A former secretary at the Miami-Dade courthouse recently filed an asbestos cancer lawsuit against the county claiming the hazards she was subjected to over the course of her employment are responsible for her medical conditions. As a result of her daily exposure to asbestos and mold, the plaintiff’s asbestos cancer lawsuit claims she was forced to undergo lung-extraction surgery and continues to undergo chemotherapy.
According to her asbestos exposure lawsuit, the plaintiff alleges that she started working at the now 90-year-old courthouse in 1994 before moving to another county building in Doral in 2005, where she also faced unsafe working conditions. The plaintiff contends that despite never being a smoker or in poor health, she developed her stage-two lung cancer as a result of exposure to asbestos and mold.
In 2016, the Miami-Dade County commissioner conducted a study on the courthouse and found that the building had not been inspected since 1988 and that recent tests detected the presence of asbestos in the structure. As a result of the report, the county undertook efforts to abate the courthouse of asbestos, but it remains unclear whether the project has been completed.