The USS Greiner (DE-37) was an Evarts-class destroyer escort laid down on September 7, 1942, and launched on May 20, the following year. It was commissioned on August 18, 1943, under Lt. Comdr. F. S. Dowd’s command with the hull number DE-37 and served in the U.S. Navy for 2 years until it was decommissioned on November 19, 1945. During its activities, the ship carried a complement of 198 people on board and had its main missions in Pearl Harbor, the Marshalls, Okinawa, the Gilberts, Guam, Kusaie, Wotje, and San Francisco. After the decommissioning, the ship was struck from the Navy List on December 19, 1945, and sold for scrapping to J. G. Berkwit & Co. in 1947. Because it was lightweight, flexible, cheap, and resistant to flame and heat, asbestos was used frequently for the insulation of pipes, boilers, electrical fixtures, and hull construction. This miraculous, versatile material also turned out to cause several incurable lung ailments, such as lung cancer, mesothelioma, asbestosis, pleural plaques, diffuse pleural thickening, benign asbestos pleural effusions, and rounded atelectasis. You may already be dealing with one or more of these conditions from your years in the shipyards or aboard vessels built between World War II and the late 1970s.
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