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 (570) 227-8432

In Hazleton the household story often runs through a powerhouse or a plant rather than a mine. The Harwood steam station burned coal at the mouth of the Harwood mine, and the factories that arrived after 1947 each had their own boiler rooms and maintenance shops. The men who repaired that equipment came home in work clothes that carried whatever they had been stripping and patching that day.

Secondary exposure — take-home exposure — is what happened when asbestos left the plant on somebody's clothes. A worker at the collieries, the Harwood power station, or the plants in the Valmont and Humboldt parks finished a shift covered in dust, drove home through West Hazleton, Hazle Township, Harwood, Lattimer, Drifton, Humboldt, Jeddo, Freeland and McAdoo, 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. Hazleton is in Luzerne County, whose courthouse is in Wilkes-Barre. Venue follows the defendants rather than the family’s address, though, and Philadelphia’s dedicated asbestos program 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.

The patch towns and city neighbourhoods around Hazleton were close to the work, so clothes went straight into the family wash. A household claim is built on the worker’s history — which plant, which job, which years — and on the domestic detail of who shook out and washed those clothes. That detail, not the address, is usually what connects the illness back to the job.

Call (570) 227-8432

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — fees and costs in Hazleton

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

He worked at the Harwood power station. Could my mother have been exposed at home?

Possibly. Powerhouse crews worked around boiler and turbine insulation that was regularly repaired, and dust left on their clothes. A household claim is built on his job, his years and who did the washing.

We lived in a patch town right by the colliery. Is that enough?

Living nearby alone is usually not the basis of the claim. What came home on a worker’s clothes and who handled them is what a household claim is built around.

My father moved from the mines to a factory in the CAN DO park. Which job brought it home?

Possibly both. A colliery boiler house and a factory maintenance shop each put dust on work clothes, and a household claim can rest on either history, documented one job at a time.

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.