Secondary & Household Asbestos Exposure Claims

• Mesothelioma Lawyer in Jeannette
• What a Mesothelioma Case Is Worth
• Secondary & Household Exposure Claims
• Jeannette Asbestos Job Sites & Trades

Jeannette was laid out around its factories, and most of its glassworkers lived within walking distance of them. A shift on a furnace floor, in a batch house or along a lehr left dust on clothing, and that clothing came straight home to North and South Jeannette, the Sixth Ward and the streets off Clay Avenue. There was rarely a change house in the early decades. The work clothes went into the same wash as everything else.

Secondary exposure — take-home exposure — is what happened when asbestos left the plant on somebody's clothes. A worker at the window-glass works, Jeannette Glass, the McKee plant, or the rubber works finished a shift covered in dust, drove home through Clay Avenue and downtown, North and South Jeannette, the Sixth Ward, Brinkerton, Grapeville, Penn borough, Penn Township, Hempfield Township and Harrison City, and the dust came with him: into the car, onto the porch, into the hamper. Whoever handled that laundry got a concentrated dose, often daily, for years. Frequently that was a wife. Sometimes it was a child who hugged a father in his work clothes.

These claims are legally the same in one respect and different in another. The same, in that the responsibility rests on the companies that made and sold asbestos products they knew to be dangerous. Different, in that the person who got sick has no employment record of their own. Nothing in a personnel file will show it. So the case has to be assembled around the worker's history — his employer, his job title, his years, the products he handled — and then connected to the household routine that carried fiber home.

That means the questions we ask are domestic rather than industrial, and people are sometimes surprised by them. Who did the laundry. Whether the work clothes were washed with everything else. Whether he shook them out on the back step first. Whether he changed at the plant or drove home in them. Whether the same car carried the family on weekends. These ordinary details are, quite literally, the evidence.

The working family member does not need to be alive, and often is not — sometimes he never developed an asbestos disease at all, which throws families off entirely. Neither fact ends the claim. What matters is that his job put asbestos in the house. Jeannette is in Westmoreland County, whose courthouse is in Greensburg. Venue follows the defendants rather than the family’s address, though, and Philadelphia’s dedicated asbestos program is frequently available for the same case.

Time limits apply and generally run from the diagnosis rather than from the exposure, which was often decades earlier. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Glass City households also tended to have more than one plant in them: a father at the window-glass works, a son at Jeannette Glass, a daughter on a packing line, an uncle at the rubber works. Each brought a different kind of dust home. A household claim is built on each worker’s job and years, and on the domestic details of who shook out and washed the clothes.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — fees and costs in Jeannette

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — questions, answered