S.S. Gopher State
The SS Gopher State is a fairly new vessel, built at the Bath Iron Works of Maine between June 1971 and early July 1972. Originally owned and operated as a crane ship by American Export-Isbrandtsen Lines, it served as a civilian freighter for fourteen years before it was acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1986. Currently based in Guam, the Gopher State is still officially on the Naval Register as a support vessel, and is maintained as part of Maritime Propositioning Squadron Three; she can be ready for action with as little as five days notice.
Asbestos insulation was used extensively throughout the construction of seagoing vessels prior to 1980. The reason was because of fire danger, which is perhaps the most catastrophic event that can occur at sea. This was graphically illustrated by the Morro Castle disaster in September 1934, when a cruise liner by that name caught fire at sea off the coast of New Jersey, killing almost 140 passengers and crewmen.
Congress soon passed regulations requiring the use of asbestos insulation aboard seagoing vessels, particularly in the fire room, around boilers and in the engine room. Good intentions aside, asbestos product manufacturers were fully knowledgeable about the health hazards of asbestos. Medical researchers had suspected the toxicity of asbestos for almost forty years; these suspicions were confirmed by the mid-1930s.
Asbestos manufacturers then spent the next forty years hiding this information from the public. When the information could not be totally suppressed, a campaign of propaganda was carried out. Warnings about the health hazards of asbestos came to the attention of the federal government in March of 1941; however, President Franklin Roosevelt was reluctant to disseminate this information for fear that it might “create disturbances among the labor force” at a time when workers were desperately needed for war production.
The government finally issued “advisories” to shipyard workers in 1943, with recommendations that respirators and ventilation be used at job sites. By then however, such warnings were usually ignored. This ignorance has caused many mesothelioma navy cases.
By the 1960s, the connection between asbestos and respiratory disease was well-documented and had begun to come to public attention. However, asbestos disease has a latency period often measured in decades; mesothelioma symptoms do not often show up until two to six decades years following initial exposure. When asbestos victims attempted to sue, defense lawyers for the corporations would use the defense stating that their clients had no awareness of asbestos toxicity at the time of exposure and therefore could not have “reasonably foreseen” harm coming from it.
In 1977, the discovery of the “Sumner Simpson Papers” were discovered at the headquarters of a major asbestos products manufacturer. Consisting of correspondence between the CEOs of Raysbestos, Inc. and Johns-Manville, it proved the existence of a “conspiracy of silence” to mislead the public regarding the true nature of asbestos.
Anyone who has worked or served aboard the S.S. Gopher State and has not yet developed malignant mesothelioma symptoms should consult with a physician and have a thorough examination as well as ongoing health monitoring if possible.
Sources
Bowker, Michael. Fatal Deception: The Terrifying True Story of How Asbestos is Killing America. New York: Touchstone, 2003.
NavSource. “S.S. Gopher State.”
http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/76/7604.htm
