For more than a century, Belleville — the St. Clair County seat in the Metro-East, just southeast of St. Louis — has been a working city of breweries, foundries, stove works, coal, and the large institutions that served the region. Many of the buildings and mechanical systems that made those operations run were built and maintained during the decades when asbestos-containing materials were the industry standard for thermal insulation, fire resistance, and equipment protection.
Why asbestos-containing materials were common in Belleville
From roughly the 1930s through the late 1970s, boilers, steam lines, pipe covering, block insulation, gaskets, refractory, and floor and ceiling tile in institutional and industrial buildings reportedly relied on asbestos-containing materials. Workers who built, operated, and maintained those systems — and later the crews who removed them during renovation and demolition — may have been exposed to airborne fibers, a hazard now understood to cause mesothelioma, asbestosis, and other serious diseases decades after exposure.
Documented Belleville sites
The facilities documented below are drawn from publicly available records, including Illinois EPA asbestos-abatement (NESHAP) notifications, OSHA and EPA inspection data, and other public sources. Each page summarizes the site’s history, the trades likely to have worked around asbestos-containing materials, and the categories of material reportedly present.
Trades most often affected
At Belleville-area sites, the workers with the most direct contact with asbestos-containing materials were typically insulators, pipefitters and steamfitters, boilermakers, maintenance mechanics, electricians, and the laborers who handled and disposed of old insulation during repairs and renovations.
Information on this page is compiled from public records and is provided as a free reference. RightsWatch Media is an independent publisher.