Texas Mesothelioma Lawyer

Texas industrialized on asbestos. The Gulf Coast refining and petrochemical belt from Orange and Port Arthur through Beaumont, the Houston Ship Channel, Texas City and Freeport ran on boilers, fired heaters, distillation columns and miles of steam piping, all of it insulated with asbestos-containing material until the 1980s. The wartime shipyards at Houston, Galveston, Orange and Beaumont turned out vessels packed with asbestos block, pipe covering and gaskets, and the men who built them often moved straight into refinery work afterward and kept accumulating exposure. Inland the industries change but the mineral does not. East Texas had gray-iron foundries and railroad machine shops, and a Tyler plant that manufactured asbestos pipe insulation from 1954 to 1972, whose 1,130 workers have been followed in peer-reviewed mortality studies ever since. Further west there was smelting and rail repair at El Paso, oilfield and drilling work across the Permian Basin, power stations, cement and paper mills, and federal installations from Pantex to Fort Hood to Dyess and Kelly Air Force Bases.

Across all of it the same jobs carried the heaviest burden: boilermakers, insulators, pipefitters, welders, millwrights, electricians, machinists and the laborers working alongside them, particularly during turnarounds, furnace relines and ship refits when insulation came off in clouds. And the exposure did not stop at the gate. It rode home on coveralls and in truck cabs, which is why spouses who did the laundry and children who met a parent coming off shift are diagnosed with mesothelioma decades later having never set foot in a plant.