If you like rock n’ roll music, you may remember the Rolling Stones album “Goat’s Head Soup” or if you are into classic disaster movies, you may recall “The Towering Inferno.” Or, if maritime history is your thing, the obscure saga of the cargo ship SS Alpha.
The golden thread connecting all of these seemingly unrelated things is that all of them have at least one thing in common – Academy Award-nominated actor Steve McQueen, who earned a dubious mention in the ‘Star Star’ cut on the Stones album, while he later starred as a headliner playing – ironically, as it will be seen shortly – a San Francisco Fire Dept. Chief in the 1974 film.
Years before, in the late 1940s, McQueen had served in the Merchant Marine for a brief period aboard SS Alpha, a commercialized, wartime-built Liberty-class freighter, when the rust-streaked ship suffered a major fire while outbound from New York to the West Indies. An aside – the fire, so the story goes, was the primary reason for his jumping ship in the Dominican Republic.
Thirty-three years later, in November 1980, at the age of 50, Steve McQueen – the ‘King of Cool’ – died of pleural mesothelioma – in all probability, according to his widow, contracted when he served aboard Alpha.
A terribly brutal and aggressive form of cancer, pleural mesothelioma has no known cure and, as the end nears, is characterized by a constant cough, lungs filled with fluid and mucus, swollen face and hands, night sweats, and spitting up blood. A diagnosis is considered, in effect, a death sentence.
The only known cause of pleural mesothelioma is the inhalation of asbestos – a silicate mineral composed of long, thin, microscopic crystal fibers.
The modern use of asbestos began in the late 1800s, gaining favor because of its fire-resistance and insulation properties. It was inexpensive, effective, and readily available, so it wasn’t long before it became widely used in everything from roof shingles and wallboard to vehicle brakes and insulation for residential homes. Even today, an estimated 30 million homes and buildings in the U.S. have asbestos mixed with cement in their foundations or walls.
As the usage of asbestos became more prevalent ashore, the maritime industry followed suit. Navy ships began utilizing equipment containing asbestos in the 1930s, and by World War II it was also heavily used in the construction of nearly 3,000 American-flag Liberty ships. Vital to the war effort as military supply vessels, Libertys were built in rapid fashion with asbestos used in numerous ways – it was added to cement to construct bulkheads, mixed with paint and used to coat pipes, and used to line winch gaskets and brakes, and insulate engine room ducts and boilers.
After WWII, Liberty ships were sold-off to operate commercially, carrying non-military government cargo and supported our military in Korea and even Vietnam with several used by the Navy as radar picket ships and technical intelligence gathering ships as late as the mid-1960s. A pair of restored, operational Liberty ships – the SS Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco and the SS John W. Brown in Baltimore – regularly cruise with passengers aboard.
The unbridled enthusiasm for the utilization of asbestos on merchant ships did not come without concerns and cautions of its potential effects. As early as 1939, the U.S. Navy Surgeon General began sounding the alarm about the dangers of asbestos exposure, issuing warnings of serious health problems if inhaled and recommending limits on exposure.
Unfortunately, those cautions were ignored. As the war effort ramped up, so did the quantity of asbestos that was used in virtually every shipyard in the country as it continued to be heralded for its fire-resistance and insulation properties. Only years later, when workers who had built and mariners who had served on Liberty ships during the war began dying of pleural mesothelioma, did the tragedy of the exposure to fibrous asbestos become increasingly clear.
The sobering reality is that it can take 20 or 30 years after exposure to asbestos to cause lung cancer – a fact confirmed by recent studies published in Italy, Greece, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S. The proof is so overwhelming that medical authorities worldwide readily acknowledge that “seafarers are at risk for asbestos disease – in particular pleural mesothelioma.”
Considering that merchant mariners contract this terrible disease at a rate 100 percent more than the public, I have no doubt that being exposed to asbestos on ships has tragically cut short the lives of tens of thousands of men and women.
Amazingly, despite all the verification that asbestos causes lung cancer among mariners, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) continues to allow it to be used on merchant vessels worldwide.
The IMOs Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) regulations permit any commercial vessel built before 2002 to utilize asbestos onboard without restriction. According to those studies, considering that the average working life of a ship is 30-50 years, thousands of merchant mariners will develop pleural mesothelioma before those vessels finally go to the scrapyard.
Even worse, even though IMO rules have prohibited the use of any asbestos on newly built vessels built since 2011, according to an official 2021 survey conducted by international maritime consultancy Maritec, more than 50 percent of the newbuilds it inspected contained asbestos onboard.
I believe that the IMO should be held fully responsible for what I see is a lack of concern for the merchant mariners it is supposed to protect. Those who crew the world’s merchant ships already face a glut of potential dangers while doing their jobs. Contracting pleural mesothelioma should not be one of them.
The IMO should immediately mandate that all asbestos be removed from every commercial ship worldwide, regardless of when it was built. If they don’t, then a class action suit against the London-based organization needs to be filed on behalf of those mariners who have tragically contracted pleural mesothelioma, and for the families of those who’ve already died of the disease.
Till next time I wish you all good health – and smooth sailin.’ •