Product Description
Beloit Corporation, headquartered in Beloit, Wisconsin, was for decades the dominant U.S. builder of paper machines, tissue machines, and Yankee dryers supplied to kraft, tissue, and fine-paper mills across the country. Plaintiffs alleged in publicly filed U.S. asbestos personal-injury and wrongful-death litigation that Beloit’s Yankee dryer installations shipped with, and were serviced using, asbestos-containing hood insulation panels and molded asbestos-block lagging on the dryer-can shell. According to those publicly filed allegations, the hood panels used a woven or matted asbestos-fabric backing to withstand the high radiant heat inside the Yankee hood enclosure, while the dryer-can lagging used chrysotile-bonded insulating block to retain steam temperature across the 12- to 22-foot cast-iron drying cylinder.
Plaintiffs allegedly maintained that this asbestos configuration was replicated across Beloit’s tissue and paper machine product lines from the 1940s through the early 1980s and appeared in mills throughout the U.S. Midwest, Southeast, and Pacific Northwest.
Workers Exposed
Publicly filed asbestos complaints have allegedly identified the following trades as exposed to Beloit Yankee-dryer hood and lagging materials:
- Paper machine tenders and back tenders working the wet end and dry end during hood-panel replacement
- Paper mill millwrights performing Yankee-dryer bearing, doctor-blade, and hood-frame overhauls
- Yankee-dryer maintenance mechanics cutting and refitting hood panels and dryer-can lagging during coating and resurfacing shutdowns
- Insulators and pipe coverers applying, removing, or rewrapping asbestos-block segments around the dryer-can shell
- Paper mill electricians pulling drives and motor leads adjacent to hood insulation
- Tissue-machine helpers and utility operators cleaning around the Yankee during scheduled outages