Portland Asbestos & Mesothelioma Lawyer

Portland’s modern industrial history was shaped by shipbuilding. In 1941, Henry J. Kaiser opened the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation in the St. Johns neighborhood, and that September it launched the first Liberty ship built in the Pacific Northwest, the Star of Oregon. Kaiser soon added a second Portland yard on Swan Island and a third across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. Oregon Shipbuilding alone turned out about 455 ships, and Swan Island built another 147 T-2 tankers. At peak production, the three Kaiser yards employed more than 90,000 workers. Wartime ships relied heavily on asbestos: it insulated pipes and boilers, lined engine rooms, and filled the gaskets and packing used throughout their machinery. Pipefitters, insulators, boilermakers, welders, machinists, electricians, and laborers who built these vessels often worked in tight, poorly ventilated spaces where fibers built up in the air.

Shipyard exposure did not end with the war. Swan Island became the center of the Port of Portland’s dry dock and ship repair operations, and companies such as Northwest Marine Iron Works overhauled U.S. Navy and commercial vessels there for decades. Repair work could be even more hazardous than new construction, because it meant tearing out aging asbestos insulation, gaskets, and packing.  Beyond the waterfront, power plants, metal works, fuel terminals, and older commercial buildings also used asbestos insulation and materials, putting maintenance and construction trades at risk.

Many Portland families were also exposed without ever working in a shipyard. To house the wartime workforce, Kaiser built Vanport, the nation’s largest wartime housing project, where about 40,000 people lived in 1944. Asbestos fibers can travel home on work clothing, in hair, and in vehicles. Spouses and children of shipyard workers and tradespeople have developed mesothelioma decades later. Because the disease can take 20 to 50 years to appear, many Portland families are only now linking a diagnosis to a parent’s or spouse’s work on the waterfront. Take-home 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.