Secondary & Household Asbestos Exposure Claims

Quick answer

Covers spouses, children, and other household members exposed to asbestos carried home on work clothes, tools, or in a car
The claim is built around the worker's job history even when the worker themselves never got sick
The working family member does not need to be living for the claim to proceed
Laundry is the classic exposure route — shaking out coveralls released fiber directly into a person's breathing space
No upfront cost, and we come to you. Call (610) 744-5614

Marcus Hook’s row houses sit close enough to the refinery that the tank farm is part of the view, and the men who worked it mostly lived within a few minutes of the gate. What they brought home was not steady. During normal operations an operator might come home no dirtier than any other shift worker; during a turnaround, when insulation was being ripped off and replaced for weeks at a stretch, the clothes that came through the door were a different thing altogether.

Secondary exposure — take-home exposure — is what happened when asbestos left the plant on somebody's clothes. A worker at the Sun Oil refinery, the Trainer refinery, or the Viscose plant finished a shift covered in dust, drove home through Marcus Hook, Linwood, Boothwyn, Trainer, Lower Chichester and Upper Chichester, and the dust came with him: into the car, onto the porch, into the hamper. Whoever handled that laundry got a concentrated dose, often daily, for years. Frequently that was a wife. Sometimes it was a child who hugged a father in his work clothes.

These claims are legally the same in one respect and different in another. The same, in that the responsibility rests on the companies that made and sold asbestos products they knew to be dangerous. Different, in that the person who got sick has no employment record of their own. Nothing in a personnel file will show it. So the case has to be assembled around the worker's history — his employer, his job title, his years, the products he handled — and then connected to the household routine that carried fiber home.

That means the questions we ask are domestic rather than industrial, and people are sometimes surprised by them. Who did the laundry. Whether the work clothes were washed with everything else. Whether he shook them out on the back step first. Whether he changed at the plant or drove home in them. Whether the same car carried the family on weekends. These ordinary details are, quite literally, the evidence.

The working family member does not need to be alive, and often is not — sometimes he never developed an asbestos disease at all, which throws families off entirely. Neither fact ends the claim. What matters is that his job put asbestos in the house. Marcus Hook is in Delaware County, so the courthouse at Media is one option. Venue follows the defendants rather than the family’s address, though, and the companies that sold gaskets, packing, pipe covering and refractory into East Coast refineries did business everywhere — Philadelphia’s dedicated asbestos program, twenty minutes up I-95, is frequently available for the same case.

Time limits apply and generally run from the diagnosis rather than from the exposure, which was often decades earlier. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Many households here also had two plants in them. Until 1977 the American Viscose works was one of the borough’s biggest employers, and it was common for one member of a family to be at the refinery and another at Viscose, or for a man to move between them. A household claim in Marcus Hook often means documenting two work histories and two routes into the same house, and then putting them together.

Call (610) 744-5614

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — fees and costs in Marcus Hook

Consultation and initial case review, at home or at the hospital	$0
Mesothelioma or asbestos claim, handled on contingency	No fee unless there is a recovery — the percentage is agreed in writing before representation begins
Requesting employment, union, and military records on your behalf	Included in the case review

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — questions, answered

My husband came home filthy during turnarounds but not the rest of the year. Does that count?

It can count heavily. Turnarounds were when insulation was stripped and replaced, so the worst dust came home in concentrated stretches. The claim is built around which units, which years and roughly how often.

My mother worked at the Viscose plant and my father at the refinery. Which one matters?

Possibly both. A household can have two working adults bringing dust home from two different plants, and each history is documented on its own before they are put together.

We lived in Linwood, right by the tank farm. Is living near the refinery the exposure?

Usually the clothes matter more than the address. A household claim is built on what a refinery worker carried home — his unit, his years, turnaround seasons — and who handled his work clothes afterward.

I never worked around asbestos. My husband did. Can I still have a claim?

Yes. Take-home or secondary exposure claims exist precisely for household members who breathed asbestos carried home on a worker's clothing, tools, or vehicle.

My father worked in the mills but never got sick. Does that matter?

No. The claim depends on his exposure to asbestos products at work and on the dust reaching the household, not on whether he developed a disease himself.