Hull Maintenance Technician: Toxic Exposure and VA Claims

Ships built through the mid 1970s used asbestos to insulate boilers, steam pipes, and hot water pipes, and asbestos appeared in gaskets, lagging, and packing throughout the hull. HT work orders routinely required cutting into insulated piping, stripping old lagging, grinding flanges, and replacing gaskets, which released asbestos fibers into poorly ventilated compartments. The VA specifically lists shipyard work, insulation work, and demolition among the activities with asbestos exposure risk, and repair availabilities placed HTs alongside civilian shipyard trades doing exactly that work. Learn more about asbestos exposure in the military.

Arc welding and thermal cutting vaporize metal, and hot work on stainless steel and chromium alloys generates hexavalent chromium fume. The National Cancer Institute lists welding and chromate painting among the industries with the highest hexavalent chromium exposures and links occupational exposure to increased risks of lung cancer and cancers of the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses. Welding, brazing, and cutting were core daily HT tasks, performed on deck plating, piping, brackets, and fittings, often overhead or inside compartments where fume lingered instead of dispersing, and repaired metal was then coated with primers and paints.

Cadmium resists corrosion and has been widely used in metal coatings, pigments, and plated hardware, and ATSDR notes that exposure to cadmium happens mostly in the workplace. Heating, brazing, or torch cutting metal that carries cadmium coatings can put that cadmium into the air an HT breathes. Breathing high levels of cadmium can severely damage the lungs, long-term exposure to lower levels builds up in the kidneys and can cause kidney disease, and the Department of Health and Human Services has determined that cadmium and cadmium compounds are known human carcinogens.

Metal must be cleaned before it can be welded, brazed, or painted, and Navy metal and pipe shops used industrial solvents to strip grease from parts, fittings, and tools. Trichloroethylene (TCE) served for decades as a standard solvent for removing grease from metal parts. ATSDR reports strong evidence that TCE can cause kidney cancer, with additional concerns about liver cancer and malignant lymphoma, and HHS, IARC, and the EPA all classify it as carcinogenic to humans. Using solvents inside a shop or closed compartment with limited airflow raises the inhaled dose. See TCE exposure in the military.

NIOSH defines a confined space as one with limited openings for entry and exit and unfavorable natural ventilation that could contain or produce dangerous air contaminants, listing storage tanks, process vessels, boilers, and pipelines among its examples. A warship is full of such spaces: fuel and ballast tanks, voids, cofferdams, bilges, and chain lockers. HTs entered them to weld cracked structure, repair piping, and maintain ballast and sanitation systems, so the same fume and vapor hazards produced in open shop work were generated inside spaces where contaminants accumulate instead of dispersing.