Asbestos at the New York State Power Authority Kensico Project in Westchester County

Three miles north of White Plains, where the Bronx River Parkway ends at a wall of masonry 307 feet high and 1,843 feet long, sits one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure in New York State. Kensico Dam was completed in 1917 by New York City’s Board of Water Supply. It holds 30.6 billion gallons. Nearly every drop of water that reaches a faucet in New York City passes through it first, arriving from the Catskill and Delaware Aqueducts and continuing south to Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers for distribution. For more than a century, Kensico has been the final gate in the city’s water supply.

Then, in the early 1980s, a new chapter began. Under a 1978 amendment to the Public Authorities Law that permitted the New York Power Authority to develop small-scale hydroelectric projects, NYPA looked at the enormous head of water dropping through the Kensico site and saw electricity. The Kensico Project, licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the Catskill Aqueduct, was initially built with three turbine-generator units of roughly one megawatt each. The plant came online in 1983 and delivered its output into the Consolidated Edison system. It ran for nearly three decades before being retired in 2012.

But alongside its quiet role powering a corner of Westchester, the Kensico Project carries a second history, one that unfolded not in the reservoir above but in the powerhouse below, where the workers who built, operated, maintained, and eventually shut down the facility were exposed to asbestos-containing materials that have since driven diagnoses of mesothelioma and lung cancer across the region.

A Plant Built at the Tail End of the Asbestos Era

The Kensico Project was constructed and commissioned in the early 1980s, the precise moment when the industrial world was beginning to reckon with the full scope of the asbestos crisis, but when many asbestos-containing materials were still in common use throughout power generation infrastructure. Kensico was among the first of a small fleet of hydroelectric facilities NYPA developed in that period to reduce New York State’s dependence on foreign oil, built alongside the Ashokan Project in Ulster County (1982), the Gregory B. Jarvis Plant at Hinckley Reservoir (1986), the Crescent Plant on the Mohawk River, and the Vischer Ferry Plant in Saratoga County.

Like its sister facilities, the Kensico Project was built using the same construction standards and the same materials that had defined the utility industry’s approach to power generation for decades. And asbestos was still central to those standards. It is a common misconception that asbestos was primarily a hazard of coal-fired or steam-generating plants. In truth, asbestos is also common in the majority of hydroelectric facilities in North America. Asbestos was first mined and imported for industrial use in North America in the 1850s, even before the first hydroelectric facility was built.

In a hydroelectric powerhouse, the turbines and generators that convert the energy of falling water into electricity reach significant operating temperatures, requiring thermal insulation and fireproofing throughout. The pumps, valves, piping, and electrical equipment that support those generators were built with and surrounded by asbestos-containing materials as industry standard, materials that, when disturbed during maintenance, repair, or renovation, released microscopic fibers into the air that workers inhaled.

Asbestos in Every Corner of the Powerhouse

The range of asbestos-containing materials present at a facility like the Kensico Project was broad. Generating stations produce electricity by a moving fluid (water, steam, combustion gases) or air pushing through a series of blades, creating rotation. The generator then converts the mechanical energy of the spinning blades into electrical energy. As expected, the machinery put in place to create this energy reaches extremely hot temperatures. Although health issues related to asbestos began being documented in 1906, any plant built between the 1930s and into the 1980s still used asbestos products to prevent fires and protect the machinery, as asbestos is an effective insulator for intense heat.

The three turbine-generator units at the heart of the Kensico plant were primary sources of exposure. Turbines used asbestos to insulate the inside and outside of the turbine, often in the form of blankets or thermal insulation. Turbines were connected to numerous pumps and valves which required asbestos-containing packing and gaskets. When turbines were inspected and maintained, these materials had to be disturbed, exposing power plant workers to asbestos.

The pumps and valves that regulated the enormous volume of water moving through the site presented their own persistent hazards. These pumps were insulated with asbestos on the outside of the pump. They also contained casing gaskets and flange gaskets. Pumps also used packing in glands to seal the pump. When pumps were opened up to be cleaned, inspected, repaired, or replaced, the asbestos covering on the pump was disturbed. There were also many valves located in power plants, controlling the flow of material through pipes and to various pieces of equipment, and those valves were insulated on the outside with asbestos.

The electrical side of the plant, where the units’ combined output was stepped up and tied into Con Edison’s distribution system, represented an additional point of exposure. Electrical cable insulated with asbestos-containing materials, switchgear containing asbestos components, and transformer equipment packed with asbestos were all features of installations built during this era, placing electricians and linemen at risk alongside the powerhouse workers themselves.

Confinement made all of it worse. Powerhouse spaces built into and beneath dam structures are tight, low-ceilinged, and poorly ventilated by design. Fiber concentrations generated by routine maintenance in a space like that can run significantly higher than in an open, surface-level plant, and the fibers tent to linger in such spaces.

A Century-Old Dam

The Kensico Project’s asbestos story is uniquely complicated by the age of the infrastructure on which it was built. The dam and its associated works date to the second decade of the twentieth century, constructed with materials and methods that predated modern asbestos regulation by more than sixty years. The aqueducts feeding the reservoir are of the same era. Grafting a 1980s generating facility onto that structure required construction crews to work within, alongside, and through infrastructure that had been sitting undisturbed for generations.

Any renovation or upgrade at a facility built with asbestos-containing materials carries the potential for renewed exposure as workers disturb old insulation, remove aging gaskets, and work in proximity to decades-old materials that may have degraded over time into a more friable and more dangerous state. For a site like Kensico, where a new powerhouse was fitted into a century-old water supply structure, the layering of construction eras created a particularly complex asbestos landscape for workers to navigate.

That complexity did not end when the plant stopped generating. The Kensico Project was retired in 2012, but retirement in a hydroelectric facility does not mean the building disappears. It means crews go in. Decommissioning, de-watering, equipment removal, and abatement work all involve breaking open exactly the insulated, gasketed, packed components where asbestos was concentrated. Workers who never generated a kilowatt at Kensico, who arrived only to take the plant apart, may have been exposed to fibers installed three decades before they got there.

Who Was Exposed?

The workforce at the Kensico Project spanned trades and job titles, and the asbestos hazard touched workers across that range. Power plant workers maintain many types of equipment at power generation and distribution plants. These workers include pipefitters, electricians, maintenance mechanics, boiler operators and tenders, plumbers, welders, and laborers. Workers were exposed to asbestos when installing, inspecting, maintaining, repairing, removing, and replacing boilers, pumps, valves, heaters, electrical boxes, and other equipment.

Insulators, pipefitters, and other utility workers who routinely fitted, drilled, and cut asbestos products during the course of their jobs now find themselves at risk of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases. The cutting, drilling, and sanding of asbestos is what causes the toxic fibers to become airborne and inhaled by its unsuspecting victims.

The risk extended past the tradespeople doing the hands-on work. Laborers who assisted them and cleaned up afterward breathed the same airborne fibers, usually without any special recognition of the risk. Supervisors conducting inspections, operators running shifts, and workers hauling materials in and out of the powerhouse were all present in an environment where fibers were routinely made airborne. And as at every NYPA facility of this era, the danger traveled home, on work clothing, in hair, on boots, into the households and lives of workers’ families who had no knowledge of what was arriving with them at the end of each shift.

A Public Good with a Heavy Burden

There is a particular irony in the Kensico story. The site exists to serve the most fundamental public need there is: clean water for nine million people. The powerhouse added to it in 1983 was itself a public-minded project, clean renewable energy meant to wean New York off imported oil. Two generations of good intentions, stacked on top of each other.

Plant workers who maintained, repaired, or operated this machinery were inevitably exposed to these toxic fibers. The NYPA operates a large number of generating facilities where exposure to this cancer-causing material has occurred.

Workers who were employed at power stations prior to the 1990s are at a high risk of developing mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other asbestos-related diseases. The companies that made and sold asbestos products knew asbestos was dangerous as far back as the 1920s, yet continued selling their products for decades without warning workers or educating them about safe handling procedures.

The Disease That Waits

Mesothelioma, the aggressive and incurable cancer of the tissue lining surrounding the lungs, abdomen, or heart, is caused by asbestos exposure. Power plant workers are eight times more likely to die of mesothelioma than the general population. The risk is especially high for employees who worked in power plants before the 1990s, when asbestos was widely used for its heat-resistant and insulating properties. Today, large numbers of power plant workers from that era are receiving mesothelioma diagnoses, as the cancer has a 10 to 60-year latency period.

For a worker who participated in the original construction and installation of the Kensico Project’s turbine-generator units in the early 1980s, or who performed maintenance in the years and decades that followed, that latency window places the present moment squarely in the period of greatest diagnostic risk. A pipefitter or laborer who worked at the Kensico site in 1982 or 1983 may be only now experiencing the first symptoms of a disease set in motion by exposures that took place more than forty years ago.

Seeking Justice

If you or someone you love worked at the New York State Power Authority Kensico Project at Kensico Dam in Valhalla, whether during its original construction in the early 1980s, during maintenance cycles and scheduled outages across its operating life, or during the decommissioning and removal work that followed its 2012 retirement, and have since been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or another asbestos-related illness, legal options may be available to you.

People who have been diagnosed with mesothelioma are victims of the asbestos industry and have the right to seek compensation from the companies that caused their illness. The manufacturers of the specific asbestos-containing products used at the Kensico Project bear significant legal accountability for the harm those products caused. An experienced asbestos attorney can review your work history, identify the companies whose products were present at the facility, and pursue compensation through personal injury litigation or asbestos trust fund claims, at no upfront cost to you or your family.

Statutes of limitations govern asbestos claims in New York State, and the window to file can close. Time is a critical factor.