A steam turbine is a machine for handling extreme heat, and for most of the twentieth century the material that made that possible was asbestos. Westinghouse built steam turbines and related heavy electrical equipment at its Lester plant, in Tinicum Township beside Essington, from the World War I era for decades afterward, serving power utilities and the Navy. The trades who built, insulated, and tested those machines had some of the most direct asbestos contact in Delaware County industry.
The turbine works by the airport
Westinghouse established the Lester works on the Delaware riverfront in the 1910s, on ground that now sits in the shadow of Philadelphia International Airport. The plant became one of the company’s major manufacturing sites, producing steam turbines and generators at a scale that made it a fixture of the lower Delaware industrial corridor and a major employer for Essington, Lester, and the surrounding towns.
Why turbine building meant asbestos
The National Cancer Institute reports that asbestos was the standard insulation for high-heat industrial equipment, including boilers, steam systems, and related machinery, through the late 1970s (NCI asbestos fact sheet). Turbines are the textbook case. Casings and steam piping were lagged with insulation, joints sealed with asbestos-containing gaskets and packing, and insulating blankets and cements were fitted around hot sections. Building and testing turbines meant cutting, fitting, and reworking those materials on the shop floor, and rework and repair jobs disturbed material that had already been installed.
Lester plant trades in asbestos cases
- Insulators and laggers fitting turbine and pipe insulation
- Machinists and assemblers on the erecting floor
- Pipefitters and welders on steam and test piping
- Winders and electrical assemblers sharing shop air
- Test crews running turbines under steam
Shop air spread the dust well beyond the insulation benches, so workers who never handled the material personally still show Lester exposure in their histories. So do family members; the NCI notes that fibers carried home on clothing exposed households as well.
The lower Delaware corridor
Lester sat in a dense strip of heavy industry along the river. Many workers split careers between Westinghouse and its neighbors, including the Baldwin Locomotive Works at Eddystone just downriver, and some went on to install or service turbines at the region’s generating stations, covered on our PECO power plants page. Each workplace in a history can add responsible manufacturers to a claim; the Pennsylvania asbestos exposure sites index covers the corridor end to end.
Timing a claim decades later
Mesothelioma typically appears 20 to 50 years after exposure, per the NCI, which places the plant’s later working decades squarely in today’s diagnosis window. Pennsylvania generally allows two years from the date of diagnosis to file (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). Claims proceed against the manufacturers and suppliers of the asbestos products used in the plant and its machines, and bankruptcy trusts stand behind many of the companies that no longer exist in ordinary form.
Navy service is a recurring second chapter in Lester histories. The plant built marine turbines, and many of its workers served aboard the same kind of steam plants they later built or tested. Shipboard engine rooms carried their own asbestos exposure, and a claim can rest on both chapters at once, so tell your lawyer about military service even if it seems long ago and unrelated. Service records are easy to obtain and slot directly into the same case file.
What this means for your family
Turbine plant histories are well documented in asbestos litigation, and Delaware County cases are heard in a court system with a dedicated asbestos program next door in Philadelphia. Your family’s contribution is the outline of the work: the building, the trade, the years. Matching that outline to the Lester plant and its products is the lawyer’s job. Michael C. Schafle, Esq. is counsel in the Philadelphia asbestos docket (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001) and reviews these histories personally; the Essington mesothelioma lawyer page covers the local path. Request a free case review to start.