The Aluminum Company of America began producing in New Kensington in the 1890s, making the Westmoreland County city one of the earliest homes of the American aluminum industry. The works operated into the early 1970s, a span that sits almost entirely inside the decades when asbestos was standard insulation in industrial plants. Former Alcoa workers and their families diagnosed with mesothelioma can still bring claims today.
The aluminum era on the Allegheny
New Kensington’s identity was tied to Alcoa for most of a century. The company’s operations there grew from early production into a large fabricating complex along the Allegheny River, turning out aluminum sheet and finished goods, including cookware lines that carried the city’s name into kitchens across the country. Generations of local families clocked in at the works before Alcoa wound down production in the early 1970s.
That timeline is the key fact for exposure purposes. A plant that ran from the 1890s into the 1970s spent its entire life in the period when, as the National Cancer Institute describes, asbestos was widely used in insulation and other industrial products (NCI asbestos fact sheet).
Why an aluminum plant meant heat, steam, and insulation
Aluminum work is hot work. Metal has to be melted and remelted, sheet has to be annealed in furnaces, and rolling equipment and presses need steam and power. All of that ran on the same industrial plumbing found in any heavy plant of the era: boilers, insulated steam lines, furnace linings, gaskets, and packing. Asbestos was the default material for high-temperature insulation through the late 1970s, so the crews who built, maintained, and repaired this equipment were the ones most likely to breathe fibers.
Maintenance work was the repeat offender. Stripping old lagging off a steam line, replacing a furnace door seal, or cutting gasket material released dust into the air, and that dust did not stay in one department. Workers who never touched insulation themselves could be exposed simply by working nearby while someone else did.
Who was most at risk at the works
- Furnace and remelt crews working around lined, high-heat equipment
- Boiler house operators and their helpers
- Pipefitters, millwrights, and maintenance mechanics
- Laborers assigned to tear-out, cleanup, and rebuild jobs
- Rolling and finishing crews stationed near insulated lines
Mesothelioma typically appears 20 to 50 years after exposure, per the NCI. A worker who left the plant when production ended in the early 1970s may only have been diagnosed recently, and that delay is expected, not suspicious.
New Kensington in the wider Pittsburgh industrial belt
The Allegheny and Monongahela valleys held dozens of plants with the same asbestos-era profile. Many New Kensington residents also worked at, or had family in, the Pittsburgh area power plants or the U.S. Steel mills downriver, such as the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock. A complete work history often names more than one site, and each site can add responsible companies to a claim. The full list of Pennsylvania asbestos exposure sites we cover is a good place to check the others.
What this means for your family
Alcoa still exists, but an asbestos claim rarely rests on the plant owner alone. The manufacturers of the insulation, gaskets, and other asbestos products used inside the works are typically the defendants, and many of them now pay claims through bankruptcy trusts. Pennsylvania law generally gives you two years from diagnosis to file (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524), so the clock runs from the doctor’s finding, not from your years at the plant.
You are not expected to know which brands of insulation were on the steam lines in 1965. Matching a New Kensington work history to this site, its era, and its products is the lawyer’s job, and it is work Michael C. Schafle, Esq. does in the Philadelphia asbestos docket and in claims across the state. Families in the area can also see the New Kensington mesothelioma lawyer page for local specifics. When you are ready, request a free case review and tell us what you remember about the job.