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What are some job sites that have had mesothelioma cases in Western New York?
Some of the bigger industrial sites in Western New York include Bethlehem Steel, which was right down the street from us. It’s a big brownfield now, but in its heyday, there were 30 to 40,000 people working there at this full-service steel plant, with tons of asbestos exposure. Right across the street was Republic Steel, which had similar conditions.
As you go up the river, you reach Lake Tonawanda and Ashland Oil. They had an oil refinery that produced crude oil and gasoline. That site is also a brownfield now, but it was another major location with asbestos exposure. It’s right on the Niagara River.
Moving up into Niagara Falls, there’s Hooker Chemical, a plastics manufacturer. This site is notable for having a high number of mesothelioma cases, due to their use of raw asbestos fibers in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Some people living near the plant were exposed and developed mesothelioma simply from proximity.
These sites are local to Western New York, but there are job sites across New York State and other states where we are familiar with asbestos exposure cases.
A huge site in Rochester was Kodak. Along with Kodak, Xerox was another large employer with significant asbestos use in their factories.
Additionally, there was a facility called Dye Molding, a custom mold shop where they molded parts out of asbestos-containing plastic materials, some of which contained 60 to 70 percent asbestos by volume.
