The most consequential asbestos site in Montgomery County history operated a few miles from Lansdale. Ambler’s Keasbey & Mattison plant manufactured asbestos products for decades, and its workforce and its dust reached across the North Penn communities around it. Michael C. Schafle, Esq. is a Philadelphia trial lawyer who handles mesothelioma cases statewide, including for Lansdale residents whose exposure traces to Ambler, to the building trades, or to a family member’s work clothes.
The Ambler connection
Keasbey & Mattison made asbestos shingles, insulation, and textiles in Ambler, and the waste from that production still sits there in piles the EPA later addressed as the BoRit Superfund site. People from Lansdale, North Wales, and the boroughs along the rail line worked at the plant or lived with someone who did. If your family’s history touches Ambler at all, read our Keasbey & Mattison page; it is the single most common thread in Montgomery County mesothelioma cases.
Trades and take-home exposure in the North Penn area
Lansdale itself was a borough of tradespeople and light manufacturing, and both paths led to asbestos. Electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and HVAC workers handled asbestos-containing wire insulation, pipe covering, brakes, and boiler components well into the 1980s. And exposure did not stop at the job site. The classic Pennsylvania fact pattern is the wife who shook out and washed her husband’s work clothes every week for years; we describe that case on our washing clothes exposure page. Courts treat household exposure as real exposure, because medically it is.
How Pennsylvania law treats a decades-old exposure
Mesothelioma typically develops 20 to 50 years after asbestos exposure, according to the National Cancer Institute (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/asbestos/asbestos-fact-sheet). Pennsylvania law answers that delay with the discovery rule: the two-year filing period under 42 Pa. C.S. § 5524 generally runs from diagnosis, not from the years the exposure happened. If the person who was exposed has died, separate two-year rules govern wrongful death and survival claims. Our statute of limitations page lays out the deadlines in plain terms.
What working with a Philadelphia firm looks like
Schafle is a founding partner of Green & Schafle, LLC and counsel in the Philadelphia asbestos docket, the Court of Common Pleas program running since 1986 (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001). Lansdale is less than an hour from that courthouse, but no one should choose a lawyer by mileage. Choose based on whether the firm can identify the right defendants, and understand that the case comes to you: the firm gathers the employment and medical records, meets you where you are, and preserves testimony early when health demands it. When a client is seriously ill, courts can move an asbestos case ahead of the ordinary queue, and the firm asks for that scheduling wherever it is available. The point of early testimony is the same in every case: the client tells the story once, on the record, and the litigation carries it forward no matter what the disease does next. That is also why the first call should not wait for a treatment plan to settle. Schafle has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America every year since 2017.
What this means for your family
A Lansdale diagnosis has a knowable cause, and usually a documentable one. Whether the thread runs through Ambler, a trade, or a laundry room, the products involved appear again and again in Pennsylvania litigation records, which is what lets us build a claim from fragments of memory. Browse the statewide city index to see how these cases connect across the region.
The practical next step takes one phone call: request a free case review and let us trace the exposure for you.