnosed today.

Key Takeaways

465 long tons of asbestos insulation per Iowa-class battleship; 85,000–90,000 pounds per destroyer. Over 5,500 vessels built 1939–1945. The 1944 War Production Board described asbestos textiles as "a non-substitutable component in all combat vessels." There was no alternative; the fleet was built with asbestos or not at all. Three shifts, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Seventy thousand workers per day at Brooklyn Navy Yard at peak production. Forty percent logging more than 48 hours per week by 1942. Time-weighted "safe" exposure averages were meaningless for workers in asbestos dust for 60–70 hours per week. Every trade was exposed. Pipe coverers handled 85–95% asbestos felt. Welders wore asbestos gloves, aprons, leggings, and blankets. Boilermakers worked in compartments where insulators had just been. Electricians handled asbestos wire insulation and tape. Carpenters cut Transite board (asbestos-cement panels). Court records: "Asbestos was essentially everywhere." The 1944 Navy Bureau of Medicine letter: "dangerous hazard to personnel." Dust counts during amosite felt application were "well above the accepted maximum of eight million particles per cubic foot." U.S. Public Health Service safe threshold was five million. The letter went to supervisors. Workers never saw it. Clarence Borel: "blowed this dust out of my nostrils by handfuls." Thirty-three years of exposure. He thought it dissolved. He "never realized it could cause any serious or terminal illness." Learned the truth January 1969. Died June 3, 1970 — four months later. His case: Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp. (5th Cir. 1973). The information gap: memos up the chain, nothing down to the floor. What officials documented internally from 1930 to 1944: asbestosis, hazardous dust counts, dangerous conditions. What workers on the shipyard floor were told: nothing. The system contained the information at the supervisory level throughout the war. 30% of mesothelioma diagnoses are veterans; ~1,000 shipyard/Navy cases per year. The 20–50-year latency period means wartime exposures are still producing diagnoses today.

Key Concepts

The Scale Problem: Why Time-Weighted Averages Failed Shipyard Workers

Occupational health standards for asbestos exposure in the 1940s were built around a model of eight-hour-day, five-day-week exposure. The U.S. Public Health Service's five-million-particle threshold — and the Navy's more permissive eight-million threshold — were derived from and calibrated for that exposure pattern.

Wartime shipyard workers did not work eight-hour days. Bureau of Labor Statistics records show that by 1942, forty percent of Brooklyn Navy Yard workers were logging more than forty-eight hours per week. After Roosevelt extended working hours for war industries in February 1943, the pattern intensified. Workers in sixty- to seventy-hour weeks were receiving proportionally higher cumulative asbestos exposure than any industrial health standard had been designed to address. The standards weren't wrong for the scenario they were built for. They were simply irrelevant to the actual scenario: continuous, overlapping exposure across three daily shifts in spaces where the previous shift's dust hadn't cleared.

The Borel Testimony: The Worker's Epistemology of Asbestos

Clarence Borel's deposition testimony is the most cited individual account in American asbestos litigation history — not because it is unusual, but because it is representative. What Borel believed about asbestos — that the dust was bothersome but not dangerous, that it dissolved in the lungs, that no one had told him otherwise — reflects the information environment that existed for the vast majority of workers exposed to asbestos during the wartime buildup.

The epistemological structure of Borel's testimony is precise: he testifies not only to what he didn't know but to what he actively believed. He did not merely lack information about asbestos danger; he held a specific, incorrect belief — that asbestos dissolved in the body like sugar in water — that filled the void left by the absence of accurate information. That belief was not arrived at randomly. It was the belief available to a person who worked daily with a substance and was never told anything to the contrary. Workers who interact with a material every day for decades develop theories about that material. In the absence of hazard information, those theories tend toward benign explanations. The dissolution belief is internally logical given what Borel was allowed to observe and what he was not told.

The Fifth Circuit's treatment of Borel's situation established that manufacturers had a duty to warn of known hazards — and that the absence of worker knowledge, in this context, was not the worker's failure but the manufacturer's and employer's.

The 1944 Letter and the Structural Information Gap

The 1944 Navy Bureau of Medicine letter documenting "a dangerous hazard to personnel" is not an anomaly in the wartime record. It sits within a series of internal documents — the 1941 Stephenson memo, the 1941 New York Navy Yard studies, the 1944 Drinker report — that collectively establish that the Navy's own medical and technical personnel were documenting hazardous asbestos conditions throughout the war.

The structural question raised by the existence of these documents is not whether the Navy knew. It did. The question is why the documentation of hazardous conditions at the supervisory level did not produce worker notification at the operational level. Multiple explanations coexist in the record: the priority of wartime production over occupational safety, the precedent established by FDR's statement that Public Health Service inspections might "cause disturbance in the labor element," the institutional culture of the Navy medical corps during wartime, and the absence of any regulatory mechanism that would have required downward communication of hazard information to workers.

The result: a paper trail of internal documentation running from 1938 through the end of the war, clearly establishing that the hazard was known and documented, combined with a complete absence of worker notification. The information existed. It did not travel down.

Borel v. Fibreboard: The Legal Architecture That Followed

Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation (493 F.2d 1076, 5th Cir. 1973) did not emerge from the shipyard context specifically — Borel worked at refineries and other industrial sites as well as shipyards — but its legal significance is inseparable from the wartime asbestos exposure that produced the disease that killed him.

The Fifth Circuit's ruling established several principles that remain foundational in asbestos litigation: that manufacturers of asbestos-containing products are strictly liable for failure to warn of known hazards; that this liability attaches even when a worker's exposure involved products from multiple manufacturers; and that the continuing-tort doctrine applies to latent occupational diseases, meaning the statute of limitations begins to run when the plaintiff knows or should know of both the disease and its occupational cause — not at the time of first exposure. For asbestos diseases with 20–50-year latency periods, this last point was essential to making litigation viable.

Borel filed suit in 1969, the year he learned his diagnosis. He died in 1970, before his case reached the appellate level. The Fifth Circuit issued its ruling in 1973. The decision that changed asbestos law was decided three years after the man it was named for had died of the disease it was about.

Full Transcript

Cold Open: Howard Zinn's Testimony

Host 1: December 1941. Brooklyn Navy Yard. Howard Zinn is nineteen years old. An apprentice shipfitter. His first day on the job.

Host 2: Howard Zinn. The historian.

Host 1: The historian. But right now he's just a kid walking through the gate for the first time. Here's how he described it, decades later, in an oral history interview.

Host 2: Okay.

Host 1: "The first time I walked out on the ways, I was walking into a kind of nightmare of sounds, noise, and smells."

Host 2: A nightmare.

Host 1: "The smells of working on a ship are amazing smells. The smells of the welding, especially when they were welding galvanized steel. Galvanized steel is covered with zinc. And when zinc burns, it gives off the worst smell in the world."

Host 2: And that's just the welding.

Host 1: "In the summer it was very, very hot. Because we were wearing protective clothing. They gave us salt pills in the summertime. Because we were sweating, sweating."

Host 2: Salt pills.

Host 1: "And we were sweating not only because of the heat but because a lot of our job required us to crawl into the hull into these little compartments which were four by four by four."

Host 2: Four feet by four feet by four feet.

Host 1: "Which had a little hole through which you could go into this four by four by four compartment to work." That's where they built ships. That's where they built the fleet that won the war. And that's where one point seven million Americans breathed in dust that wouldn't kill them for twenty years.

Host 2: This is Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making. Episode 26: The Shipyards Never Sleep.

The Scale of the Buildup

Host 1: After Pearl Harbor, American shipyards didn't sleep. Three shifts. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

Host 2: For how long?

Host 1: For the duration. At Brooklyn Navy Yard alone, seventy thousand people reporting for work each day at peak production. The yard was a city unto itself.

Host 2: Three shifts. So workers coming in at—

Host 1: Day shift starting at six or seven AM. Swing shift at two or three PM. Graveyard starting at ten or eleven at night.

Host 2: And the insulation work — the asbestos work —

Host 1: Happening around the clock. A day-shift worker might enter a compartment that had been filled with asbestos dust by the night shift. By the swing shift before that. The dust didn't clock out.

Host 2: And overtime?

Host 1: Bureau of Labor Statistics records show that by 1942, forty percent of Brooklyn Navy Yard workers were logging more than forty-eight hours a week. President Roosevelt extended working hours for war industries in February 1943.

Host 2: More hours, more exposure.

Host 1: More hours, more exposure. And the time-weighted averages that industrial hygienists would later use to calculate "safe" exposure? Meaningless. Because the workers were in it for sixty, seventy hours a week.

Sponsor Break 1

Host 2: This episode is brought to you by Danziger and De Llano. Because every diagnosis deserves a team who's been through it. Dan-Dell dot com.

The Trades and What They Breathed

Host 1: Let's talk about who was actually handling the asbestos. And what they were handling. First — the pipe coverers. The insulators. The workers applying asbestos directly to pipes, boilers, turbines.

Host 2: The highest exposure.

Host 1: The highest exposure. At shipyards like Bath Iron Works in Maine, there were dedicated pipe covering shops. Dr. Philip Drinker — Harvard professor, Chief Health Consultant to the Navy — surveyed them in 1944. His finding: workers cutting and pounding asbestos matting in conditions that created "a very real asbestos hazard."

Host 2: What were they cutting?

Host 1: Felt insulation. Asbestos content: eighty-five to ninety-five percent.

Host 2: That's not insulation with asbestos. That's asbestos with insulation.

Host 1: Exactly. And in some shipyards — Brooklyn, for example — there were asbestos mixing rooms. Workers combining raw asbestos fibers with magnesia, mixing them by hand.

Host 2: By hand.

Host 1: By hand. Then there were the boilermakers. They weren't applying insulation directly, but they were working in the confined spaces where insulators had just been. Or where insulators were working alongside them. Court testimony describes it: "In the naval shipyards, workers of all trades in small compartments breathed the heavy asbestos dust created by insulators and boilermakers."

Host 2: "Heavy asbestos dust in small compartments."

Host 1: Now add the welders.

Host 2: How were welders exposed? They weren't handling insulation.

Host 1: They were wearing it. Asbestos welding gloves. Asbestos aprons. Asbestos leggings. Asbestos blankets used as fire shields. And more than that — welders worked in the same confined spaces as insulators. They welded near freshly-applied insulation.

Host 2: So the protective gear was asbestos, and the environment was asbestos.

Host 1: And then the electricians — asbestos wire insulation, asbestos electrical tape. The carpenters — cutting asbestos-cement panels. Transite board. The machinists — brake and clutch materials. Gaskets. The reality, documented in court records: "Asbestos was essentially everywhere."

Host 2: How much asbestos are we actually talking about? Per ship?

Host 1: An Iowa-class battleship. Four hundred sixty-five long tons of thermal insulation.

Host 2: Four hundred sixty-five tons.

Host 1: A destroyer. Eighty-five thousand to ninety thousand pounds of thermal insulation alone. Not counting pipe hanger liners, gaskets, electrical cables. And how many ships were built? The Maritime Commission program built over five thousand five hundred vessels between 1939 and 1945. Liberty ships: two thousand seven hundred ten. Victory ships: five hundred thirty-one. Each one packed with asbestos. Each one built by workers who would carry the fibers home in their lungs.

Host 2: So that's the exposure.

Host 1: Now let's look at what officials were writing — during the same years, in the same shipyards.

Host 2: We covered some of this last episode. The Stephenson memo. Commander warning the Surgeon General that "we are not protecting the men as we should."

Host 1: March 1941. Before Pearl Harbor. But it didn't stop. 1944. Dr. Drinker reports to the Navy Bureau of Ships that dust counts at Bath Iron Works were "very much higher than anyone would recommend."

Host 2: And the Navy's response?

Host 1: A 1944 letter from the Navy Bureau of Medicine to the Supervisor of Shipbuilding. The Bureau had conducted dust counts during application of amosite felt insulation. Their finding: concentrations "well above the accepted maximum of eight million particles of dust per cubic foot."

Host 2: What was the accepted maximum?

Host 1: The U.S. Public Health Service had established a threshold of five million particles per cubic foot back in 1938. The Navy used eight million as their maximum. The shipboard measurements were well above that.

Host 2: And their conclusion?

Host 1: "A dangerous hazard to personnel." In 1944. While one point seven million workers were laboring in those conditions.

Sponsor Break 2

Host 2: If someone in your family worked as a pipefitter, boilermaker, or electrician in the forties — the exposure records exist. Danziger and De Llano has spent three decades finding documentation companies claimed was lost. Dan-Dell dot com.

What the Workers Knew: Clarence Borel

Host 1: So that's what the Navy knew. What Drinker documented. What the Bureau of Medicine wrote in internal correspondence. Now let's talk about what the workers knew.

Host 2: They knew the dust was there. They couldn't not know — you couldn't see across the rooms.

Host 1: They knew it was there. They didn't know what it was doing to them. Clarence Borel. Industrial insulation worker. Thirty-three years, 1936 to 1969. Shipyards and refineries along the Texas-Louisiana border. His deposition testimony — given under oath, in the lawsuit that would change asbestos law forever — describes what he believed about the dust.

Host 2: Okay.

Host 1: "You just move them just a little and there is going to be dust, and I blowed this dust out of my nostrils by handfuls at the end of the day."

Host 2: By handfuls.

Host 1: "Trying to use water too. I even used Mentholatum in my nostrils to keep some of the dust from going down in my throat, but it is impossible to get rid of all of it."

Host 2: So he knew he was breathing it. Every day.

Host 1: Every day. For thirty-three years. And here's what he believed about what it was doing to him. He thought the dust was "bad." He thought it was "bothersome." But — and this is his sworn testimony — he "never realized it could cause any serious or terminal illness."

Host 2: He didn't know it could kill him.

Host 1: He didn't know it could kill him. And here's the part that broke me. When asked what he thought happened to the dust once he breathed it in, Borel said he believed it "dissolves as it hits your lungs."

Host 2: He thought it dissolved.

Host 1: He thought it dissolved. Like sugar in water. Like it just... went away. That's what the workers believed. The dust that was coating their lungs, embedding in their tissue, starting the twenty-year clock toward mesothelioma — they thought it dissolved.

Host 2: Nobody told them otherwise?

Host 1: Borel's testimony is explicit on this point. No one — not employers, not manufacturers, not the Navy — ever told him asbestos dust could cause fatal disease. He learned about asbestosis in January 1969, when he was hospitalized with breathing problems. February 1970, they removed his right lung. Found mesothelioma. He died June 3, 1970. Four months after learning what the dust had actually done.

Host 2: Thirty-three years of exposure. Four months of knowing the truth.

Host 1: And Borel wasn't unique. He was typical. The New York Times would later report that during World War II, asbestos dust clouded shipyards so thickly that "one often could not see across the rooms they worked in." One point seven million workers. And they thought the dust dissolved.

Host 2: That's what they walked into. Every day. For years.

Host 1: Let's put the timeline side by side. 1930: Merewether and Price establish, in the British medical literature, that asbestos causes asbestosis. 1935: Sumner Simpson writes that "the less said about asbestos, the better off we are." 1938: U.S. Public Health Service establishes five million particles per cubic foot as the safe limit. 1939: Navy Medical Officer H.E. Jenkins recommends respirators for shipyard workers. 1941: Commander Stephenson warns Admiral McIntire that "we are not protecting the men as we should." 1943: Navy issues safety standards calling for ventilation, respirators, medical exams. 1944: Navy Bureau of Medicine documents shipboard dust concentrations as "a dangerous hazard to personnel."

Host 2: That's the official record.

Host 1: And during the same years — 1941 to 1945 — one point seven million workers labor in conditions so dusty they can't see across rooms. They blow asbestos out of their nostrils by handfuls. They wear protective gear made of asbestos. They crawl into four-by-four-by-four compartments filled with asbestos dust. And they think it dissolves.

Host 2: How is that possible? The Navy knew. The standards existed.

Host 1: The information never reached the workers. Navy medical officers documented hazards in internal memos. The memos went up the chain of command. The workers on the shipyard floor saw nothing.

Host 2: So when workers started dying twenty years later—

Host 1: —the executives who signed the memos would be retired or dead. The workers would be grandfathers, wondering why they couldn't breathe. And the paper trail would be buried in corporate archives.

Host 2: The latency clock.

Host 1: Twenty to fifty years between exposure and diagnosis. The workers exposed in 1943 wouldn't develop disease until 1963 at the earliest. Today, thirty percent of all mesothelioma diagnoses are veterans. Nearly a thousand shipyard and Navy cases diagnosed every year.

Host 2: The shipyards built the fleet that won the war.

Host 1: And they poisoned a generation.

Sponsor Break 3

Host 2: Larry Gates grew up three blocks from the Shell refinery in Pasadena, Texas.

Host 1: The Golden Triangle.

Host 2: His father was a chemical operator. Instrument technician. Worked at Shell for years — exposed to asbestos throughout the plant.

Host 1: In his twenties and thirties, when the exposure was heaviest.

Host 2: And then?

Host 1: 1999, his father was diagnosed with mesothelioma. Dead six months later. Larry's words: "I watched him wither away from a strong, active man into a skeleton."

Host 2: And now Larry's Senior Client Advocate at Danziger and De Llano, helping families navigate VA claims and trust fund compensation.

Host 1: He's seventy-two. Currently fighting his own battle with cancer.

Host 2: When he talks to families, he's not reading from a script. He's lived both sides — as a son who lost his father, and as someone fighting the same industrial disease.

Host 2: Dan-Dell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Closing and Tease

Host 1: That's the men's story. The pipe coverers, the boilermakers, the welders, the electricians. One point seven million workers at peak production. Every one of them walking into the dust.

Host 2: But they weren't the only ones exposed.

Host 1: No, they weren't. Because starting in 1942, there was another workforce flooding into the shipyards. Women.

Host 2: Rosie the Riveter.

Host 1: By 1943, women made up thirteen percent of shipyard production workers. Thirty thousand in Portland alone. Seven thousand at Brooklyn Navy Yard. They did the same jobs. They worked in the same conditions. And when the war ended and they went home —

Host 2: — their husbands kept working. Bringing the dust home on their clothes.

Host 1: Next episode: The Women of the Shipyards. The exposure that happened on the factory floor — and the exposure that happened at the wash basin.

Host 2: Until next time. This has been Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making.

External Links

Primary Documents and Legal Records

• Veterans and Mesothelioma — Danziger & De Llano
• Mesothelioma Compensation Guide — Danziger & De Llano
• Borel v. Fibreboard, 493 F.2d 1076 (5th Cir. 1973) — Justia Federal Courts

Medical and Scientific Resources

• NCI Malignant Mesothelioma — National Cancer Institute
• NIOSH Asbestos Information — Centers for Disease Control
• Schepers 1995 AJIM (PMID: 7793430) — Asbestos cancer discoveries chronology

Compensation and Legal Resources

• Veterans Mesothelioma — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Trust Fund Payouts — Danziger & De Llano

Podcast Resources

• Episode 26: The Shipyards Never Sleep — MLNM podcast landing page
• Asbestos Podcast Hub — All episodes
• Episode 26 on Apple Podcasts
• Episode 26 on Spotify

Series Navigation

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Arc 6: The War Effort
Previous: Episode 25: The Navy Comes Calling	Episode 26: The Shipyards Never Sleep (Arc 6, Episode 2)	Next: Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards

Related Wiki Pages

• Asbestos_Podcast_EP25_Transcript — The Navy Comes Calling: Strategic Materials Act, Stephenson memo, Fleischer study
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP27_Transcript — The Women of the Shipyards: household exposure, Newhouse 1965, Jeanette Franklin
• Borel_v_Fibreboard — The landmark Fifth Circuit asbestos liability decision (1973)
• Clarence_Borel — Industrial insulation worker whose 33-year exposure and death produced the foundational case
• Asbestos_Occupational_Exposure_Quick_Reference — High-risk occupations and exposure statistics
• Asbestos_Trust_Fund_Quick_Reference — Compensation mechanisms for shipyard workers and veterans
• The_Asbestos_Podcast — Main podcast page with all episodes

About This Series

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast tracing the complete history of asbestos from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban. The series is produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP, a nationwide mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims.

Episode 26 is the second episode of Arc 6 ("The War Effort"). Episode 25 (The Navy Comes Calling) established the institutional context: the Strategic Materials Act, the Fleischer study, and the Stephenson memo. Episode 26 goes inside the yards — the workers, the trades, the dust measurements, the Borel testimony, and the information gap between what officials documented internally and what workers on the floor were allowed to know.

Approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year. Nearly 30% of mesothelioma cases involve veterans. Mesothelioma has a latency period of 20–50 years, meaning workers exposed during the 1940s shipyard buildup are still being diagnosed today. Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds for victims and their families.

If you or a loved one were exposed to asbestos through Navy service or shipyard work, contact Danziger & De Llano for a free case evaluation. Call (866) 222-9990. Available seven days a week.