Mesothelioma in Construction Workers and Asbestos in Construction

Sam E. Taylor:

People in the construction industry, again, going back all the way to the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, were exposed to asbestos in a number of ways.

Frequently, those construction workers would have to deal with drywall. The joint compound that’s used when drywalling, everybody’s been involved with putting or seeing sheetrock being put up and the putty material they put in between the sheetrock panels is what’s called joint compound that would have to be, you know, it’s a putty form, then it’s when it dries, it’s sanded, it’s smoothed out, then it gets on the floor, it’s swept up, a joint compound, just as an example, was an asbestos containing material.

And a lot of construction workers, even if you weren’t the one doing the sheetrocking, if you happened to be another trade working on, you know, the countertops or in the house or the building doing another type of work, you could be exposed to that spread of asbestos fibers from the sheetrocking that was going on.

Likewise, cement pipe, that’s frequently involved in his construction work. Floor tiles, roofing, all types of materials used customarily in the construction business were asbestos-containing products.

We frequently have clients who come in to see us who might not have been carpenters or construction workers, but maybe they just did some home renovation on their own. You know, expanding by putting in a new room, or remodeling a room, and they used joint compound, they use floor tile, they did the roofing, whatever they did.

So we frequently have to question our clients extensively about all the remodeling jobs they did throughout time, because as we’ve talked about before, mesothelioma, which is, as we’ve talked about, a very dreadful, terminal illness caused by asbestos exposure. It has a latency period and latency means that from the time of exposure, it takes at least 10 years before that can lead to mesothelioma. It also can cause mesothelioma 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later. So when we see clients we have to investigate even going back like said earlier to what their parents did for a living when they were little.

That’s a form of take home exposure. A parent can work as a construction worker, have asbestos fibers on their clothes, come home, play with their kids, roll around on the floor, and the child can inhale asbestos fibers that way. I have, specifically have a case out of New Mexico who I represented, a banker, he played college football and then became a banker. There was no evident way that he was exposed to asbestos.

And when we started investigating, we found out that his father was a carman for a railroad company. Train brakes, like car brakes, have asbestos containing linings. So he was literally exposed to these asbestos containing linings every day. He would come home with it on his clothes, play around with his son, and his son at the age of 54 ended up being diagnosed with mesothelioma and passed away about a year later.

And so that’s an example of take home exposure and the way that these construction jobs can lead, or other jobs can lead to exposures to family members.