Tarrant County — Fort Worth and Arlington — carried aircraft and defense manufacturing, meatpacking, and heavy industry, work that reportedly exposed trades to asbestos in boiler rooms, on process piping, and around furnaces.
Every Texas asbestos case follows the same path: it is filed in the county of proper venue, transferred to the statewide Texas Asbestos MDL pretrial court (the 281st District Court in Harris County) for pretrial proceedings, and then remanded to the county for trial. Texas allows two years from a mesothelioma or asbestos-cancer diagnosis to file (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003).