A Tennessee native who grew up in the DuPont company town of Old Hickory has sued the company and twenty other defendants over the loss of both his parents to an asbestos disease. The Tennessean reports that Roger Neely has filed suit over allegations that both his parents developed mesothelioma cancer from asbestos exposure incurred at the DuPont plant.
The father, Lively Neely, worked at the plant for twenty years. According to the current suit, “Lively Neely would cut, mold and fit asbestos containing insulation and cement onto the various lines at DuPont.” Prior to his death in the 1980s he settled an asbestos lawsuit with DuPont out of court.
Although she never worked in the plant, his wife Ruby Neely died this year of mesothelioma cancer – a disease for which the only known cause is asbestos fibers that are inhaled. Because of her obvious exposure in the home and her death from a rare disease, their son has filed suit.
“The U.S. government asked DuPont to take on five major construction projects to make explosives for Allied forces in World War I. The most challenging was to be the world’s largest smokeless powder plant and a town to go with it at Old Hickory, Tennessee.
“The newly organized DuPont Engineering Co. completed construction in only five months. Production of sulfuric acid began 67 days after ground-breaking, nitric acid nine days later, and guncotton, the raw material of smokeless powder, two weeks after that.”
Ninety-odd years later the plant is turning out synthetic textiles used for everything from imitation leather to window shades. They are also manufacturing composite materials used for an assortment of consumer products. During most of the twentieth century after the need for smokeless gunpowder receded DuPont produced a multitude of products at the plant, including those needing insulation that Mr. Neely assembled for twenty years.
According to the lawsuit, information about the dangers of asbestos exposure had been available to the company as early as the 1930s, but they still weren’t informing insulators on the line of the hazards until the 1970s, when many workers had already died of asbestos-related illnesses. The suit alleges that Ruby Neely, was exposed to asbestos fibers in the dust on her husband’s clothes that he wore home from work. She too developed a fatal asbestos cancer after washing those clothes for twenty years.
