Greensburg is the seat of Westmoreland County, and Westmoreland County was mill and mining country for a century. That is the context behind nearly every mesothelioma case that arises here. Michael C. Schafle, Esq., a trial lawyer based in Philadelphia, represents Westmoreland families in asbestos claims as part of a practice that covers Pennsylvania end to end.
A county built on coal and manufacturing
The towns around Greensburg, Jeannette, New Kensington, Latrobe, Monessen at the county’s edge, held glassworks, metal plants, and factories, while coal mines threaded the countryside between them. Steam power tied all of it together, and steam power in that era meant asbestos insulation on boilers, lines, and hot equipment. Mining brought its own exposure points around preparation plants and machine shops, a pattern described on our miners page. Greensburg itself supplied the county with its tradesmen, its clerks, and its courthouse, and its residents worked everywhere the county’s industry operated.
Documented sites within a short drive
Among the county’s documented exposure sources, the Alcoa works at New Kensington stands out for the number of careers it touched; the aluminum giant’s plants ran the same insulated steam and process systems as the rest of heavy industry. Many Westmoreland work histories also cross into Allegheny County’s mills. The statewide inventory, organized by site, is in our Pennsylvania asbestos exposure sites guide, and matching a family’s work years against it is one of the first things the firm does.
Claims after a loved one has died
Because mesothelioma so often strikes late in life, many Greensburg families come to a lawyer after a death rather than before. Pennsylvania’s wrongful death and survival statutes, 42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8301-8302, let the family pursue the claim the worker held, generally within two years of the death. Our Pennsylvania wrongful death page covers who may file and what damages include. Nothing about a death ends the evidence trail: earnings records, union files, and coworker testimony carry the proof. The long delay itself has a medical explanation. According to the National Cancer Institute, mesothelioma typically develops 20 to 50 years after asbestos exposure, so a diagnosis today points back to working years in the 1970s and 1980s.
Households carry claims alongside workers. A wife who spent decades brushing coal dust and insulation fiber off work clothes before washing them took her own exposure, inside her own home, and if she is the one diagnosed, Pennsylvania law lets her file in her own name. When a Greensburg family cannot see any industrial work in the patient’s past, the question to ask next is whose clothes she washed.
The record does the traveling
Mr. Schafle practices from Green & Schafle, LLC on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, is counsel on the Philadelphia asbestos docket, In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001, and has been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America each year since 2017. A Greensburg family’s case runs on documents and testimony, all of which move by mail, subpoena, and phone; no one in the family is asked to gather records or travel to Philadelphia. Whether the case is ultimately filed in Westmoreland County, Philadelphia, or another venue is a judgment made case by case, after the exposure history is fully mapped. The rest of the firm’s Pennsylvania coverage is on the statewide city hub.
What this means for your family
If a parent or spouse spent working years in this county’s mills, mines, or trades and mesothelioma has now been diagnosed, the two facts are almost certainly related, and Pennsylvania law provides both lawsuit and trust-fund routes to compensation. The deadline is the only element that punishes waiting.
Ask for a free case review and have the work history evaluated by someone who handles these cases daily.