Asbestos
We’ve been doing some needed running repairs on the house and have come up against the asbestos problem that is common in this region. Many of the houses built here were built before asbestos was banned and there is lots of it in our homes.
Mostly we are stuck living with it well-painted over. We hope it won’t cause problems and making it go away would be beyond most of us to afford.
Have you got asbestos in your home? Not nice stuff!
How much do you know about asbestos? About the dangers of asbestos? About the safety procedures to follow if you ever have to come into contact with it?
Well John had to work on fixing part of the asbestos eves with the prospect of drilling asbestos to make holes for screws and being underneath it. All your alarm bells should be going off by now!
Drilling creates dust and asbestos dust falling down onto eyes and skin and hair and being breathed in is a recipe for death down the track.
Fortunately now we have the Internet it is possible to research first and we did our research on asbestos safety. There were links to standards and guidelines from all over the world to browse and choose half a dozen representative ones on how to protect yourself if you are working with asbestos and how to assess the level of risk in the particular task.
Instead of arguing about the danger (and for the man dismissing it as something women worry to much about and it’ll be all right) we were able to read through the reports and have a very sensible informed discussion. At the end of it we came up with a totally different approach than we started with taking the asbestos risk into account.
Now John will do a less thorough job and be prepared to have another go if another problem arises in future and if it doesn’t he won’t have over-exposed himself to risk now. We dug in our safety gear box and found a heavy duty industrial breathing mask safety goggles rubber gloves and a plastic cover for hair. He’d have a thorough shower straight after doing the job. We agreed to wash down all the surfaces as soon as finished. He would use a very slow 12volt drill and spray the asbestos with water to keep it damp.
We also grimly thanked our lucky stars that John is already an old man. Asbestos has a long lead time to develop it’s highly destructive consequences. But every time we face the asbestos issue we remember times in our life when we were exposed.
There was the work he did on some walls in the kitchen and bathroom before we realised they must be asbestos when we told ourselves they were ‘just fibro’. There was the time the people next door spent the afternoon power-sawing straight the top of the dividing asbestos fence filling the air with asbestos dust. There was the lump of blue asbestos my father brought me back from his outback travels as a child for my mineral collection that I used to lick!
Then there were a couple of hair-raising tales about asbestos dust tailings dumps that children played on. A woman I worked with had played on one at the port in WA where the Wittenoom asbestos was shipped from and she was facing the 30 year mortality sentence. One of the women in my U3A writing group shocked us all with her story about the asbestos tailings dumps in Mitchelton and how they had all played on them. Does anyone even know where they are now? Built on?
Another friend has an asbestos roof as have so many of our schools. This dangerous stuff is among us and around us. It is insidious. A death sentence if we don’t protect ourselves against its danger. A reminder that big companies will sell death to make a profit even when they know.