Product Description
Pfaudler Company (Rochester, NY) allegedly manufactured glass-lined steel chemical reactors for pharmaceutical, dye, agrochemical, and specialty-chemical batch service throughout the mid-twentieth century. Plaintiffs alleged in publicly filed U.S. asbestos personal-injury and wrongful-death litigation that Pfaudler reactors — with their characteristic lugged, glass-lined flanges on the top manway, side nozzles, bottom outlet, and agitator drive-mount — were supplied with, and later re-gasketed with, compressed asbestos fiber (CAF) sheet gaskets, often within a PTFE or elastomer envelope suitable for corrosive-service flange joints.
Because glass-lined reactor flanges are unusually load-sensitive (over-torque cracks the glass), plaintiffs alleged that Pfaudler-specified gasket materials — and Pfaudler-branded replacement gasket sets — were the mandated material of construction on many reactor lines through the early 1980s.
Workers Exposed
Plaintiffs allegedly identified the following trades as exposed during Pfaudler reactor service:
- Chemical plant millwrights lifting reactor heads during campaign changeovers and cleaning old gasket residue from lugged glass-lined flanges.
- Pfizer, Merck, and other pharmaceutical plant mechanics replacing manway and nozzle gaskets between batch campaigns.
- Pipefitters breaking nozzle flanges to swap process piping.
- Industrial insulators stripping insulation from reactor heads and jacket flanges before millwright work.
Alleged exposure mechanisms included cutting the envelope facing with a utility knife, scraping the exposed CAF core off the glass-lined flange, and cutting fresh gasket blanks from CAF sheet stock at the reactor deck.