Sunbury Asbestos Exposure: Job Sites, Employers & Trades

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Sunbury’s industrial history is spread along the river rather than concentrated in one mill. Across the water at Shamokin Dam, Pennsylvania Power & Light built its Sunbury steam electric station on land bought from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1945 — a coal plant of boilers, turbines and insulated steam lines. Upriver at Northumberland, the railroad’s roundhouse and yards serviced steam locomotives until 1957. Further up, at Milton, a car works that had been building railroad cars since the 1860s built tank cars under ACF for more than a century.

Asbestos exposure is local in a way most injuries are not. It happened at particular buildings, on particular shifts, in particular trades, and the same handful of employers come up again and again in a given town. Around Sunbury the recurring ones include PP&L’s Sunbury steam electric station, across the river at Shamokin Dam, the Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse and yards at Northumberland, which dispatched steam until 1957, the ACF tank-car works upriver at Milton, and the Celotex fiberboard plant in Sunbury.

The trades most often affected are powerhouse operators and boiler crews, railroad shopmen and roundhouse machinists, boilermakers, car builders and welders, pipefitters, millwrights and mill maintenance crews. That reflects where the material actually was: wrapped around steam and process lines, packed into boilers and furnaces, cut into block and cement, sitting in gaskets and packing at every pump and valve, sprayed onto structural steel for fireproofing. The people who installed it, repaired it, and above all tore it out took the heaviest doses, because removal is what puts fiber into the air.

Bystander exposure is the part people discount about themselves. Someone who never touched insulation but worked in the same shop while insulators cut and fitted it all day was breathing the same air. Office and clerical staff in older industrial buildings sometimes have real exposure histories for the same reason. If the honest answer is "I didn't work with it, but I worked around people who did," that is worth a conversation rather than a shrug.

Exposure also travelled home. Dust carried on coveralls into houses across Sunbury, Northumberland, Shamokin Dam, Selinsgrove, Upper Augusta and Milton exposed spouses and children, most often through laundry. Those household members can have claims in their own right, built on the worker's job history rather than their own.

You are not expected to arrive with product names. Almost nobody remembers whose gaskets were in a pump in 1968. The employer, the job title, and a rough span of years are enough to start; identifying the products is our job, and it is done through supplier records, co-workers, and the histories of the sites themselves. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

In town, the Susquehanna Silk Mills — later Sunbury Textile Mills — and the Celotex fiberboard plant were major employers of their own. Celotex is best known in asbestos litigation because its asbestos liabilities led to its 1990 bankruptcy and an asbestos trust; whether a particular Sunbury job involved asbestos is a question for the employment and product records. Many valley work histories cross two or three of these sites, and each one is documented on its own.

Fees and costs in Sunbury

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

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