Asbestos at the Charles Poletti Power Project in Astoria, Queens

On the western waterfront of Queens, a power plant once rose from the shoreline that would become one of the most contested industrial sites in the history of New York City. The Charles Poletti Power Project was an 885-megawatt oil and natural gas-fired facility originally known as Astoria 6. It started generating electricity in 1977 and was gradually phased out starting in 2002, replaced by a newer, cleaner facility on the same site in 2005. The plant was shuttered in 2010 following a lawsuit and years of community opposition.

The facility was purchased by the New York Power Authority from Consolidated Edison in 1974, when the unit was still under construction. It was named after Charles Poletti, who was a NYPA trustee. It began generating power in 1977, and was converted to dual-fuel capability in 1980. For three decades, it was one of the most consequential power facilities in the state, and one of the most harmful to those who lived and worked near it.

But while the public battle over the Poletti plant focused largely on its air emissions and their impact on the surrounding community, a quieter and equally devastating hazard was present from the facility’s earliest days of construction. For the workers who built, operated, and maintained the plant across more than thirty years of continuous operation, asbestos was an immediate hazard the effects of which have become more and more clear as years have gone by.

The Worst Polluter in New York City

The Poletti plant’s environmental record is difficult to overstate. The Poletti Plant had for years been the single-biggest polluter in New York City. In 2000, the Poletti plant alone spewed 263,376 tons of pollutants into the airshed, more air emissions than the rest of the city combined. These toxins may contribute to high rates of asthma in western Queens, which because of all the plants and highways that crisscross its strip of waterfront neighborhoods was nicknamed Asthma Alley.

It took eight years of protests and political pressure from elected leaders before the New York Power Authority agreed to permanently shut down the Charles Poletti Power Project in 2011. The 33-year-old natural gas and oil plant was deemed the city’s worst polluter.

One local leader claimed that, as a result of the pollution, birds would not nest in Astoria. The campaign to close the plant became a landmark case in the environmental justice movement. It was a story of a community overburdened by industrial pollution fighting back against a powerful state authority. A 2008 study by the city Department of Health showed that the number of children with asthma in Queens from 2000 to 2008 did not waver, even as child asthma rates in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island decreased over the same period.

But as significant as the plant’s air pollution legacy was, it told only part of the story of how the Poletti facility harmed the people who were closest to it. For workers inside the plant like the boilermakers, pipefitters, electricians, mechanics, and laborers who kept the machinery running, an additional and invisible hazard was present every single day.

Asbestos Throughout the Facility

The two hazards, air pollution affecting the community, and asbestos affecting the workforce, were separate manifestations of the same fundamental disregard for human health that characterized the plant’s operational history.

Like all major power-generating facilities built during the 1970s, the Poletti plant was constructed with asbestos-containing materials throughout its critical infrastructure. Generating stations produce electricity by a moving fluid that is pushed through a series of blades, creating rotation. The generator then converts the mechanical energy of the spinning blades into electrical energy. The machinery put in place to create this energy reaches extremely hot temperatures. Although health issues related to asbestos were documented as early as 1906, any plant built between the 1930s and into the 1980s still heavily used asbestos products to prevent fires and protect the machinery, as asbestos is an effective insulator for intense heat.

The Poletti plant’s boilers at the heart of its oil and gas-fired operation were among the primary sources of asbestos exposure. Asbestos use at the Poletti Power Plant were concentrated in the boiler, gaskets, and roof, with additional asbestos present in an adjacent building. That acknowledgment, made during the plant’s demolition planning process, confirms what workers and their advocates had long understood: asbestos was embedded in the plant’s most essential equipment from the earliest years of its operation.

The turbines and generators that converted the plant’s steam into electricity were insulated, top to bottom, with asbestos-containing materials. When turbines were inspected and maintained, these materials had to be disturbed, exposing power plant workers to asbestos. The plant’s hundreds of pumps and valves moving oil, water, steam, and chemicals throughout the facility’s complex systems presented persistent hazards. They were insulated with asbestos on the outside of the pump, but they also contained asbestos in the form of casing gaskets and flange gaskets. Asbestos was also in packing used in glands to seal the pump. When pumps were opened up to be cleaned, inspected, repaired, or replaced, the asbestos they contained was disturbed. Often, pump gaskets would need to be removed and replaced when pumps were repaired. Packing material would wear and need to be repaired and replaced on a regular basis.

Asbestos Mitigation That Confirmed the Scope of the Problem

One of the most significant admissions about asbestos at the Poletti plant came not in a courtroom or a regulatory filing, but at a community meeting convened to discuss the plant’s demolition. When asked how much asbestos was on the site, NYPA officials noted that the Poletti Power Plant had been well managed and that asbestos mitigation had been done throughout its 40-year life. The very fact that asbestos mitigation was an ongoing process spanning four decades of the plant’s operational life speaks volumes about the scope and persistence of the contamination. Asbestos was not a minor or isolated feature of the Poletti facility. It was a continuous presence requiring constant management, and constant disturbance.

The question of how that asbestos was removed, and by whom, was itself a matter of community concern. When asked about the transport of asbestos through the Astoria and Queens neighborhoods and its ultimate destination during demolition, officials noted they were investigating both the use of East River barges and trucking as options, with the community strongly preferring the East River route. That community pushback reflected a hard-won awareness that the plant’s hazards had never been adequately contained, and a determination that its demolition would not add one more chapter to that history.

A Workforce in the Line of Fire

The workers who operated and maintained the Poletti plant across its more than three decades of operation were the people most directly exposed to its asbestos hazards.

Power plant workers maintained many types of equipment at power generation and distribution plants. These workers included 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.

At an 885-megawatt oil and gas-fired facility that ran continuously for decades, maintenance was the constant work of keeping an aging and heavily stressed plant operational. Every maintenance cycle that involved the plant’s boilers, turbines, pumps, or gasket-sealed systems was a potential exposure event. The workers who performed that maintenance, many of whom were union tradespeople from the Queens waterfront communities that the plant served and polluted simultaneously, did so without adequate warning and without adequate protection.

The New York State Power Authority, like many other similar facilities during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, was full of asbestos. 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 caused fibers to become airborne and be easily inhaled or ingested by its victims.

The dangerous effects of asbestos exposure extended beyond the plant’s workers and into their homes and families. Workers who carried asbestos fibers on their clothing, hair, and skin at the end of each shift exposed spouses, children, and other household members to secondary contamination, a well-documented pathway to asbestos-related disease that multiplied the reach of the plant’s harm.

A Community Already Carrying Too Much

The Poletti plant’s asbestos legacy landed on a community that had already been asked to absorb more than its fair share of the negative effects of the industrial burden.

The campaign to shut the Charles Poletti Power Plant involved remarkably successful environmental advocacy, and the victory of shutting the plant down was real and hard-won. But for the workers who spent careers inside its walls, the closure came too late to undo the exposures already accumulated over decades of work.

The Disease That Takes Decades to Arrive

Mesothelioma, the aggressive and incurable cancer of the tissue lining surrounding the lungs, abdomen, or heart, is caused by asbestos exposure. Its defining characteristic is a latency period that can span anywhere from 10 to 60 years between initial exposure and first diagnosis. A boilermaker who spent the 1980s maintaining the Poletti plant’s oil-fired boilers may have retired in apparent good health, only to receive a life-altering diagnosis, decades after the dust settled.

Plant workers who maintained, repaired, or operated this machinery were inevitably exposed to these toxic fibers, and are unfortunately being diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, and other asbestos-related diseases. The NYPA operates a large number of generating facilities, where exposure to asbestos 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.

For a worker who was present at the Poletti plant during its construction in the mid-1970s, or who performed maintenance through the 1980s and 1990s, the latency clock has been running for forty years or more. The diagnoses tied to those exposures are arriving now, and will continue to arrive for years to come.

Seeking Justice

If you or someone you love worked at the Charles Poletti Power Project in Astoria, Queens, whether as a NYPA employee, a ConEdison worker present during the plant’s construction, a union tradesperson, or an independent contractor brought in for maintenance or retrofit work, and have since been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or another asbestos-related illness, legal options to obtain compensation 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 Poletti plant such as the boiler insulation suppliers, the gasket manufacturers, or the turbine blanket makers, bear significant legal accountability for the harm their products caused, separate from the plant’s ownership history. An experienced asbestos attorney can review your work history, identify the relevant companies, and pursue compensation through personal injury litigation or asbestos trust fund claims, at no upfront cost.

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