Whenever you dust in your home, you’re stirring up particulates. These are the minuscule pieces of textile fibers, dirt, pollen, pet dander, dust mites, and, yes, dead skin cells.
When those specks are stirred up, you might end up breathing them in.
Unless you are allergic, you might not be harmed. The same can’t be said for other types of dust. Prolonged exposure to quartz countertop silica can lead to silicosis, which is an incurable, progressive lung disease. Fortunately, the engineered quartz countertop in your kitchen is a stable surface with the silica locked inside a hard resin binder. The breathing hazard happens during the cutting and grinding process that prepares the countertops.
That puts the workers at risk. Their families are also at risk from potential secondary exposure.
If you or someone in your family has been exposed to quartz countertop silica, you might have recourse to seek compensation to cover medical expenses along with pain and suffering.
First, speak with a knowledgeable artificial stone silicosis attorney to determine whether you have a valid claim. It also helps to fully understand this condition.
Dry vs. Wet Cutting: Where the Dust Comes From
The quartz in your kitchen countertop started as a large block of stone cut from a quarry, sliced into slabs. Homeowners choose a slab, and fabricators shape it to size, often with cutouts for sinks. That shaping work carries the greatest risk of developing silicosis.
Fabrication generates respirable crystalline silica dust whenever engineered stone is mechanically cut, ground, drilled, or polished without adequate controls. NIOSH puts the respirable crystalline silica content of engineered stone at “typically over 90%,” far above most natural stone.
The resin that makes a finished countertop safe in your kitchen does nothing to protect the worker cutting it.
Dry fabrication means handheld grinders and saws working the stone without water, followed by dry polishing and finishing. At the end of a shift, workers often sweep the accumulated dust, which puts it back into the air for everyone in the shop.
The result is a dense cloud of fine dust that is largely invisible at the particle sizes that reach deep into the lungs. OSHA’s housekeeping rule speaks to that last step directly: employers may not allow dry sweeping or dry brushing where it could contribute to silica exposure unless wet sweeping or HEPA-filtered vacuuming isn’t feasible.
With wet fabrication, water continuously flushes the cutting and polishing area and traps silica dust at the source. Wet methods are the kind of engineering control OSHA’s silica standard expects employers to use first, before falling back on respirators, and they sharply reduce the risk of irreversible lung disease.
OSHA Standards for Crystalline Silica in General Industry
Most countertop fabrication shops fall under OSHA’s general industry silica standard. Its permissible exposure limit (PEL) for respirable crystalline silica is 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air as an 8-hour time-weighted average (TWA), with an action level of 25 micrograms.
The standard also requires employers to:
- Assess exposure. Measure or assess worker exposure using either the performance option or scheduled air monitoring.
- Use engineering controls. Rely on wet methods or local exhaust ventilation to keep dust below the PEL, and provide respirators where those controls can’t get exposure low enough.
- Write a control plan. Maintain a written exposure control plan describing the tasks that create silica exposure, the controls and work practices used for each, and the housekeeping measures in place.
- Offer medical surveillance. Make exams available, including chest X-rays and lung function tests, to workers exposed at or above the action level for 30 or more days a year.
- Train and keep records. Train employees on silica health hazards and maintain accurate exposure and medical records.
OSHA citations by themselves don’t decide a civil case. But an employer’s failure to meet these obligations is often the clearest available record of what a shop knew and what it chose not to do.
Who Can Be Held Liable for Silica Exposure
When a worker has been exposed to silica dust over years, liability is rarely a single-defendant question. A worker injured on the job normally files a workers’ compensation claim, but that route gets complicated when the exposure happened at a job the worker left years ago, or at a company that no longer exists.
When investigating these claims, you and your attorney can look at several potentially responsible parties.
Employers
Workers’ compensation is usually the exclusive remedy against an employer, meaning an employee who files a comp claim gives up the right to sue that employer in most circumstances. A narrow set of exceptions exists, and they vary by state — fraudulent concealment of a known injury and its connection to the job is one recognized example.
An attorney can tell you whether anything in your work history fits an exception in your state.
Contractors and Job Site Managers
Work sites often run several crews at once. During a home build, one crew might be handling framing, flooring, and drywall while a separate crew grinds countertops to fit.
That puts dust in the air for everyone on site. If the contractor who hired that crew, or the job site manager responsible for conditions, failed to require dust controls or provide protective equipment, they may share liability for the exposure.
Product Manufacturers
Engineered stone manufacturers can face product liability claims for selling a high-silica material without adequate warnings or without designs that reduce dust generation.
The same theory can reach makers of tools or respiratory protection that failed to warn or failed to perform.
Talk With Frost Law Firm, PC About Your Silicosis Claim
If you or someone in your family has been diagnosed with silicosis, you deserve answers about where the exposure happened and who is responsible.
Frost Law Firm, PC handles artificial stone silicosis claims, and when we agree to work together, we investigate your full work history to identify every exposure source and every party that should be held accountable.
A silicosis diagnosis is hard enough without the financial pressure that follows it. Call Frost Law Firm, PC to discuss your options. Consultations are free, and we don’t take a fee unless we win.
From exposure to closure, we’re standing by to provide support and guidance.
