The village of Roxana in Madison County exists because of the refinery. Built beside the Mississippi in the Wood River area northeast of St. Louis, the Wood River Refinery — operated for most of the twentieth century by Shell Oil and later as a Phillips 66 joint venture — anchored Roxana and the surrounding refining corridor. Petroleum refining runs hot, and the plant was built and continually rebuilt during the decades when asbestos-containing materials were the standard for high-temperature insulation.
Why asbestos-containing materials were common in Roxana
Crude oil is heated, distilled, cracked, and processed through pipes, vessels, exchangers, and fired heaters — many operating well above 1,000 degrees. From roughly the 1930s through the late 1970s, that thermal environment reportedly drove heavy use of asbestos-containing pipe covering, block insulation, gaskets, valve packing, spray fireproofing, and insulating cement. Workers who installed and maintained that insulation, and the turnaround crews who stripped and replaced it, may have inhaled airborne fibers — an exposure now understood to cause mesothelioma and other diseases 20 to 50 years on.
Documented Roxana sites
The refinery operations documented below are drawn from publicly available records: 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
Insulators, pipefitters and steamfitters, boilermakers, millwrights, instrument technicians, process operators, and laborers were typically the trades with the most direct contact with asbestos-containing materials during refinery construction, maintenance, and turnarounds.
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