Lower Burrell grew up beside Alcoa. The aluminum operations across the city line in New Kensington anchored this stretch of the Allegheny Valley for most of the twentieth century, and they drew their workforce from Lower Burrell’s neighborhoods. Michael C. Schafle, Esq. focuses his practice on asbestos litigation from Philadelphia and represents Westmoreland County residents diagnosed with mesothelioma after careers in and around those plants.
The Alcoa belt and asbestos
Aluminum work is hot work. Furnaces, casting operations, rolling and fabricating lines, and the steam systems behind them all used asbestos insulation, gaskets, and protective equipment through the 1970s. Millwrights and maintenance crews disturbed that material every time they opened a line or stripped a furnace wall, and the dust did not stay in one department. The history of the New Kensington operations, including who worked there and what products show up in litigation records, is on our Alcoa New Kensington page.
Beyond the aluminum works
Not every Lower Burrell case runs through Alcoa. The valley held glass plants, machine shops, and rail operations, and plenty of residents spent careers in the building trades or at power stations elsewhere in the region. The pattern that matters is not the employer’s name; it is heat, steam, friction, and the asbestos products that served them. A work history conversation usually surfaces two or three exposure sources a client had never connected to the diagnosis. Exposure also crossed the threshold at home: wives who laundered work clothes and children who grew up around a father’s dusty jacket appear in Pennsylvania case files alongside the workers themselves, and those household claims are weighed with the same seriousness. The Pennsylvania exposure site directory shows how many of those sources are already documented.
The claim targets manufacturers, not your old employer
Most asbestos lawsuits are product liability cases against the companies that made and supplied the insulation, gaskets, cements, and gear, not against the plant that signed your paychecks. Many of those manufacturers went through bankruptcy and funded compensation trusts; the U.S. Government Accountability Office put the total set aside at roughly $30 billion (GAO-11-819, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-11-819). A single case often involves both trust claims and lawsuits, run in parallel.
Deadlines and the Fair Share Act
Two Pennsylvania rules shape every case from this valley. First, the statute of limitations: generally two years, and for mesothelioma the period usually begins at diagnosis (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). Second, the Fair Share Act (42 Pa. C.S. § 7102), which controls how responsibility is split when many companies contributed to the exposure, a near certainty in a multi-plant work history. Both are explained on our Pennsylvania asbestos laws page.
The path from diagnosis to claim
Schafle practices from Philadelphia, where he is counsel in the asbestos docket of the Court of Common Pleas (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001), and he selects the filing court case by case based on the defendants and the evidence. For you, the process is built to be light: the firm pulls the employment, union, and medical records, interviews happen where you are comfortable, and nothing requires a trip across the state. He resolved two multi-million-dollar mesothelioma settlements in 2023. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. The first conversation also answers the practical questions families actually have: what the process asks of the client, how long the investigation takes to produce answers, and what happens if health worsens mid-case.
If aluminum, glass, or trade work in the Allegheny Valley is part of your story, request a free case review, or start with the statewide city index to see how we approach communities like yours.