What Is A Toxic Tort?
Brian O Sutter
Personal Injury
There are a lot of different things that can happen to a person while he or she is at work. Work days can be ordinary, with no surprises, and, in worse cases, things can go wrong that may even result in an injury. If it’s a small thing, such as a scratch, scrape, or other minor accident, life goes on and people merely deal with a painful inconvenience. If it’s more serious, however, it can require hospitalization, medical treatment, and, in some of the worst case scenarios, may never be recovered from, such as deafness, blindness, or limb amputation.When something like this happens to a person and the fault lies with the negligence or carelessness of someone else, this is grounds for a case going to court for financial compensation. That’s a general personal injury case. However, when something happens at the workplace, even if the circumstances are similar, it’s a very special kind of personal injury case, and you’ll get better results with a court case when you seek the guidance of an attorney familiar with work-related injury cases.
Today, we’re going to look at a very specific kind of workplace injury, and it’s one that is extremely challenging to both experience and deal with in court. Most injuries in the workplace occur quickly, such as a construction accident, a malfunction in a manufacturing facility, or even just falling down the stairs in an office. But there’s one kind of injury that takes a very long time before its full effects are known, and that it falls under the category of a “Toxic Tort.”
Damage Over Time
A toxic tort is a lawsuit that is enacted when the victim realizes—or is diagnosed with—an illness that is related to long term exposure to a harmful substance. In the case of this exposure happening while at work, this is known as occupational exposure. But how could this possibly happen to a person?
The issue stems from the fact that not every substance that companies put into wide use is always fully understood, especially in terms of how it can affect human health in the long term. The most common example of this kind of manufacturing short-sightedness is with the substance we know as asbestos.
Asbestos, when it was first discovered, was merely thought of as just another mineral that could be mined and used in different industrial activities. One of its most useful properties was that it was flexible and extremely resistant to heat. As a result, asbestos became heavily favored as an insulator for wires, and was eventually even used in fire prevention. People built it into walls, pipes, insulation and many other fixtures of buildings because of its flame retardant properties. With asbestos in a building, a structure was much less likely to burn down to the ground in the event of a fire.
Unfortunately, it was eventually discovered the exposure to asbestos over a long period of time was like being constantly subjected to small doses of poison. Asbestos is actually a toxic substance to humans, and because of that, it was finally banned as a material to be used in construction in 2003. However, many buildings in the decades previous to that ban can—and did—use asbestos in their construction, and there are still many buildings throughout the USA today that contain asbestos somewhere in their structure.
Today, we know that long term exposure to asbestos can lead to both lung and skin disorders, and, without proper diagnosis and treatment, can even result in death.
A Hazardous Working Environment
A toxic tort, in the case of asbestos, would be an example of a company not doing proper diligence and inspecting a building to ensure that it is free of asbestos. If a company did not do this, and a person took a job with that company, working for many years, only to eventually be diagnosed with a carcinogenic infection to the lungs, the company would be at fault.
In this case, no one informed the employee of the danger that was presented every single day of the week that he or she showed up for work, thanks to hours of breathing in dangerous asbestos particles from the building. This is a classic occupational exposure scenario for a toxic tort. The employee, through no fault of his or her own, has contracted a serious disease by doing nothing else except honestly showing up every day for work, unaware that the employers are exposing all the employees to a toxin in the building.
If you’ve contracted a serious, chronic illness as a result of simply going to work and doing your job, you are not responsible for this, your employer is. Talk to an experienced personal injury lawyer and explain exactly what happened. The people responsible must be made to answer for what they’ve done.