Chester’s asbestos story is above all a shipyard story. Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock, one of the largest shipyards of the Second World War, put tens of thousands of Delaware County residents to work building and repairing vessels packed with asbestos insulation. Those workers and their families hold some of the strongest mesothelioma claims in Pennsylvania, and Michael C. Schafle, Esq., counsel on the Philadelphia asbestos docket a few miles upriver, handles them.
Why shipyard exposure was so severe
Ships concentrated asbestos in confined spaces. Boilers, turbines, steam piping, and bulkheads were insulated with it, and much of the installation happened belowdecks with little ventilation. Insulators sawed and fitted block insulation, laggers mixed asbestos cement in open buckets, and every trade working nearby, welders, electricians, shipfitters, painters, breathed the same air. During wartime production surges, crews worked shoulder to shoulder around the clock. The yard kept building and repairing vessels for decades after the war too, so exposure at Sun Ship is not only a 1940s story; men hired in the 1960s and 1970s worked amid the same materials. Our Sun Shipbuilding exposure page details the yard, and the shipyard workers guide covers the trades themselves.
Who is filing Chester claims now
The yard’s wartime generation is largely gone, but claims continue from three directions. Workers from the yard’s later decades, still living, diagnosed after the long latency the National Cancer Institute describes as 20 to 50 years (NCI asbestos fact sheet). Children of shipyard workers, exposed to dust carried home decades ago. And estates of workers who died of mesothelioma recently enough that a wrongful death claim remains timely under Pennsylvania’s general two-year rule (42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8301-8302).
The compensation picture
Sun Ship litigation over the decades established which manufacturers supplied asbestos products to the yard, and that record now works for new claimants. Cases typically combine:
- Lawsuits against surviving asbestos product manufacturers
- Bankruptcy trust claims, drawing on the roughly $30 billion the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported was set aside for asbestos victims (GAO-11-819)
- Veterans’ claims, where Navy service overlapped shipyard exposure
Delaware County case, Philadelphia counsel
Chester is roughly 20 minutes from Michael Schafle’s office at Green & Schafle in South Philadelphia, making this one of the communities where in-person meetings are easiest to arrange. He is counsel in Philadelphia’s dedicated asbestos program (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001). That proximity does not predetermine where a Chester case gets filed; venue follows the facts and the defendants, and the decision is made openly with the client once the exposure record is assembled. The Pennsylvania city index lists the practice’s statewide reach.
Deadlines: the two-year reality
Pennsylvania generally gives a living patient two years from discovery of the disease to file suit (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). The statute of limitations page walks through how discovery is measured and what happens in edge cases. The practical translation: the time to investigate is immediately after diagnosis, while treatment decisions are also being made. A law firm exists partly so the family does not have to do both jobs at once. If a shipyard worker in your family died of mesothelioma within the past two years, a survivor’s claim may still be timely and deserves the same prompt look.
What this means for your household
If your father, grandfather, or you worked at Sun Ship in any trade, in any decade, a mesothelioma diagnosis deserves a legal evaluation. The yard’s asbestos history is thoroughly documented, which shortens the distance between your story and a filed claim.
Michael Schafle also keeps a site just for Chester families, mesotheliomalawyerchesterpa.com, with the local exposure history, the deadlines that apply, and the same free case review.
A free case review takes a few minutes to request and costs your family nothing.