Occupational disease law is the part of injury law where the harm and the cause are separated by decades, and almost everything that goes wrong follows from that gap. This article explains why the ordinary machinery of a tort case fails on a thirty-year delay: the limitations period, the employer that no longer exists, the insurance policy written in a different era, and the memory of a working life nobody wrote down. It shows why workers' compensation exclusivity pushes the real recovery toward the manufacturers rather than the employer, and why the exposure history is the single document that decides the case. It works through the two-step causation problem that Daubert governs, the failed settlement classes that produced the bankruptcy trust system, and the way apportionment turns a solvent defendant into a fractional one. It closes with what actually gets preserved, and when.