Jackson County holds the Missouri core of Kansas City — the downtown, the West Bottoms, and Independence to the east. Its industrial history is the metro’s engine: the stockyards and packing houses of the Bottoms, the rail terminals that served them, the Kansas City Power & Light generating stations, and a spread of manufacturing from steel and gasket makers to electrical and chemical plants. From the early twentieth century into the 1980s, these operations reportedly relied on asbestos-containing pipe covering, block insulation, refractory, and gaskets, and the trades who worked them may have been exposed throughout their careers.
Claims arising in Jackson County are venued in the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit (Kansas City and Independence). Missouri’s filing window is five years from a mesothelioma or asbestos-cancer diagnosis — longer than the two years on the Kansas side of the metro, but a deadline all the same.