Washington Mesothelioma Lawyer

Washington’s asbestos history starts at the water. Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton has built, overhauled and scrapped Navy ships for more than a century, and every one of them carried asbestos in its boilers, turbines, pipe lagging and bulkhead insulation. In World War II the shipyards multiplied: Todd and the Seattle-Tacoma yards, Lake Washington, and the Kaiser yard across the river at Vancouver, where tens of thousands of new workers learned shipfitting in compartments thick with insulation dust. Many of them stayed on in the region’s other heavy industries. The pulp and paper mills at Longview, Everett, Port Angeles, Camas and Tacoma ran recovery boilers, digesters and dryer sections wrapped in asbestos. Cheap federal hydropower from Grand Coulee and Bonneville brought aluminum smelters to Spokane, Wenatchee, Longview and Bellingham, where pot lines and casthouses used asbestos for heat protection. Refineries at Anacortes and Cherry Point, the ASARCO smelter in Tacoma, and the reactors and processing plants at Hanford added more. So did Boeing’s plants and military installations from Fort Lewis and McChord to Whidbey Island and Bangor.

Across all of it the same jobs carried the heaviest burden: insulators and pipe coverers, boilermakers, machinists, shipfitters, pipefitters, electricians, millwrights and the laborers beside them. That was worst during ship overhauls, mill shutdowns and boiler rebuilds, when old insulation came off. And the exposure did not stop at the gate. It went home on coveralls and in car seats, which is why spouses who shook out work clothes and children who met a parent at the shipyard gate are diagnosed with mesothelioma decades later having never set foot in a yard.