Asbestos Exposure Aboard the USS Amphion (AR-13)
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She was not a warship in the conventional sense. She carried no torpedoes, launched no aircraft, and never charged an enemy line. But the USS Amphion (AR-13) was, in her own way, as essential to American naval power as any destroyer or cruiser in the fleet. Designed and built to carry out a primary mission of making emergency and routine repairs to ships of the fleet during periods of technical availability, Amphion was equipped with a wide variety of repair shops: shipfitter, carpentry, pipe and copper, sheet metal, welding, canvas, watch, optical, foundry, and in short, facilities that employed skilled craftsmen capable of repairing hardware from precision watches to heavy machinery and hulls.
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USS Amphion (AR-13) was the lead ship of her class of repair ship built for the United States Navy during World War II. She was laid down on 20 September 1944 at Tampa, Florida, by the Tampa Shipbuilding Company, launched on 15 May 1945, and commissioned on 30 January 1946, under the command of Captain Noble W. Abrahams, USN. She displaced 17,600 long tons at full load, stretched 492 feet from bow to stern, and carried a complement of 921 officers and enlisted men. Her propulsion plant consisted of a Westinghouse Curtis turbine driving a single screw, capable of 18.4 knots.
For twenty-five years, the Amphion served as one of the Navy’s most vital support assets, keeping the fleet operational across two oceans and through some of the most consequential decades of American military history. What she also did, unwittingly, was expose her crew and the hundreds of sailors who came aboard for repairs to one of the most dangerous occupational hazards of the twentieth century: asbestos.
A Floating Shipyard Built with Asbestos
The USS Amphion was, in every meaningful sense, a shipyard that could sail. Her workshops were staffed by skilled artificers capable of repairing virtually any piece of equipment in the fleet. Her modern engineering plant could generate enough electricity for not only herself but ships moored alongside undergoing repairs. Her distilling plant could produce water for herself and for other vessels. This extraordinary self-sufficiency was the Amphion’s defining characteristic, and it made her one of the most heavily equipped and mechanically complex vessels in the Navy’s auxiliary fleet.
It also made her one of the most thoroughly saturated with asbestos. Asbestos was widely used in Navy repair ships due to its fire-resistant and durable qualities. It was found in various areas of these ships, including engine rooms, boilers, turbines, gaskets, electrical wiring, deck tiles, and bulkheads. On a vessel as large and as mechanically complex as the Amphion, with a propulsion plant large enough to power not only itself but neighboring ships, and workshops operating machinery of every conceivable kind, the scope of asbestos contamination was correspondingly vast.
The U.S. Navy used more than 300 asbestos products and parts on ships for several decades, from the 1930s to the early 1980s. Asbestos exposure was a real risk for anyone who served on or worked on these ships. For the Amphion, commissioned in 1946 and decommissioned in 1971, this meant a quarter-century of continuous asbestos exposure for a crew that routinely numbered more than 900 men.
The Unique Hazard of a Repair Ship
The USS Amphion’s asbestos exposure problem was not simply that of any other naval vessel of her era, significant as that baseline already was. It was magnified, fundamentally and dramatically, by the nature of her mission.
Ordinary warships contained asbestos in their own insulation, gaskets, and fittings. The men who maintained those ships were exposed when they serviced their own equipment. But the Amphion’s crew did not merely maintain their own ship’s equipment. They repaired the equipment of every vessel that came alongside for a period of technical availability. Every destroyer, cruiser, submarine, and auxiliary ship that moored next to the Amphion and opened its machinery spaces for the Amphion’s artificers to work in brought with it its own load of asbestos-containing equipment, insulation, and components.
Personnel aboard any repair ship, or civilians that provided shipyard maintenance, repair or deconstruction, were at risk of asbestos exposure. The Amphion’s skilled tradespeople, working in the engineering spaces and machinery compartments of visiting vessels, cut through asbestos-containing pipe insulation to access valves and pumps. They scraped old asbestos gaskets to install new ones. They worked in boiler rooms insulated floor to ceiling with asbestos-containing block insulation, in turbine spaces wrapped in asbestos blankets, and in electrical compartments lined with asbestos-insulated cable.
Then they returned to the Amphion, carrying the fibers of those ships on their clothing, their tools, and their skin. And then another vessel came alongside, and the process began again.
Regular maintenance, including replacing pipe lagging and gasket packing, added exposure on top of the baseline. For the Amphion’s repair crews, there was no baseline in the conventional sense. Their work created continuous, compounding exposure across every deployment and every period of fleet support operations.
Twenty-Five Years of Service Across Two Oceans
The breadth of the Amphion’s service record meant that her crew accumulated asbestos exposure across an extraordinary range of vessels and locations. Following shakedown in the Chesapeake Bay area and availability at her builder’s yard, Amphion joined the Atlantic Fleet’s service force and was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia. Operating at and out of Norfolk and Newport, Rhode Island, for the first decade of her service, she provided her vital repair services principally on the east coast of the United States.
During the summers of 1957 and 1958, Amphion deployed to the Mediterranean, servicing ships of the 6th Fleet and visiting ports in France, Greece, Crete, Sicily, and the Balearic Islands. Through the 1960s she operated along the Atlantic coast of the United States. In 1965, she supported naval contingency operations off the Dominican Republic; and, in 1968, she visited ports in Scotland and England.
This capability was particularly crucial during times of heightened activity like the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where there was a demand for operational ships. The ability of the Amphion to carry out repairs at sea or in deployed locations greatly bolstered the Navy’s logistical flexibility and combat readiness. Throughout these decades of service, the Amphion’s crew repaired ships that had seen combat, ships that had been at sea for months without yard availability, and ships whose asbestos-containing equipment was worn, degraded, and friable. Degraded asbestos releases far more fiber than intact asbestos, and working on war-worn combat vessels meant working with materials in their most hazardous possible state.
Amphion departed Norfolk for the last time under the stars and stripes on 18 August 1971. After visiting Recife, Brazil from 29 to 31 August, and Mombasa, Kenya from 18 to 22 September, the repair ship reached her destination, Bandar Abbas, Iran, on 28 September. Decommissioned on 2 October 1971, Amphion was turned over to the Imperial Iranian Navy on that day. She was later renamed IIS Chah Bahar and ultimately sank at her berth in Bandar Abbas, Iran, on an unknown date.
Who Was at Risk Aboard the Amphion
The range of personnel exposed to asbestos aboard the USS Amphion was broader than on virtually any other type of naval vessel, for two reasons. First, the Amphion’s own crew was large and diverse, encompassing the full range of ratings needed to operate a 492-foot naval vessel as well as the specialized tradespeople who staffed her workshops. Second, the sailors from visiting ships who came aboard for repairs, or whose vessels came alongside for the Amphion’s artificers to work in, also faced exposure.
The U.S. Navy used asbestos on every class of ship built between the 1930s and early 1980s. A 2019 International Journal of Radiation Biology study of more than 114,000 U.S. Navy veterans found significantly elevated mesothelioma mortality rates among engineering and machinery personnel. Machinist’s mates, boiler technicians, pipefitters, fire control technicians and water tenders had the highest mesothelioma death rates in the study, confirming that the heaviest exposure occurred in engineering spaces below deck.
For the Amphion’s specialist repair crews, working in engineering spaces below deck was not an occasional assignment but a daily reality. A pipefitter aboard the Amphion did not simply maintain his own ship’s piping. He repaired the piping of every ship that came alongside, across a career that could span a decade or more of continuous repair ship service.
Electricians who re-ran cables and rewired equipment aboard visiting ships were exposed to asbestos-insulated electrical components. Sheet metal workers who modified ductwork and ventilation systems encountered asbestos-containing insulation board and fireproofing. Welders who worked in the machinery spaces of damaged vessels disturbed asbestos materials simply by the heat their torches generated, releasing fibers into confined spaces below deck. And the laborers who assisted all these skilled tradespeople and cleaned up after their work breathed the same air.
The Knowledge That Was Kept from the Fleet
The manufacturers of the asbestos-containing products that were installed throughout the USS Amphion and the ships she serviced had access to decades of medical evidence linking their products to serious and fatal lung disease. They chose not to share that evidence with the sailors who handled those products. Manufacturers hid the deadly health risks of asbestos, so U.S. Navy veterans thought the substance was safe for decades.
The Amphion’s skilled artificers went about their work in good faith, believing that the materials they worked with were simply the tools of their trade. No one told them to wear respirators. No one told them to change their clothes before returning to the ship’s berthing compartments. No one warned the sailors from visiting vessels that the work being done on their ships was releasing a carcinogen into the air of the compartments where they worked and lived.
A Disease that Takes Decades to Develop
Mesothelioma is an aggressive and incurable cancer of the tissue lining surrounding the lungs, abdomen, or heart, caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure. One of its defining characteristic is the length of time it takes to develop. The disease’s latency period can span 10 to 60 years between initial exposure and first diagnosis.
A machinist’s mate who served aboard the Amphion in the 1950s and repaired fleet vessels through the Mediterranean deployments of 1957 and 1958 may have retired from a full naval career, raised a family, and lived decades in apparent good health before a diagnosis of mesothelioma.
Navy veterans are at a high risk of developing mesothelioma because of the amount of asbestos the United States military used. Veterans were exposed to asbestos while performing their job duties aboard ships in the Navy or Coast Guard. For the men of the Amphion, whose jobs placed them in sustained, daily contact with asbestos-laden equipment aboard their own ship and every vessel they serviced, that risk was not merely elevated. It was compounded with every repair job, every period of technical availability, every ship that came alongside.
VA Benefits and Legal Compensation
Veterans who have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or another asbestos-related illness following service aboard the USS Amphion have two primary avenues for support: VA benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs, and legal compensation through civil litigation against the manufacturers of the asbestos-containing products to which they were exposed.
While you cannot sue the military or government for exposure to asbestos on Navy ships, you may be able to sue private companies that made the products you were exposed to. Pursuing that compensation does not affect VA benefits. An experienced asbestos attorney who specializes in Navy veteran claims can review service records, identify the specific manufacturers whose products were present aboard the Amphion and the vessels she serviced, and pursue compensation through personal injury litigation or asbestos trust fund claims, typically at no upfront cost.
Accessing these funds requires acting within the relevant statutes of limitations, which govern asbestos claims and can close the window for recovery.
