Jeannette earned the nickname Glass City honestly: for most of the twentieth century its economy revolved around glass plants whose furnaces ran day and night. High heat is where asbestos lived. Michael C. Schafle, Esq., a Philadelphia trial lawyer who focuses his practice on asbestos litigation, represents Jeannette and Westmoreland County residents diagnosed with mesothelioma, wherever in Pennsylvania their case belongs.
Heat, glass, and asbestos
A glass furnace holds molten material at well over two thousand degrees, and everything near it had to resist that heat. For decades the material of choice was asbestos. It was in furnace and lehr insulation, in the gloves and aprons worn at the hot end, in the curtains shielding work stations, and in the gaskets and packing on steam and air lines throughout the plant. Maintenance crews who relined furnaces or tore out old insulation had it worst, but the dust from that work hung in the air for everyone on the floor.
Glass was not the only industrial employer in town. Jeannette was also home to heavy manufacturing, including the Elliott Company’s turbine and compressor works, and turbine production is among the most asbestos-intensive trades on record. Factory workers across these plants faced overlapping sources of exposure, sometimes at more than one employer over a career.
Why the diagnosis comes decades later
Mesothelioma has a long fuse. The National Cancer Institute reports that the disease typically appears 20 to 50 years after asbestos exposure (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/asbestos/asbestos-fact-sheet). A glassworker who left the plant in 1985 can be diagnosed in 2026, and Pennsylvania law accounts for the gap: the clock generally starts at diagnosis, not at exposure.
Who actually pays on a claim like this
Usually not the glass companies. The claims target the manufacturers and suppliers of the asbestos insulation, refractory products, gaskets, and protective gear used inside the plants. When several companies share responsibility, Pennsylvania’s Fair Share Act (42 Pa. C.S. § 7102) governs how liability is divided among them. Our Pennsylvania asbestos laws page walks through how that apportionment works and why naming the right defendants early matters.
Working with a Philadelphia lawyer from Westmoreland County
Schafle’s office is on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, and he is counsel in the Philadelphia asbestos docket, the program that has handled asbestos cases in the Court of Common Pleas since 1986 (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001). Where a Jeannette case gets filed depends on the defendants and the facts; venue is a strategic decision made after the work history is built, not before. The distance costs you nothing. The firm collects the records, interviews happen by phone or at your kitchen table, and testimony can be preserved close to home. Schafle has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America annually since 2017 and in Pennsylvania Super Lawyers from 2021 through 2026.
Where this leaves your family
You do not need to collect documents; that is our job. What helps most is memory: plant names, departments, years, the trades that worked around you. Even partial recollections give the investigation threads to pull, because the products used in Pennsylvania glass and turbine plants are documented in decades of litigation records. Households have standing too. A spouse who shook out and washed dusty work clothes for years, or a child raised in a glassworker’s home, can develop the same disease from the same fibers, and Pennsylvania courts treat those household exposures as real claims deserving the same investigation. The Pennsylvania exposure site directory shows how industrial histories like Jeannette’s are mapped, and our city index covers the rest of the state.
When you are ready to talk it through, ask for a free case review and we will take the history from there.