Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk (review)

In Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk, Rachel Maines historicizes the costs and benefits associated with technological innovation. Asbestos promised to help alleviate the challenges posed by fire in American life, only to become a scourge in its own right. In revealing this transformation, Maines advances our understanding of the complexities of risk as an economic and social construct.

Long known for its fire resistive properties, asbestos began to find popular use after the Civil War, when rapid industrial and urban growth fueled the ever-expanding risk of fire. By the 1890s, as scientists and safety entered the battle against fire, they began to experiment with asbestos. Into the twentieth century asbestos emerged as powerful preventive technology in the effort to curtail fire's most egregious risks to property and life. In applications where danger was particularly acute, asbestos found welcome audiences—for example, use in theaters as a fire preventive curtain. Asbestos, also, was incorporated into the plethora of safety standards that first began to appear around the turn of the century.

Asbestos steadily gained adherents through World War II, after which its popularity exploded. On one level, perceptions about the fire threat had shifted dramatically. Not only was there a continued deepening of professional interest in fire, but for the first time the primary focus had begun to shift toward protecting life, not just property. In this climate, disastrous school fires, such as the Our Lady of Angels fire in 1958, had rhetorical traction in increasing the use of asbestos in public buildings. Also, the military experience of World War II with the horrible blazes involved, and the many military uses of asbestos would become critical to its expansion. A host of other factors—including the Cold War, need for rebuilding the world's economic and physical infrastructure, American prosperity and consumerism, the baby boom, and the nuclear threat—all fueled the explosive growth of asbestos in the 1950s and 1960s. Safety professionals further sought to build a more fire resistive infrastructure—from consumer products, to landscapes, to industrial workplaces—by successfully embedding asbestos into the continually growing list of safety and engineering standards.

Just as quickly as asbestos emerged as a solution, it crashed and burned. Following a prominent epidemiological study in the 1960s, a "tort conflagration" broke out, running through the balance of the twentieth century. Rather than assume the inevitability of this decline, Maines asks: why asbestos? Why not lead or some other material? Indeed, as she notes, information about asbestos as a potential carcinogen had been known since at least 1926. What had changed? She argues that none of the traditional explanations really work, except perhaps for the unprecedented legal context as it regarded asbestos. With this book, Maines posits an alternative. Namely, the obvious, immediate, and calamitous challenge posed by the fire overwhelmed the less obvious carcinogenic risk of asbestos before the 1960s. And, by the last decades of the century, fire's danger had receded from the popular consciousness to a sufficient degree that we could now focus on the asbestos problem. This explains, perhaps, the puzzling fact that with rare exceptions the attorneys for asbestos manufacturers never pursued the issue of fire prevention as a defense.

Maines's argument, built upon the writings of engineers and safety experts, is expertly narrated, including framing around some spectacular disasters. If this gives the narrative an urgent and accessible quality, it sometimes has the effect of misconstruing the problem of fire. Specifically, emphasizing disastrous events and taking the rhetoric of engineers at face value, rather than examining more ordinary blazes—those that insurers, manufacturers, and other invested economic actors also wanted to ameliorate—sometimes overstates the breadth and depth of societal concern about the dangers to human life from fire. Likewise, this study fails to appreciate fully the broader and complex causal factors behind the lessening of fire risk during the twentieth...