Klamath Falls Asbestos & Mesothelioma Lawyer

Klamath Falls grew up around timber. When the Southern Pacific Railroad reached the town in 1909, it opened the Klamath Basin’s pine forests to large-scale logging, and the population jumped from a few hundred to several thousand. Weyerhaeuser had already bought the Klamath Lake Railroad and surrounding forestland, and in 1929 it opened what was then the largest pine sawmill in the world in Klamath Falls. By 1941, that mill alone employed about 1,200 men. Dozens of other mills cut fir and pine across the county until the industry declined in the late 1980s. Sawmills and their dry kilns ran on steam, and the boilers, steam lines, and kilns that powered them commonly used asbestos insulation, gaskets, and packing. Millwrights, boiler operators, pipefitters, electricians, and maintenance crews who kept that equipment running faced repeated exposure. Railroad workers who serviced locomotives and brakes did too.

Klamath Falls also carries one of the Pacific Northwest’s best-documented community asbestos problems. In 1944, the U.S. Navy built a Marine Recuperation Barracks north of town to treat Marines who had contracted tropical diseases during World War II. The siding, roofing, and steam pipes of its roughly 80 barracks contained asbestos. After the buildings were later demolished without proper controls, asbestos debris was mixed into the soil of what became the North Ridge Estates subdivision. Oregon public health officials concluded that the site posed a past and present health hazard to the families who lived there and the people who worked on it. The EPA added North Ridge Estates to the federal Superfund list in 2011. Between 2016 and 2018, crews removed about 360,000 cubic yards of asbestos-contaminated material and restored roughly 40 properties.

As in other mill towns, exposure in Klamath Falls often reached people who never worked in industry. Asbestos fibers can travel home on work clothing, in hair, and in vehicles. Spouses and children of mill workers, railroad employees, and tradespeople have developed mesothelioma decades later. Residents of North Ridge Estates faced a different risk: exposure from the ground around their own homes. Because mesothelioma can take 20 to 50 years to appear, many Klamath Falls families are only now linking a diagnosis to a parent’s job, a spouse’s work clothes, or a former home. Take-home and environmental exposure can support a legal claim just as direct workplace exposure can. Danziger & De Llano can help identify the job sites, products, and companies involved, even when the original employer no longer exists.