This wall was to the supply room with all of the uniforms and PPE. The building was constructed in the mid-20th century so it turns out it’s full of asbestos. Thanks mole man.
Over 80% of all mesothelioma cases are caused by asbestos
Asbestos fibres are 10x thinner than fibreglass fibres (N95 is useless) and can stay airborne basically forever, we spray what’s called a “lockdown ecapsulant” in the air that basically just grabs every fibre and bit of dust in the air then glues it to the floor.
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Asbestos, much like jigsaw in the movie saw, doesn’t kill you. It makes your body kill itself just by being indestructible. Your body sends cells to break it down, the cells die and turn into scar tissue. The asbestos just wants to live in your lungs.
Asbestos was open pit mined with dynamite meaning our atmosphere has a small amount of ambient asbestos fibres still and meaning that a clean air clearance for abatement is not 0 fibres/cc it’s 0.02
Asbestos fibres are 10x thinner than fibreglass fibres (N95 is useless) and can stay airborne basically forever, we spray what’s called a “lockdown ecapsulant” in the air that basically just grabs every fibre and bit of dust in the air then glues it to the floor.
My big fear with this is that it’s almost certainly flooding the HVAC system now, but there’s no official posting beyond this sign and the office staff seem to think it’s fine. Who would I anonymously contact in the US for an inspection? Is that regulated at the state level or by the EPA?
OSHA (https://www.osha.gov/form/osha7) and/or the EPA’s Asbestos Ombudsman (https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/forms/contact-us-about-asbestos)
If you eat asbestos, it gets into your bloodstream and lodges itself wherever it feels like. You may think “who would eat asbestos?” But in my training I’ve seen pictures of old school insulators sitting on asbestos blocks with hands covered in asbestos based mastic eating a sandwich bare handed.
Bonus: there is a town in Quebec that only VERY recently changed its name from Asbestos to something lame idk what honestly. They stopped mining asbestos in 2019 or maybe 2016 i forget
They almost reopened the mine in Asbestos, the Quebec Liberal Party had a deal all ready to reopen it with government money in an attempt to appeal to blue-collar workers. But the Parti Quebecois (the socdem party) won the election before they could implement it and diverted the money to economic diversification programs.
A company mining the vast majority of vermiculite at the time, an ostensibly safe loose fill insulation product, “accidentally” mined an asbestos vein at the same time so now all vermiculite is considered asbestos contaminated because as a loose fill product you can’t get an accurate reading of the concentration of a foreign substance
The world trade centre building’s structural steel had sprayed on fireproofing made from asbestos up to the 50th floor I want to say. Making the 9/11 attacks the largest asbestos exposure in history lasting days and days because of how long the dust took to settle
