Asbestos Exposure in Oil Refinery Workers

Oil refinery workers are particularly known to be exposed to asbestos due to the high pressure systems that occur in oil refineries, the applications that they use, and to many of these corporations, asbestos was a top choice for them because it was able to withstand high heat, high temperatures, and endure these kind of pressures. Whether you were a mechanic who’s working on pipes and pipe fitting or if you’re working on insulation, you’re working on pumps, valves, gaskets, you name it, these products throughout the 20th century mostly contained asbestos. What you’re talking about the high pressure systems and the heat systems, that’s a common theme in almost all asbestos exposure cases. Asbestos was a particularly resilient mineral against heat and that’s why it was so popular back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. It was very useful in those types of operations that involve high heat, whether it’s on a navy ship, the high heat pipes, whether it’s on car brakes or whatever, the boilers, turbines, all of those types of operations involve heat. And so asbestos was almost always used as some type of an insulation or barrier, for example, on navy ships, it was used extensively until through the 1970s to prevent fires on ships because it was a very heat resistant mineral. So like Abby was talking about the same thing applies to the oil refinery business. It principally involves those types of occupations that involve a lot of heat. So even if you weren’t hands on working with these asbestos containing products, but if you even worked in these oil refineries in general, it goes back to what we were talking about the secondhand exposure, just being around and in the vicinity of asbestos fibers that are manipulated and such that they end up in the air, you could have also been exposed that way too.