Cornell University Steam Station in Ithaca, New York
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Asbestos at the Cornell University Steam Station in Ithaca, New York
Table of Contents
Cornell University has long been celebrated as one of America’s great research institutions where knowledge is produced, disseminated, and applied for the public good. Founded in 1865 on the hills above Ithaca, New York, the university grew over more than a century and a half into a sprawling campus of 608 buildings spanning more than 2,000 acres, with more than 11,500 faculty and staff serving around 20,000 students. Heating the campus through bitter Finger Lakes winters, and keeping it lit and powered required a massive and continuous industrial operation at its core. That operation was the Cornell Steam Station, known formally as the Central Heating Plant.
A Plant Built for the Long Haul
Cornell University’s central steam plant was built in 1922 and expanded over the years to accommodate new boilers, backpressure steam turbine-generators, and related equipment. By the time of its most active operation, the plant was home to two coal-fired boilers, four boilers capable of burning gas and/or oil, two steam turbines, and all the supporting mechanical systems needed to serve the Ithaca campus.
The scale of what this plant was asked to do was enormous. Coal was burned to make steam in central boilers, and the steam flowed through 25 miles of pipes in underground tunnels to steam radiators in major buildings on campus. Maintaining that network of boilers, turbines, the miles of piping, the hundreds of valves and pumps required a steady workforce of skilled tradespeople working day in and day out in close contact with the plant’s equipment. And that equipment, for most of the plant’s history, was saturated with asbestos.
Cornell University Central Heating Plant is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on the Cornell campus. In 1985, the heating plant pressure was doubled to 400 psig and back-pressure steam turbine electric generators were added, which generate approximately 30 million kilowatt-hours per year of electricity, nearly 12% of total campus use. Each of these upgrades and renovations brought workers into direct contact with older, asbestos-laden systems, compounding exposure risks with every round of new construction.
Asbestos at Every Turn
Like power and steam stations across the country built during the mid-twentieth century, Cornell’s Central Heating Plant made extensive use of asbestos throughout its critical infrastructure. The Cornell University Asbestos Management Program itself warns that buildings were constructed with asbestos materials such as boilers, breeching, boiler rope, duct, and tank insulation, as well as cement or mortar used for boilers and refractory brick. This acknowledgment from the university’s own environmental health and safety program is a candid confirmation of what workers in and around the plant encountered every day.
Asbestos is a mineral fiber that was used commonly in a variety of building construction materials for insulation and as a fire retardant. Because of its fiber strength and heat-resistant properties, asbestos was used for a wide range of manufactured goods, mostly in building materials, friction products, heat-resistant fabrics, packaging, gaskets, and coatings. In a steam plant operating under extreme heat and pressure, virtually every major system depended on these materials.
Boilers used asbestos to insulate both the interior and exterior. The interior materials were usually firebrick and refractory cement, while the external insulation was typically asbestos covering in the form of cement or thermal insulation. Boilers also used asbestos in gaskets on the boiler door, various access windows and plates, and where the boiler was connected to piping or equipment. Boilers contained many components that used asbestos packing and gaskets, such as soot blowers, valves, and pumps.
The turbines were no less contaminated. Turbines used asbestos to insulate both the 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.
And the miles of underground steam piping that carried heat across campus presented their own hazards. Piping and electrical systems throughout power plants were rife with asbestos millboard and taping, which could have effectively exposed every department during maintenance. Over the past several decades, a significant renewal program replaced large segments of the steam distribution piping, some of which dated back to the 1920s, meaning that workers who carried out that replacement work were tearing out decades-old asbestos insulation in the process.
The Workforce in the Crossfire
The workers most directly endangered by asbestos at the Cornell Steam Station were those whose trades placed them in regular, hands-on contact with the plant’s equipment. 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.
Power plant operators often cut, saw, or sanded asbestos-containing insulating materials for boilers and generators as part of maintenance, without protective equipment. The boiler room at a coal-fired plant of this size and age was a particularly hazardous environment. Workers who entered the boilers during overhauls cutting through exterior insulation, scraping gaskets, and replacing packing material were exposed to concentrated clouds of asbestos dust in what was often a poorly ventilated space.
But the risk was not confined to the boiler room or to the most skilled tradespeople. General laborers who cleaned up debris, assisted skilled trades, and worked throughout the plant accumulated exposure from multiple sources. Anyone who worked on the Cornell campus prior to the 1980s may have been exposed to dangerous asbestos materials, including powdered asbestos used for mixing into compounds.
The risk extended to those who came in from outside the university as well. Over the course of the plant’s many expansions, conversions, and renovations, independent contractors and union tradespeople from the Ithaca area and beyond worked alongside Cornell’s own facilities staff. In 2011, Cornell converted the central heating plant to burn natural gas, capturing the waste heat to make electricity. That conversion also involved installing high-capacity gas mains from the national pipeline grid directly into the central plant. Workers involved in that conversion, and in the earlier 1985 turbine upgrades, were working in and around equipment that had accumulated decades of asbestos-containing materials.
A University That Acknowledged the Problem
To its credit, Cornell eventually established a formal Asbestos Management Program through its Environment, Health and Safety office. The Cornell University Asbestos Management Program is overseen by EHS and implemented by Facilities Services and Facilities Management. The program operates with objectives including minimizing employee, student, and visitor exposure to the hazards of airborne asbestos fibers, providing technical services related to asbestos removal projects on the Cornell campus, and ensuring asbestos abatement waste is disposed of properly.
That program’s very existence is a testament to the scale of the asbestos problem across the Cornell campus, and at the Central Heating Plant in particular. But the formal recognition of the hazard came long after the decades of unrestricted exposure had already taken their toll on workers who never received adequate warning or protection.
The Invisible Timeline
Mesothelioma, the rare and aggressive cancer of the tissue lining surrounding the lungs, abdomen, or heart, is caused by asbestos exposure. Mesothelioma is a devastating cancer with a long latency period, taking 10 to 60 years after asbestos exposure for symptoms to appear. A boilermaker or pipefitter who spent the 1960s or 1970s working maintenance cycles at the Cornell Steam Station may have retired in apparent good health, only to receive a diagnosis decades later that traces directly back to the dust they breathed on the job.
Epidemiological studies have documented mesothelioma rates 3 to 8 times higher among power plant workers compared to the general population. The math is stark: the men and women who kept Cornell’s campus warm and powered paid for that service with their health, at rates far exceeding what the general public experienced.
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.
Your Rights and Your Options
If you worked at the Cornell University Steam Station, whether as a Cornell employee, a union tradesperson, or an independent contractor, at any point during the plant’s coal-burning or early gas-conversion era, and have since been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or another asbestos-related disease, you may have legal options available to you. The same may be true for family members who experienced secondary exposure through a worker’s contaminated clothing.
Statutes of limitations govern asbestos claims, and the window to seek compensation can close. An experienced asbestos attorney can help identify the manufacturers and suppliers of the asbestos-containing products used at the plant and help pursue the justice that affected workers and their families deserve.
