Ask an asbestos lawyer which workplaces produced the heaviest exposures and power plants come up almost immediately. A generating station is boilers, turbines, and miles of steam piping, and for most of the twentieth century all of it was insulated with asbestos-containing material. Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, ran the stations that powered southeastern Pennsylvania, and the men who operated and maintained them carry that history.
The stations that powered the region
PECO’s generating fleet grew across the twentieth century and included coal-fired stations along the region’s rivers: Delaware and Richmond stations on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Schuylkill Station on the Schuylkill, Chester Station downriver, the large Eddystone Generating Station in Delaware County, and Cromby Station near Phoenixville, among others. Later decades added nuclear stations, but the mid-century coal fleet, built and maintained during the peak asbestos years, is where most exposure histories center.
Why power plants exposed workers so heavily
The National Cancer Institute reports that asbestos was the standard insulation for boilers, pipes, and other high-heat equipment through the late 1970s (NCI asbestos fact sheet). A generating station is that equipment, floor to ceiling. Boiler walls, steam headers, turbine casings, feedwater lines, valves, and pumps were all lagged, gasketed, or packed with asbestos-containing products. Outage work made it worse: during scheduled overhauls, crews tore out old insulation and refractory in enclosed spaces, then rebuilt it, generating dust that hung in the plant for the length of the job.
Who worked in that dust
- Boiler operators, watch engineers, and their helpers
- Insulators and laggers, including outside contractors brought in for outages
- Pipefitters, welders, and valve mechanics
- Turbine deck crews during teardowns and overhauls
- Laborers and janitorial staff who swept up after the trades
Contractor status does not defeat a claim. Thousands of the most exposed men at generating stations were employed by outside insulation and mechanical firms, not the utility, and their cases proceed the same way: against the manufacturers and suppliers of the products in the plant.
Records help these cases more than most. Utilities kept plant and outage documentation, unions kept dispatch and membership records, and Social Security earnings statements list every employer, including the insulation contractors whose names families often cannot recall. Prior litigation involving the same stations has produced testimony describing which products were used where. A family that can only name the station and the years is further along than it thinks. Veterans who did boiler work in the Navy before joining a utility often have a second exposure history that belongs in the same claim.
One region, many overlapping sites
Power plant workers moved between stations, and many also logged years at the industrial neighbors that shared the lower Delaware corridor, including the Westinghouse turbine plant at Lester, which built the very machines these stations ran. Utility workers in western Pennsylvania faced the same conditions at the Pittsburgh area power plants. The full Pennsylvania asbestos exposure sites index maps both ends of the state.
Latency and the legal clock
Mesothelioma typically appears 20 to 50 years after exposure, per the NCI, which is why men who worked PECO outages in the 1960s and 1970s are receiving diagnoses now. Pennsylvania generally allows two years from the date of diagnosis to file (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). The relevant question is never how long ago the work happened; it is how recently the disease was found.
What this means for your family
Station records, outage schedules, and product identifications from these plants have been developed through decades of litigation, and a family is not expected to reproduce any of it. What you supply is the shape of a career: which stations, roughly which years, what kind of work. Matching that history to specific plants and the products used in them is the lawyer’s job. Michael C. Schafle, Esq. is counsel in the Philadelphia asbestos docket, where southeastern Pennsylvania utility cases are heard, and the Philadelphia mesothelioma lawyer page describes that court’s dedicated asbestos program. Begin with a free case review.