Asbestos Compensation in Rome

There is a city in the Marche called Ancona. Since the days of the Doric invasions it was appreciated for its strategic location overlooking the sea, and for the peculiarity of being able to see the sun mirroring itself on the water both at dawn and sunset.

From the hill at the top of the city you can see the blue expanse of the Adriatic and the hectic life around the great port. Ships arriving and departing and a myriad of construction sites, small and large, where these ships are built and repaired.

Truth to be told, the shipyards of Ancona are among the most renowned in Italy, for the skill of the workers who manage to carry out work of extreme precision. Among them, there is a gentleman born right in the small town of Marche, who has breathed salt sincebirth.

He was barely a kid when he found work at the shipyards construction sites of his town, and there he remained from 1956 to 1963, when after specializing in the activities of the torner, he found a more lucrative and less tiring job as a maintenance worker for the railway cars at the State Railways.

In Ancona, in fact, there is also the large railway station and the workshops that repair and maintain trains are always looking for skilled workers.

In 1995, after a lifetime of fixing ships and rail cars, he retired to enjoy his family and leisure time.

Retirement time is marred by illness

Unfortunately, his quiet retirement life is turned upside down by terrible news.

After nine years of spending peacefully playing cards with other retirees, walking with his grandchildren and waking up in peace without thinking about work, in 2014 the former worker began to feel sick.

He spends a terrible year between desperate care and hospitalizations. The diagnosis was shocking: it is pleural mesothelioma, a type of disease that affects those who have worked in direct contact with asbestos.

Unfortunately, just a year after the discovery of the disease, the worker passes away leaving the family full of anger and pain.

A real nightmare for his family

The loss shocked his family, who within 12 months were left behind by their beloved husband and father after a heinous ordeal.

It all started suddenly, and the dreams of a quiet retirement were washed away as a typhoon would do with mud homes.

The hardest situation to digest was indeed to have lost a loved one after unbelievable suffering that has upended everyone's lives and that suffering was extremely related to a job he loved and to whom he literally devoted his life.

Scientists call asbestos the silent killer, because it creeps into the lungs of victims by the fibers that they are breathing during exposure and only after many years it produces its devastating effects.

It was widely used in industrial processes due to its great resistance to fire and heat, in fact it was the preferred material for building steam machines.

It also had a large noise absorption capacity,and therefore was used to insular pipes, boilers, seals.

But it was not until first 2000’s that the poor men who worked on it started to become ill and die. Deaths started to increase and the diagnosis was in all those cases related to the exposure to asbestos.

It was sufficient to understand all the potential damage that this substance could lead.

A disease that affects workers

Family members know that their relative's illness was not a tragic fatality but that it depended directly on the work it has done for so many years. In the ships the worker was in charge of maintenance and painting, while in the railway cars the maintenance concerned the components contained in asbestos-insulatedboxes that were in the train's tractor.

None of his employers had ever warned him that such prolonged exposure to asbestos would lead to certain death.

No one had ever forced him to wear protective equipment and especially not to inhale the killer fibers.

At the time, this was how it was worked, outdoors or indoors without masks or protections for nose and eyes, and there was not the same attention paid to the health of the workers that companies are now obliged to observe.

The law firm specializing in asbestos diseases

Where there is a particular production sector, it is easy to have professions linked toit. Let's talk about lawyers, who in a seaside place like Rome often specialize in subjects that have directly to do with maritime transport.

There is one in particular, whose specialization has been found in the damage to health caused by the substances used in the many shipyards and railways in the city.

When it comes to the ears of the family that this lawyer can find justice for the loss of their loved one, they do not think twice and go to his office.

The competence of the Employment Judge

The lawyer's plan is very clear, compensation must be obtained for the death of the victim and suffering of the victim's family members.

The two companies where the worker joined for a lifetime will have to answer: the shipyards and the railways, where he came into contact with asbestos.

The compensation will not be less than one million euros, so much has been the suffering endured.

And since the reason for the illness is to be traced in the work done, the lawsuit will have to be filed before the Employment Judge.

The Tribunal grants a large compensation

The Judge of the Ancona Tribunal granted the lawyer's requests.

Both construction sites known as the victim's employers were ordered to pay a maxi compensation of about one million euros to the family members. The Judge acknowledged that the death occurred as a direct cause of work, consisting of prolonged and repeated exposure to asbestos fibres that covered the components of the ships and rail cars with which the worker came into contact every day.

Many similar cases in the same city

At that time, the total compensation was three and a half million euros for the families of four workers, who became ill and died within a year of diseases strictly caused by exposure to asbestos between the 1960s and 1980s.

In this case, too,the court acknowledged the company's responsibility for failing to adequately provide workers with tools to protect against inhalation of asbest, which was outlawed by a 1992 rule.