King of Prussia never had a steel mill or an asbestos factory. What it has is people who worked at places that did, then moved here. Michael C. Schafle, Esq., a Philadelphia trial lawyer with a practice concentrated in asbestos litigation, represents King of Prussia and Upper Merion residents diagnosed with mesothelioma, and the first step in every one of those cases is tracing where the exposure actually happened.
Where King of Prussia residents were actually exposed
Three patterns cover most of the cases we see from communities like this one. The first is an earlier career: a job at an industrial plant somewhere else in the region, decades before retirement brought you here. Alan Wood Steel in Conshohocken, a few miles down the Schuylkill, employed generations from across Montgomery County; its history is documented on our Alan Wood Steel page. The second is construction. The third is exposure that came home on someone else’s clothes. Military service belongs on the list as well; Navy veterans in particular served aboard ships whose engine and boiler spaces were insulated with asbestos, an exposure documented across decades of litigation.
The building boom that built the exposure
King of Prussia as it exists today was largely built between the 1950s and the 1980s: the mall, the office corridor, the interchanges, the housing. Through most of that period, asbestos was standard in fireproofing, insulation, joint compound, flooring, and roofing materials. The carpenters, insulators, drywall finishers, plumbers, and laborers who did that work cut and sanded asbestos products daily. If your trade put you on those job sites, the exposure did not need a factory gate.
Take-home exposure counts too
A spouse who shook out and washed work clothes, or a child who grew up in a house where a parent came home dusty from a plant or a job site, can develop mesothelioma without ever holding the job. Pennsylvania courts have heard these household cases for years. We explain the fact pattern on our secondary exposure page; if it sounds like your family, the claim is evaluated the same careful way as a worker’s.
Two years, generally from diagnosis
Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations for these claims is generally two years, and for mesothelioma it usually runs from diagnosis rather than from the long-ago exposure (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). Wrongful death and survival actions follow their own two-year rules under 42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8301-8302. The details are on our statute of limitations page, and the practical advice is simple: do not let the deadline question sit unanswered.
A Philadelphia practice, twenty miles away
Schafle’s office is on South Broad Street, and he is counsel in the Philadelphia asbestos docket, the Court of Common Pleas program that has managed asbestos cases since 1986 (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001). For a Montgomery County resident, that courthouse is close, but venue is still decided case by case, based on where the defendants and the evidence point. Either way, the work of the case does not fall on you. The firm obtains the employment, union, military, and medical records; your job is to remember what you can and focus on treatment. Schafle began his career on the defense side, so he knows how these companies build their arguments before they make them.
What your family can do now
Write down the outline of the work history, even a rough one: employers, job sites, trades, years. That outline is usually enough for us to start matching against documented Pennsylvania exposure sites, which you can browse in our exposure site directory alongside the statewide city index.
Then request a free case review, and we will tell you plainly whether a claim is there.