Asbestos at the St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project in Massena, New York

In the North Country town of Massena, at the northernmost edge of New York State where the river forms the border between the United States and Canada, stands a facility that began as one man’s political vision and became one of the most consequential public works projects in American history. The St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project, the first large hydroelectric plant ever developed by the New York Power Authority, is a monument to what public power can accomplish, and a facility that has shaped the economy and daily life of the North Country for more than six decades.

“I place first of all in importance the passage of the bill creating the power authority to develop the state-owned waterpower on the St. Lawrence River,” Franklin D. Roosevelt declared on April 24, 1931. That vision took more than two decades to realize. By 1954, all approvals were in place, and Robert Moses, New York’s “Master Builder,” who had been designated by Governor Thomas E. Dewey as Power Authority chairman, was ready to go to work. In cooperation with Ontario Hydro, a construction army transformed millions of tons of concrete, stone and steel into a power-producing marvel. An accelerated construction schedule led to the start of electricity production in July 1958 and delivery of full power a year later, two years ahead of the original schedule.

The international power project was formally dedicated on June 27, 1959 in ceremonies led by Queen Elizabeth II and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who unveiled the International Friendship Monument on the border between the US and Canada at the center of the dam. It was a moment of extraordinary international significance.

The Scale of the Project and Its Asbestos Legacy

The physical dimensions of the St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project are staggering. The principal features of the project include the Robert Moses-Robert H. Saunders Power Dam, which has an 80-foot head and stretches 3,200 feet across the St. Lawrence River. The dam includes 32 turbine-generator sets, with 16 operated by NYPA and 16 by Ontario Power Generation, producing 800 megawatts for each utility. The Long Sault Dam, 3.5 miles upstream from the power dam, directs flow toward the powerhouse, while the Iroquois Dam, 28.5 miles upstream, controls the outflow of Lake Ontario.

The project incorporated 16 turbines generating over 900,000 kilowatts of power, plenty of power to light a city the size of Washington, D.C. The project, which first made power on July 17, 1958, contributes, along with NYPA’s other generating plants and additional power purchases, up to 25 percent of New York State’s energy.

That scale of the project is directly related to its direct implications for asbestos exposure. A facility with 16 massive turbine-generator units, miles of high-voltage transmission infrastructure, multiple dams across dozens of miles of river, and a workforce drawn from communities across St. Lawrence County was a facility where asbestos-containing materials were present in extraordinary quantities. The New York State Power Authority, like many other similar facilities during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, utilized asbestos materials in its construction, maintenance, and use. Insulators, pipefitters, and other utility workers who routinely fitted, drilled, and cut asbestos products during the course of their daily jobs now find themselves at risk of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases.

Construction in the Peak Era of Asbestos Use

The St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project was constructed between 1954 and 1958, exactly during the decades when asbestos was most heavily used throughout the power generation industry. GE Renewable Energy was selected as the turbine supplier for the hydro power project, providing 16 units of propeller turbines, each with 58.9-megawatt nameplate capacity. Those turbines, and every system that supported them, were built with and surrounded by asbestos-containing materials as standard industry practice.

Generating stations produce electricity by a moving fluid like water and steam or combustion gases or air, pushing them through a series of blades, creating rotation. The generator then converts the mechanical energy of the spinning blades into electrical energy. Although health issues related to asbestos were documented as early as 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.

At a hydroelectric facility of this scale, asbestos was not limited to the turbine halls. The powerhouse building itself, one of the largest structures of its kind ever built in North America, was constructed with asbestos-containing building materials throughout: in its fire-resistant flooring and ceiling tiles, in the insulation of its electrical conduits and cable runs, in the joint compounds and fireproofing coatings applied to its structural elements, and in the gaskets, packing materials, and insulation covering every pump, valve, and pipe fitting in the facility.

Valves, which are devices that control the flow of material through pipes and to various pieces of equipment, were used in the thousands in power plants. Similarly, there were hundreds of pumps in powerhouses. These pumps were insulated with asbestos on the outside of the pump, and inside they 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. 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.

The Turbines at the Heart of the Hazard

With 16 massive propeller turbines operating continuously to produce 800 megawatts of power, the turbine hall of the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project was the center of both the facility’s productivity and the epicenter of its asbestos hazard. Turbines were insulated by asbestos inside and outside, 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.

Each of those 16 turbines required regular maintenance, overhauls, gasket replacements, bearing inspections, seal work, and emergency repairs. Multiply the maintenance demands of a single turbine across 16 units operating for more than six decades, and the total number of individual asbestos exposure events accumulated by the St. Lawrence-FDR plant’s workforce becomes incalculable.

The transmission infrastructure radiating outward from the plant presented its own additional hazard. On the US side, two 230kV transmission lines link to three NYPA substations, Plattsburgh, Adirondack, and Massena. The electrical workers, linemen, and substation maintenance personnel who maintained those transmission corridors across the North Country worked in proximity to asbestos-insulated cable, asbestos-containing switchgear, and asbestos-packaged transformer equipment throughout the plant’s most active decades.

A Workforce Drawn From the Heart of the North Country

The construction of the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project transformed Massena and the surrounding region. The project brought thousands of construction workers to St. Lawrence County in the early-to-mid 1950s, and its ongoing operation provided steady employment for generations of local workers, millwrights, electricians, pipefitters, laborers, engineers, and operators drawn from Massena, Ogdensburg, Potsdam, Canton, and the other communities of the North Country.

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. They were exposed to asbestos when installing, inspecting, maintaining, repairing, removing, and replacing boilers, pumps, valves, heaters, electrical boxes, and other equipment.

Those who worked through the plant’s scheduled maintenance shutdowns, when crews descended on the facility to perform overhauls of turbines, pumps, and associated equipment, faced a very concentrated asbestos exposure. During a shutdown, multiple systems were opened simultaneously, releasing asbestos fiber from insulation, gaskets, and packing materials throughout the powerhouse in conditions that could saturate the air with invisible fibers.

Workers who came to the St. Lawrence-FDR plant as independent contractors, brought in for specific construction, renovation, or maintenance tasks, were equally at risk. Many of them moved between multiple NYPA facilities and other industrial sites across the North Country and upstate New York, accumulating asbestos exposure across multiple locations without ever receiving a single warning about what they were breathing.

The Risk for the Community and Beyond

The reach of the St. Lawrence-FDR plant’s asbestos legacy extends well beyond the workers who staffed it. The North Country communities surrounding Massena have long borne a disproportionate share of industrial health burdens. This source of inexpensive, reliable power enticed the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later named the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, to establish a facility in the community. The concentration of heavy industry in the region meant that many workers were exposed to asbestos at multiple sites, at the power plant, at the aluminum smelter, and at the various industrial and construction facilities that grew up around them.

Workers who carried asbestos fibers home on their work clothing, hair, and boots exposed their families to secondary contamination, a well-documented pathway to asbestos-related disease that extended the plant’s reach into the households and lives of workers’ families throughout the North Country. In a region where many families had multiple members working in the same industrial facilities across generations, the potential for overlapping and compounded exposures was significant.

The Irony of a Dream Fulfilled

There is a particular poignancy to the asbestos story at the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project. Franklin D. Roosevelt spent much of his political career fighting for the principle that New York’s waterways should serve the people, not private interests, and that the power of those rivers should be returned to the public. The facility that bears his name was built to fulfill that vision, and in many respects it has done so admirably: generating clean, low-cost renewable power for the North Country and beyond for more than six decades.

But the workers who made that vision real, who poured the concrete, installed the turbines, maintained the generators, and kept the facility running through every season of more than sixty years, were not treated as the people whose interests the plant was built to serve. They were treated as the labor force through which the vision would be executed, and the hazards they faced in executing it were concealed from them by the manufacturers of the products they worked with every day.

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 construction of the St. Lawrence-FDR plant began in 1954, more than three decades after that knowledge was well established.

The Disease That Takes Generations to Arrive

Mesothelioma, the aggressive and incurable cancer of the tissue lining surrounding the lungs, abdomen, or heart, is caused by asbestos exposure and is characterized above all by the extraordinary length of time between first exposure and first diagnosis. The disease’s latency period can span 10 to 60 years or more, meaning that a construction worker who installed turbine insulation at Massena in 1956 or 1957 may have carried the fibers that would cause this disease through a full working career and well into retirement before any symptoms appeared.

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 this cancer-causing material has occurred.

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.

Seeking Justice

If you or someone you love worked at the New York State Power Authority St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project in Massena, whether during its construction in the mid-1950s, during the plant’s more than six decades of continuous operation, or in any capacity as a maintenance worker, contractor, union tradesperson, or transmission line worker, 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 St. Lawrence-FDR plant such as turbine insulation suppliers, gasket manufacturers, pump packing producers, and electrical cable makers among others, bear significant legal accountability for the harm those products caused. An experienced asbestos attorney can review your work history, identify the specific 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.