A widow’s wrongful death asbestos lawsuit is back on track after a Wisconsin appeals court reversed the trial court’s dismissal of her claim.

Plaintiff Sandra B.’s asbestos lawsuit will continue after the appeals court found that the work her late husband John had done as a steamfitter was not covered under a Wisconsin statute that shields defendants from liability related to improvements to real property. The appeals court’s decision reverses the trial court’s dismissal of all of Sandra’s claims.

Sandra and John filed their asbestos lawsuit in December 2012 while John was dying of mesothelioma. The couple claimed that John’s disease resulted from exposure to asbestos during his career as a steamfitter from 1966 to 2000.

They named as defendants a long list of companies in the Milwaukee area including Miller Brewing Company, Pabst Brewing Company and Wisconsin Electric Power Company.

John died in November 2013. After that, Sandra continued to litigate the asbestos lawsuit as the administrator of John’s estate, adding a claim for wrongful death.

In 2014, a trial court judge had granted all the defendants’ motions to dismiss, based on a Wisconsin statute that shields defendants from lawsuits over harm related to “some allegedly faulty aspect of the improvement to real property.”

The trial court judge determined that John’s work had constituted improvements, rather than maintenance and repair. In reversing that decision, the appeals court noted a lack of sufficient evidence to establish that John’s work had constituted improvements to real property.

The undisputed evidence showed that John’s work had consisted of installing and replacing pipes and mash frames at breweries, as well as re-packing and replacing gaskets, work that the appeals court determined could constitute repair or maintenance instead of improvements.

Asbestos Lung Cancer

The Wisconsin statute in question eliminates claims for harm related to improvement work done outside a 10-year exposure period. However, asbestos-related diseases like lung cancer can take much longer than 10 years to develop, sometimes taking as long as 15 to 30 years after exposure to develop. Some diagnostic standards even require 10 years to pass before asbestos can be confirmed as the cause of lung cancer.

Asbestos lung cancer happens once asbestos fibers are inhaled and get lodged in the tissue inside the lungs. These fibers cause irritation, inflammation and genetic damage that eventually leads to tumor development.

Asbestos was used throughout the mid-20th century in a large number of industrial applications, like the steamfitting work John did. This use continued years after medical science had become well aware of the link between asbestos exposure and deadly diseases like lung cancer.

Once victims of asbestos exposure started bringing increasing numbers of asbestos lawsuits in the 1960s, U.S. lawmakers finally started addressing the issue. Regulatory efforts from the 1970s through the 1980s progressively restricted existing and new uses of asbestos and imposed requirements for abatement of some asbestos already in use.

Although about 55 other countries have substantially banned the use of asbestos, efforts at an outright ban in the United States have not been successful. The EPA’s attempt to ban all new uses of asbestos was undone by a federal appeals court in 1991. More recently, attempts at passing federal legislation that would ban asbestos have not succeeded.