Product Description
Carrier Corporation designed and built centrifugal and reciprocating chiller compressor packages for the chilled-water plants that served hospitals, schools, office towers, courthouses, hotels, and industrial process buildings throughout the United States during the asbestos era. Each compressor was a bolted-flange machine — head bolts, suction and discharge flanges, oil-pump housings, seal-plate covers, and inspection ports — and every one of those bolted joints required a gasket sized and formulated for the temperature, pressure, and refrigerant service of that connection.
Plaintiffs alleged in publicly filed U.S. asbestos litigation that Carrier specified compressed asbestos sheet gaskets — commonly sourced from Garlock, Anchor Packing, Johns-Manville, and similar industry suppliers — for the great majority of these flange, head, and suction/discharge joints from the 1940s through the late 1970s. Compressed asbestos sheet was the industry-standard gasket material for chiller compressor service because chrysotile fiber bonded with elastomeric binder held its seal across the thermal-cycling range and refrigerant-oil chemistry of centrifugal and reciprocating machines.
Workers Exposed
The exposure pathway occurred not during original installation but during compressor teardown for overhaul, seal replacement, valve service, and end-of-season maintenance. When a chiller compressor was pulled apart, the old gasket had typically been cooked onto the flange faces by years of thermal cycling. Removing that residue required scraping with putty knives and razor blades, wire-brushing, and — when the residue was stubborn — dry-cutting or grinding the surface flat before the new gasket could be set.
Litigation records document that HVAC service technicians, refrigeration mechanics, operating engineers, and pipefitters performed this work in mechanical rooms and penthouse chiller plants without respiratory protection, without wet-methods dust control, and without warning labels identifying the gasket material as asbestos. Millwrights called in to align the shaft and reseat the head after major service also encountered the dust.