Tragedy at Federated Metals in 1949

Jerry Banik, January, 2022

In January of 1949, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unwary Robertsdale and Whiting residents may have narrowly avoided crippling illness or death.

Nineteen workers at Federated Metals were not so lucky. Four of them lost their lives.

On Indianapolis Boulevard at New York Avenue, the Federated Metals Company smelted and refined metals like brass, lead and zinc, beginning in 1939.  The  raw materials needed for their operations included scrap, non-ferrous metals and their by-products, like drosses and skimmings from other smelters.

On Monday, January 3, 1949, a train left the National Lead Company in Granite City, IL carrying forty-nine unsealed, steel drums of raw materials in what a Hammond Times story reported as open train cars.  Each drum carried 700 to 1,000 pounds of metal dross, bound for Federated Metals, next door to Robertsdale’s Goose Island neighborhood.  National Lead had skimmed this dross from its refining pots and sold it to Federated, where it was to be refined further.

On a dreary, rainy Tuesday, January 4, the train rolled into town with its cargo of beat up, dented drums leaking powder, within mere feet of homes on Lakeview Street and 122nd, and delivered a toxic shipment that would soon result in sickness and death to workers at the plant.  

The following day, Wednesday, January 5, workers on the day shift began unloading the drums, dumping their contents on the concrete floor of the receiving department.

Using shovels, the men mixed the dross, some of which was wet from rain, and made separate piles for production and for lab samples.  By late morning a worker noticed white fumes coming from the piles, and hosed them down with water.

Before long, some of the men in the plant began to feel ill, unaware that they were being poisoned.

The dross that National Lead in Granite City skimmed off and sold to Federated Metals contained aluminum arsenide. It had formed when National Lead smelted raw materials containing high concentrations of arsenic.

When aluminum arsenide comes into contact with water, it decomposes in a chemical reaction that creates deadly arsine gas. If arsine gas is inhaled, it enters the blood stream and kills red blood cells.  Weakness, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain follow. Pulmonary edema sets in.  Breathing becomes difficult.  Wheezing, coughing and gasping for breath will often ensue.  In lethal doses, acute kidney failure develops, usually within less than a few days.  Convulsions may occur, followed by coma and death. 

Tragically on that Wednesday, the Federated workers were unaware that their actions were creating the poison that would sicken and kill them.

Later that day, on the swing shift, as ten, sick Federated workers laid on cots in a Saint Catherine’s Hospital hallway waiting for rooms to come available, other workers shoveled the deadly dross piles back into their drums and took them outside.  Federated frequently stored dross outdoors in its yard.  The company said that, on occasion, the material outside generated enough heat to catch on fire, “but being out in the open no harm was done.”

At eleven o’clock the following morning the first man died, but neither Federated Metals nor the hospital made the information public until Friday, January 7.  Three more succumbed in the next three days.  Within four days, nineteen men had become sick, some suffering irreversible damage.

Dr. Richard H. Callahan, the deputy Lake County coroner, who has been referred to as the “Crusading Coroner,” led an investigation into the workers’ deaths. 

He was intensely critical of the Indiana State Board of Health.

The medical director at the Federated Metals plant had also been the head of the State Board of Health, with broad responsibilities over occupational safety and hazard prevention. During his inquiry, Dr. Callahan called the company’s and the State Board’s explanation of the plant’s precautionary procedures “vague, evasive and ridiculous.”

The Hammond Times reported that Dr. Callahan asserted, “It is inconceivable that the chemists in the State Board did not know that dross used by Federated Metals would poison workmen with arsine.  Federated Metals was in the possession of a dangerous toy.”

He added that safeguards against arsenic poisoning had existed for thirty years but were not in place at the accident scene, and that the use of gas masks, birds in cages or chemically treated gas detecting cards costing less than a penny a piece might have saved the lives of the victims. The U.S. Army in World War II had used such cards to detect the presence of arsine.

Additionally, it was reported that lives could have been saved had the drug, British Anti-Lewisite, or BAL, been on hand, but it was not.  Instead, BAL had to be found at medical suppliers in Hammond and rushed to St. Catherine’s to treat the sick workers.

Only two months earlier a horrified nation had watched as the worst industrial air pollution disaster in U.S. history killed twenty people and sickened hundreds more in a poisonous fog in Donora, Pennsylvania. And now, here at home, the potential danger of the arsine gas extended far beyond the Federated Metals plant. 

So, how close to a brush with death were Robertsdale and Whiting residents on that January day in 1949?  What might have happened if the rainfall had been much heavier as the train rolled into town, or while the drums of dross sat outside?

Those drums traveled past, and sat within, a quarter mile of hundreds of homes in town.  Dr. Callahan’s inquiry reported that a single drum of the arsenic-tainted dross, if in contact with sufficient rain, had the capacity to generate enough arsine gas to poison a million cubic feet of air, in a concentration capable of killing everyone exposed to it. A million cubic feet of poisonous air from a single drum could cover an average Whiting city block in a layer roughly five feet deep, and there were forty-nine drums in the shipment of National Lead dross.

Upon learning of this accident, the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission immediately ordered new regulations governing containers and hazardous material identification for dross shipments across state lines, as well as safety training for employees who handle dross. Sadly, for those unfortunate, stricken men at Federated Metals, by that time the horses had already long since left the barn.

For well over a century, Calumet Region residents have been no strangers to working in, and living alongside, heavy industry.  The factories provide us with paychecks, food on our tables and clothes on our backs. But if managed irresponsibly they also have the potential to rob us of our health, and for some, our lives.  Living where we do is one of life’s many choices we make.