The Georgia Supreme Court has given a woman suffering from a fatal lung disease the right to continue with her lawsuit against the company that made the asbestos-containing pipe she claims caused her illness.
Marcella Fletcher filed her lawsuit in South Georgia’s Thomasville, where her father worked for 35 years with the city water department until his retirement in 1983. When she was 8 years old, she began laundering his work clothes, which were covered with a grayish dust that would poof into a fine mist as she shook them out. Decades later, she was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma. She sued the maker of the pipe her father cut and fit, Pennsylvania-based CertainTeed Corp., in Thomas County State Court. But Judge Mark Mitchell threw out her lawsuit, granting CertainTeed’s motion for summary judgment.
