Product Description

Plaintiffs alleged in publicly filed U.S. asbestos personal-injury and wrongful-death litigation that Yuba Industries (Yuba Heat Transfer) supplied surface condensers to utility, industrial, and marine steam-cycle plants across the mid-20th century, and that the tube-sheet-to-water-box joints, water-box division-plate joints, hot-well cover joints, and manway/access flanges on those condensers were sealed with allegedly asbestos-containing compressed sheet gasket material as originally furnished and as replaced during outages.

According to publicly filed asbestos litigation records, a Yuba condenser water-box opening — required for tube cleaning, eddy-current inspection, retubing, and tube-sheet repair — forced workers to break the water-box flange, scrape the aged CAF gasket off the tube-sheet face and water-box mating surface, cut fresh asbestos sheet to the full tube-sheet perimeter and division-plate pattern, and re-bolt — with the aged gasket material allegedly releasing respirable asbestos fibers into the water-box interior where the worker performed the scraping.

Workers Exposed

  • Boilermakers opening water boxes, scraping and replacing tube-sheet gaskets, and performing tube-sheet repairs
  • Pipefitters breaking and remaking circulating-water piping flanges tied into the water boxes
  • Millwrights and mechanics performing routine condenser tube-cleaning and retube outage work
  • Insulators stripping and re-lagging the condenser shell, hot-well, and connecting piping around gasket work