Syracuse Toxic Tort Lawyers

If you or someone in your family became sick after exposure to lead, contaminated drinking water, industrial solvents, pesticides, mold, or chemical fumes anywhere in New York, a New York toxic exposure lawyer can help you find out whether the illness is connected to that exposure and who is responsible for it. Toxic tort cases are different from most injury claims. The harm often takes years to appear, the exposure happened somewhere you had every right to be, and the company that created the risk usually knew about it long before you did.

Porter Law Group represents people harmed by toxic substances across New York State, from Syracuse and Central New York to Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, and New York City. We locate the source of the exposure, gather the environmental and regulatory record, work with medical and industrial hygiene professionals to connect the substance to the illness, and litigate against manufacturers, property owners, and industrial defendants who refuse to take responsibility. Consultations are free, and we handle toxic exposure cases on a contingency fee basis, so there is no fee unless we win.

Why Choose Porter Law Group for a New York Toxic Exposure Claim

Toxic tort claims are among the most document heavy and science dependent cases in personal injury law. The defense rarely argues that the substance is harmless. Instead it argues that you were not exposed to enough of it, that something else caused your illness, that you waited too long to sue, or that the company followed every regulation in force at the time. Answering those arguments takes environmental records, employment and product histories, exposure reconstruction, and qualified medical opinion.

When a Toxic Exposure Case Needs a Lawyer

Not every unpleasant chemical smell becomes a lawsuit. You should speak with an attorney when any of the following apply:

• A doctor has told you that an illness may be related to something you were exposed to at work, at home, or in your neighborhood.
• A child has an elevated blood lead level, or a landlord failed to address peeling paint, dust, or water damage after you reported it.
• Your water supply, soil, or indoor air has been tested and found to contain a regulated contaminant.
• A spill, release, fire, or plant emission affected your home, school, or workplace.
• You worked with solvents, degreasers, fuels, adhesives, coatings, or pesticides and have developed a blood, kidney, liver, lung, or neurological condition.
• A company, insurer, or government agency has asked you to sign a release or waiver of any kind, or you have been told the deadline to sue has already passed.

Statewide Reach With a Syracuse Base

Porter Law Group is headquartered in Syracuse and maintains six offices across New York State. Toxic exposure work is intensely local. The regulatory file lives with a regional office of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, a county health department, or a municipal water authority, and the exposure history lives in a plant that may have changed hands three times. Central and Upstate New York carry a long industrial legacy, from the manufacturing corridor along Onondaga Lake to the chemical, metalworking, and paper operations that once anchored towns across the region, and the contamination they left behind is still being investigated decades later.

How We Handle Toxic Exposure Cases

We start by identifying the substance and the pathway, because a case cannot be built on the word chemical alone. That means employment records, safety data sheets, purchase and inventory records, environmental filings, testing data, and interviews with coworkers and neighbors who were in the same place at the same time. Only after the exposure is documented do we turn to the medical side. You work directly with the attorney handling your case. Read our client testimonials, review our case results, and meet the team on the Attorneys and Staff page.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Meet Some of Our Attorneys

Michael S. Porter

Founder, Managing Partner

Eric C. Nordby

Co-Founder, Partner

Mary E. Langan

Partner

View all of our attorneys →

How New York Toxic Tort Law Works

There is no single toxic tort statute in New York. A toxic exposure claim is built from ordinary civil causes of action applied to an unusual set of facts, and most cases plead several of them together because the proof each requires is different.

The Legal Theories Behind a Toxic Exposure Claim

Negligence is the backbone of most claims. It asks whether the defendant used reasonable care in handling, storing, disposing of, or warning about a substance it knew or should have known was hazardous. Where a company violated an environmental or workplace safety rule, that violation is powerful evidence of unreasonable conduct even if it does not automatically establish liability.

Strict products liability applies when the substance reached you through a product. A manufacturer can be responsible for a defective design, a manufacturing flaw, or a failure to warn of a danger it knew or should have known about, and the failure to warn theory is often the strongest one in exposure cases because internal research frequently predates any label change by years. Our New York product liability practice covers claims against manufacturers, including defective household products and defective equipment and machinery.

Private nuisance and trespass apply when contamination migrates onto your property through groundwater, soil, air, or dust. These theories reach interference with the use and enjoyment of your home and physical invasion of your land, and they support claims for property damage and remediation alongside a personal injury claim.

Premises liability applies when a property owner allowed a hazardous condition to persist in a building they controlled, which is the usual theory in lead paint and mold cases. That overlaps directly with our premises liability practice and with claims involving residential rental property.

Proving Exposure

Before any medical question is reached, a toxic tort plaintiff has to show actual exposure to the substance. That sounds obvious and is frequently the hardest part of the case, because the exposure may have ended years ago and the records that would document it were kept by the company that caused it.

Exposure is proven with layered evidence rather than a single document. Employment and union records establish where you worked and what you did. Product inventories, purchase orders, and safety data sheets establish what was present. Environmental sampling, monitoring data, permit filings, and violation notices establish concentrations and releases. Coworkers, neighbors, and former supervisors describe what no document captured, including how often a substance was used, whether ventilation worked, and whether protective equipment was provided.

Proving Causation

New York requires causation to be established on two levels. General causation asks whether the substance is capable of causing the illness at all, which is answered with the scientific and epidemiological literature. Specific causation asks whether this person’s exposure was sufficient to have caused this person’s illness, which is answered with an exposure assessment and a physician’s opinion.

New York courts do not demand a precise numerical dose. What they require is a scientifically reliable method of estimating exposure, which can include mathematical modeling, comparison to workers in studied occupations with similar tasks, measured sampling data, or a documented reconstruction of the work or living environment. A physician who simply assumes causation because the timing fits will not survive a defense challenge, which is why the exposure reconstruction has to be built before the medical opinion is written.

New York does not require the exposure to be the only cause. A preexisting vulnerability does not defeat a claim where the exposure was a substantial contributing factor.

Comparative Fault and Common Defenses

Defendants in exposure cases reach for a familiar set of arguments. They point to smoking, genetics, diet, hobbies, or a different job as the real cause. They argue the exposure was too brief or too dilute to matter, that the risk was not scientifically known when the product was sold, or that another company, often one that no longer exists, supplied the substance.

New York’s comparative fault rule under CPLR 1411 reduces a recovery by the injured person’s share of responsibility rather than eliminating it, so a defendant who proves you smoked does not thereby win the case. Our explanation of comparative negligence in New York covers how that allocation works in practice.

Substances and Exposure Settings We Handle

Toxic exposure claims arise anywhere a hazardous substance escapes the controls meant to contain it. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation publishes hazardous waste handling guidance, and a documented departure from those requirements often becomes the center of a case.

Lead Paint and Childhood Lead Poisoning

Lead based paint was banned for residential use in the United States in 1978, which concentrates the risk in older housing stock. That describes a great deal of New York, particularly the pre war neighborhoods of Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, and the older boroughs of New York City. Intact paint is not the hazard. Paint that chips, chalks, or is disturbed by friction on windows and doors, or by renovation and sanding, produces dust that settles on floors and toys and is then ingested by young children.

Lead is a neurotoxin, and its effects on a developing brain can include reduced cognitive function, attention and behavioral problems, learning disability, and delayed development. These injuries are permanent and are often identified only when a child struggles in school years later. New York City imposes its own obligations on landlords to identify and remediate lead hazards in apartments where a young child lives, and county health departments investigate elevated blood lead levels and issue orders to abate. Those investigation files and violation notices are usually the strongest evidence a family has, and the most likely to be lost if no one requests them.

Contaminated Drinking Water and Groundwater

Drinking water contamination usually traces back to something disposed of, spilled, or allowed to leach decades earlier. Common sources include industrial solvent disposal, leaking underground storage tanks, landfills, firefighting foam used at airports and training grounds, agricultural runoff, and manufacturing discharges. Contaminants of concern include chlorinated solvents such as trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, benzene and other fuel components, per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and heavy metals.

New York communities have lived through this directly. Contamination of the municipal water supply in Hoosick Falls with a fluorinated compound used in manufacturing led to years of testing, filtration, and litigation, which we covered in our report on the Hoosick Falls water contamination litigation. Residents near a former plant in the Watertown area raised concerns that prompted a state health department review, discussed in our coverage of the cancer investigation near the former Watertown airbrake plant.

Testing establishes the contaminant and the plume, historical records establish who put it there, and vapor intrusion sampling determines whether the same chemicals are entering homes through the soil beneath them. Claims can include personal injury, diminished property value, and the cost of alternative water and filtration.

Chemical Spills, Releases, and Plant Emissions

Acute releases are the most visible form of toxic exposure. A tank ruptures, a rail car derails, a fire sends combustion products across a neighborhood, or a pressure release vents a cloud that drifts toward homes and schools. Injuries range from chemical burns and corneal damage to reactive airway disease that persists long after the air clears. These events generate emergency response records, air monitoring, and agency reports, so the evidence is excellent, but the window closes fast. Sampling not done in the first hours cannot be recreated.

Chronic emissions work the opposite way. A facility operating within or slightly outside its permit conditions can affect a community for years without a single dramatic event, and the case is proven with permit files, stack testing, and complaint logs rather than an incident report. Industrial and construction site fires raise both issues at once, which is why they overlap with our work on construction fires and explosions and burn injuries.

Industrial Solvents and Occupational Chemical Exposure

Most toxic exposure claims still come from the workplace. Degreasers, paint strippers, adhesives, resins, fuels, metalworking fluids, plating chemicals, welding fumes, and cleaning agents are used daily in machine shops, auto body shops, foundries, hospitals, dry cleaners, and manufacturing plants across the state. The risk multiplies where ventilation is inadequate, where respirators are not fit tested, or where a worker was never told what was in the drum.

Substances that generate claims include benzene, associated with leukemia and other blood disorders, chlorinated solvents associated with kidney cancer and lymphoma, vinyl chloride associated with a rare liver cancer, isocyanates that cause occupational asthma, respirable crystalline silica that causes silicosis, and heavy metals such as cadmium, chromium, mercury, and manganese. Our guide on what New York employees need to know about chemical exposure at work covers the practical steps, and our chemical exposure practice page goes into the claims side.

Pesticides, Herbicides, and Agricultural Chemicals

Central New York is farm country, and pesticide exposure reaches applicators, farmworkers, greenhouse and nursery staff, groundskeepers, and households downwind of a treated field. It happens through mixing and loading concentrate, through spray drift, through re entering a treated area before the restricted interval has run, and through residue carried home on clothing.

Organophosphate and carbamate insecticides produce acute cholinergic illness with symptoms including nausea, sweating, blurred vision, muscle twitching, and respiratory difficulty, and severe poisonings can cause lasting neurological effects. Longer term exposures have been studied for associations with certain cancers and neurodegenerative disease. Applicator licensing records, application logs, and label instructions are central evidence, because departing from a pesticide label is itself a regulatory violation.

Mold and Indoor Air Quality

Mold claims deserve an honest description. There is strong scientific support for the proposition that damp indoor environments and mold growth cause allergic reactions, asthma exacerbation, respiratory symptoms, and in some people hypersensitivity pneumonitis. Claims of systemic illness from mold toxins are far more contested. We tell clients where their claim sits on that spectrum before they invest years in it.

What usually decides a mold case is not the mold. It is the water. Persistent leaks, roof and window failures, plumbing defects, flooding that was never properly dried, and ventilation failures create the conditions, and the landlord typically has a documented history of being told about them. Repair requests, maintenance logs, code enforcement complaints, and photographs of the water intrusion do more for a claim than a spore count taken years later.

Asbestos and Mesothelioma

Asbestos exposure is a toxic tort, but it has its own procedures, its own defendants, its own trust fund system, and its own body of law, so we handle it separately. If you or a family member has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, asbestos related lung cancer, or asbestosis, start with our New York asbestos and mesothelioma practice, which covers exposure sites, trust claims, and the shortened timelines these cases run on.

Illnesses Linked to Toxic Exposure and the Problem of Latency

The health effects of toxic exposure fall into two groups that behave very differently in litigation. Acute effects appear during or shortly after the exposure and are easy to connect to it. Latent effects appear years or decades later and are the reason toxic tort law needed a separate set of rules.

• Cancers of the blood, lung, kidney, bladder, liver, and other organs, depending on the substance.
• Chronic respiratory disease, including occupational asthma, reactive airway dysfunction, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and interstitial lung disease.
• Neurological injury, including cognitive impairment, peripheral neuropathy, tremor, and movement disorders.
• Kidney and liver damage, including chronic kidney disease and toxic hepatitis.
• Developmental and behavioral injury in children exposed to lead and other neurotoxins.
• Reproductive harm, pregnancy complications, and birth defects.
• Chemical burns, corneal injury, and contact dermatitis.
• Wrongful death, where the illness proves fatal.

Latency creates practical problems that have nothing to do with the law. Employers close. Plants are demolished. Records are destroyed on a retention schedule. Supervisors and coworkers who could describe the conditions die or lose touch. The most useful thing to do after a diagnosis that might be exposure related is to start writing down every job, address, and product you can remember while the memory is still available.

Who Can Be Held Responsible

Toxic exposure cases usually involve more than one defendant, because a substance passes through many hands between the plant that made it and the person it harmed. Identifying every responsible party early matters, since some will be insolvent and some will be protected by other rules.

• Manufacturers and chemical suppliers, for defective products, inadequate warnings, and failure to disclose known hazards.
• Property owners, landlords, and managing agents, for hazardous conditions in buildings they controlled, including lead paint and chronic water intrusion.
• Industrial facility operators, for releases, disposal practices, and emissions that reached neighboring property.
• General contractors, site owners, and subcontractors, for exposures created on a jobsite by another trade or by the work itself.
• Equipment manufacturers, where ventilation, respiratory protection, or containment equipment failed to perform as represented.
• Prior owners of contaminated land, whose operations left the substance behind before the current owner took title.
• Municipalities, water suppliers, and public agencies, in limited circumstances and subject to much shorter notice requirements.

Workplace Exposure and Workers Compensation

If the exposure happened on the job, two systems apply at once and they interact in ways that catch people off guard. Workers compensation is a no fault system that provides medical treatment and wage replacement for occupational disease without requiring proof that anyone was careless. In exchange, it is generally the exclusive remedy against your own employer, which means you usually cannot sue the employer directly in tort for the same illness.

That exclusivity does not extend to anyone else. A third party claim can proceed against the chemical manufacturer, the equipment maker, the property owner, the general contractor, or another contractor on the site, and those claims are where the full range of tort damages, including pain and suffering, becomes available. Occupational disease claims also carry their own notice and filing deadlines that run separately from the civil deadlines described below, and missing one does not necessarily forfeit the other.

New York Labor Law 200 codifies the duty to provide workers with a safe place to work, and it reaches owners and general contractors who supervised or controlled the work or created the dangerous condition. Our article on whether you can still file a personal injury case after receiving workers compensation explains how the two tracks run together, and our page on third party claims for injured workers covers the mechanics. A compensation carrier that paid benefits will assert a lien against any civil recovery, which has to be negotiated as part of the resolution.

What to Do After a Toxic Exposure in New York

Get Medical Care and Name the Exposure

See a physician promptly and tell them specifically what you were exposed to, where, for how long, and in what form. That detail belongs in the chart. A record that says respiratory complaints is worth very little later, while a record that says patient reports three years of solvent vapor exposure in an unventilated shop is worth a great deal. Ask whether biological monitoring is appropriate, since blood lead levels, heavy metal panels, and certain metabolites are only detectable for a limited window after exposure.

Then follow the treatment plan and keep every referral. Pulmonology, neurology, occupational medicine, toxicology, and hematology consultations all build the record. Gaps in treatment are the most common argument used to discount an injury.

Preserve the Substance and the Scene

Physical evidence disappears fast in exposure cases. If it is safe to do so, keep the container, label, product, or material involved, and store it sealed and separate. Photograph the site, the staining, the water damage, the peeling paint, the equipment, the ventilation, and any warning signage or absence of it. Do not clean, repaint, remediate, or discard anything before it has been documented, and if a landlord or employer offers to fix the problem immediately, photograph it first. Independent testing is often worth the cost, because sampling collected by a qualified laboratory with a documented chain of custody carries weight that a home test kit does not.

Report It and Request the Records

Report a spill or release to the state Department of Environmental Conservation spill hotline and to local emergency services. Report a workplace exposure to your employer in writing and keep a copy, and report a suspected building hazard to local code enforcement and the county health department. Reporting creates a dated record from a neutral source, and it often triggers an inspection that generates evidence you could never gather yourself.

Two things to avoid. Do not give a recorded statement to an insurer or company investigator before speaking with an attorney, and do not sign a release, waiver, or payment for inconvenience offered in the days after an incident. Those documents are frequently written broadly enough to extinguish a claim for an illness that has not appeared yet.

Evidence That Strengthens a Toxic Exposure Claim

Bring whatever you have to your consultation, even if it is incomplete. Most of the following can be obtained later, but knowing what exists shapes the first steps.

Exposure history

• A written chronology of every job, employer, job title, and task, with approximate dates.
• Every residential address, with dates and the age of each building where known.
• Product names, brand names, and container photographs for anything you handled or lived near.
• Safety data sheets, hazard communication materials, and training records.

Medical documentation

• Diagnostic records, pathology, imaging, pulmonary function testing, and laboratory results.
• Blood lead levels, heavy metal panels, and any biological monitoring performed.
• Occupational health files, periodic physicals, and respirator fit test records.
• Every bill and explanation of benefits. See our guide on obtaining medical records in New York.

Official and environmental records

• Spill reports, agency inspection reports, violation notices, and remediation orders.
• Water quality reports, sampling data, permit files, and site investigation documents.
• Code enforcement complaints, housing violations, and health department lead investigation files.
• Workplace air monitoring results and any safety citations issued to the employer or site.

Witnesses and life impact

• Names and contact details for coworkers, neighbors, former supervisors, and union representatives.
• Written repair requests, texts, and emails to a landlord, employer, or property manager.
• Proof of lost wages, job changes forced by the illness, and travel to treatment.
• A dated journal of symptoms and the activities the illness has taken away.

The Experts Behind a Toxic Exposure Case

Toxic tort cases are proven by qualified professionals, and the choice of who to retain and in what order often decides the outcome. An industrial hygienist reconstructs the exposure itself, evaluating the task, the substance, the ventilation, the duration, and the protective equipment to estimate what actually reached the person. That reconstruction is the foundation everything else rests on, and the piece most often missing from a weak case.

A toxicologist addresses general causation, explaining what the literature establishes about the substance and the disease. A treating physician or occupational medicine specialist addresses specific causation, connecting the estimated exposure to this patient’s illness while accounting for the alternative causes the defense will raise. Environmental engineers and hydrogeologists map contaminant plumes and trace a substance back to its source. Life care planners and economists translate future medical needs and lost earning capacity into present value. Defendants retain their own experts for each role, which is why the qualifications and methodology behind an opinion matter as much as its conclusion.

Damages Available in a New York Toxic Exposure Case

What a toxic exposure claim is worth depends entirely on the facts, and no lawyer can quote a figure before reviewing the exposure history and the medical evidence. What can be described is which categories of loss New York allows.

Economic Damages

Economic damages cover the documented financial consequences of the illness, including past and future medical treatment, diagnostic monitoring, surgery, medication, home health care, and home modifications. They include lost wages, reduced hours, and diminished earning capacity where an illness permanently limits the work a person can do, which is common where a diagnosis forces someone out of the trade they trained for. Where contamination affected real property, they can also include diminished property value, remediation costs, and alternative water supply.

Non-Economic Damages

Non-economic damages compensate the human consequences of a toxic illness, including physical pain, breathlessness and fatigue, treatment side effects, cognitive and emotional changes, anxiety about disease progression, and the loss of activities and independence the illness took away. A spouse may have a derivative claim for loss of services and companionship. Where conduct was particularly egregious, such as a company that concealed test results showing a known hazard, punitive damages may be available, though New York sets a demanding standard for them.

How Long You Have to File a Toxic Exposure Claim

Deadlines are where toxic tort law departs most sharply from ordinary injury law, and getting this wrong ends otherwise strong cases. The general personal injury deadline in New York is three years from the date of injury under CPLR 214. For an illness that appears twenty years after the exposure, that rule would be meaningless, so New York adopted a separate discovery rule.

Under CPLR 214-c, an action for personal injury or property damage caused by the latent effects of exposure to a substance must generally be commenced within three years from the date the injury was discovered, or from the date it should have been discovered through reasonable diligence, whichever comes first. The clock is tied to discovery of the physical condition, not to discovery that a chemical caused it. Waiting until a cause is confirmed before consulting a lawyer is one of the most common ways this deadline is missed.

CPLR 214-c also contains a narrow provision for the situation where the injury is known but its cause is not yet scientifically identifiable. Subject to strict conditions and proof requirements, that provision can allow an action to be brought within one year of discovering the cause. It is a genuinely narrow exception and should never be treated as a substitute for filing on time.

• Claims against a city, county, town, village, school district, or public authority. A notice of claim generally must be served within 90 days, with a shortened period to sue afterward. This reaches claims involving municipal water systems, public buildings, and schools.
• Wrongful death. Where an exposure related illness causes death, the estate’s wrongful death claim is generally subject to a two-year period under EPTL 5-4.1, which runs from the date of death and is shorter than the personal injury deadline.
• Injured children. The limitations period is generally tolled during childhood, which matters in lead poisoning cases where the harm surfaces years later. A parent’s separate claim for the child’s medical expenses is not tolled the same way.
• Workers compensation deadlines. Occupational disease claims carry their own notice and filing requirements that run independently of the civil deadlines.

Because these rules interact and the answer turns on when a diagnosis was made and what you were told, the only reliable way to know your deadline is to have someone look at the actual dates. That review costs nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a New York toxic exposure lawyer cost?

Porter Law Group handles toxic exposure cases on a contingency fee basis. You pay nothing upfront and nothing unless we win your case, and the initial consultation is always free. Having a lawyer review your exposure history and medical records before you decide anything costs you nothing.

How long do I have to file a toxic exposure claim in New York?

For injuries from the latent effects of exposure to a substance, CPLR 214-c generally gives you three years from when the injury was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered, rather than three years from the exposure itself. The clock runs from discovery of the physical condition, not from learning what caused it.

Shorter deadlines apply to claims against public entities and to wrongful death claims, and workers compensation has its own schedule. Because the dates control the outcome, have the timeline reviewed as soon as you suspect a connection.

Do I need to know exactly which chemical made me sick?

Not before you call. Identifying the substance is part of the investigation, and it is usually done from employment records, product inventories, safety data sheets, environmental sampling, and interviews with people who were there. What helps most is anything you can recall about where you were, what you handled, what it smelled or looked like, and how long the exposure lasted.

You do not need a precise dose figure either. New York requires a scientifically reliable estimate of exposure rather than an exact measurement, which is why an industrial hygienist’s reconstruction is often the most important work in the case.

Can I bring a claim if I was exposed at work?

Usually yes, though not always against your employer. Workers compensation is generally the exclusive remedy against your own employer for an occupational illness, and it provides medical coverage and wage replacement without requiring proof of fault. It does not bar a claim against anyone else.

Third party claims against chemical manufacturers, equipment makers, property owners, and contractors on the site are frequently available, and they reach damages the compensation system does not cover, including pain and suffering. Many workplace exposure cases run on both tracks at once.

I was exposed but I am not sick yet. Can I file a claim now?

New York does not permit a standalone claim for medical monitoring where a person has been exposed but has no present physical injury. Fear of future illness on its own is generally not enough to support a lawsuit. Where an injury does exist, the cost of ongoing monitoring can be pursued as part of the damages in that case.

Even so, document the exposure now. Preserve testing results, records, and witness contacts, follow any medical surveillance your doctor recommends, and keep a written history, so that if an illness appears later the evidence still exists.

Who can be held responsible for a toxic exposure in New York?

More parties than most people expect. Chemical manufacturers and suppliers can be liable for defective products and inadequate warnings. Property owners, landlords, and managing agents can be liable for hazardous conditions in buildings they control. Industrial operators can be liable for releases, emissions, and disposal practices. General contractors, site owners, and equipment manufacturers can be liable for exposures created on a jobsite. Prior owners of contaminated land and, in limited circumstances, municipalities and water suppliers can also be defendants.

What if my landlord says the lead paint or mold problem existed before I moved in?

That is not a defense. What matters is whether the owner knew or should have known about the hazardous condition and failed to remedy it while you were living there. Age of the building, prior violations, complaints from other tenants, and inspection history all cut in favor of the tenant.

Written notice usually decides these cases. Repair requests, texts, emails, code enforcement complaints, and health department files establish that the owner knew, which is why we ask for that correspondence at the first meeting.

What should I do first after a chemical spill or release near my home?

Get to safe air, seek medical evaluation even if symptoms seem minor, and make sure the exposure is described specifically in your chart. Report the release to emergency services and to the state Department of Environmental Conservation so an official record exists.

Then document everything while it is fresh. Photograph the scene, note the time, wind direction, odor, and visible plume, keep affected clothing sealed and unwashed, arrange independent sampling where appropriate, and collect the names of neighbors who experienced the same thing. Do not sign anything a company representative brings to your door.

Where We Serve Toxic Exposure Clients in New York

Porter Law Group is based in Syracuse and represents people harmed by toxic substances throughout Onondaga County, including Liverpool, Cicero, DeWitt, Camillus, Manlius, North Syracuse, Baldwinsville, Fayetteville, Skaneateles, Marcellus, Solvay, Salina, and Clay, along with the city neighborhoods of Eastwood, Westvale, Strathmore, Tipperary Hill, and University Hill. We also work with clients across Central New York in Auburn, Cortland, Oswego, Ithaca, Utica, Rome, and Watertown.

We maintain offices throughout New York State including Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Saratoga Springs, and New York City, and we take toxic exposure cases statewide. Browse all of our New York offices, or read the latest updates on the Porter Law Group blog.

Contact a New York Toxic Exposure Lawyer

If you believe an illness in your family is connected to a chemical, a contaminated water supply, a building, or a workplace anywhere in New York, the sooner someone starts building the record, the better your position will be. Agency files can be requested, sampling arranged, coworkers and neighbors interviewed while they still remember, and product histories traced before the companies that made them reorganize.

Our Syracuse office is at 100 Madison Street, Suite 1500, Syracuse, NY 13202. If you cannot come to us, we will come to you at your home or a hospital room. We also meet clients at our Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Saratoga Springs, and New York City offices.

Call 833-PORTER9 or email info@porterlawteam.com for a free, no-obligation consultation. We handle toxic exposure and toxic tort cases on a contingency fee basis, so you pay nothing unless we win.

Schedule a free consultation