Ohio Mesothelioma Lawyer

Ohio’s heavy industry ran on heat, and asbestos was what kept the heat in. The steel valley from Youngstown and Warren through Cleveland, Lorain, Canton, Mansfield and Middletown was full of blast furnaces, open hearths, coke ovens and soaking pits. All of it was lined, wrapped and patched with asbestos-containing refractory and insulation until the 1980s. Akron built the country’s tires, and its rubber plants used asbestos in curing presses, steam lines and the talc and fillers workers handled every shift. Toledo made glass for the auto industry, and its furnaces and lehrs used asbestos gloves, blankets and rollers. Some of that asbestos was made in Ohio: the Philip Carey Manufacturing Company in Lockland, just outside Cincinnati, made asbestos insulation there for most of the twentieth century and later faced hundreds of thousands of injury claims. On the lakefront, shipyards at Lorain, Toledo and Cleveland built and refitted Great Lakes freighters packed with asbestos pipe covering and boiler lagging. Along the Ohio River, coal-fired power stations ran turbines and boilers insulated the same way, and the refineries at Lima and Toledo had the same fired heaters and steam piping as the Gulf Coast. There were also auto and brake plants, railroad shops, and federal sites: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Portsmouth enrichment plant at Piketon, Fernald and Mound.

Across all of it the same jobs carried the heaviest burden: boilermakers, insulators, bricklayers who relined furnaces, pipefitters, steamfitters, millwrights, electricians, and the laborers who swept up after them. That was worst during furnace rebuilds, outages and ship layups, when old insulation was torn out. And the exposure did not stop at the gate. It went home on work clothes and in lunch pails, which is why spouses who did the laundry and children who hugged a parent coming off shift are diagnosed with mesothelioma decades later without ever working in a mill.