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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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
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
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
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.
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 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)
It’s crazy to me that there are still a ton of buildings with asbestos in them. Can we please have a functional society with a government program to tear down and replace asbestos filled buildings
Turns out Mohammad Atta was just trying to get rid of asbestos in New York
9/11 was just a public demonstration on the failure of asbestos as a fireproofing material that got out of hand.
The only materials you can safely assume are 100% NOT ASBESTOS are wood glass and metal.
It is fireproof, waterproof(amphibole asbestos is anyway), resists electricity, is the best insulation material on earth still used in space applications, it’s lightweight, it comes from the earth as Asbestos it needs no processing other than like grinding it up, it’s indestructible, easy to work with, as it “deteriorates” it keeps its fibrous shape just gets longer so it lasts forever.
If it didn’t kill you slowly it would be the best material known to humankind.
The cost to safely abate the least dangerous forms of asbestos are massive. Not even just in money. The amount of poly plastic needed, the wasted coveralls, the duct tape. It’s an environmental nightmare to make a high risk enclosure but even in a moderate risk you’re using like 3 coveralls per person per shift
Wait until you learn about lead paint, and lead plumbing, and leaded AV gas, and leaded soil, and leaded wire coatings.
That doesn’t sound like an optimal use of labor even if we had a functioning society. Leaving sitting asbestos lie is pretty stable and doesn’t sound like a high priority.
The problem is with known and unknown unknowns. It’s stable until a mole man burrows through the wall or a car hits it or a fire breaks out in the old structure. You can’t renovate it or service the things inside the walls. A tornado or heavy wind storm, both possible here, would cause similar damage. Wildfires have destroyed an entire town in the same area without any warning, and one happening here would leave a big pile of asbestos in the open air. To me it’s like having radioactive waste or chemicals that can’t be mixed in that room. Perfectly okay until suddenly it isn’t.
I work maintenance for a school board with over 80 schools. Every single one has Asbestos containing materials.
That rules
All your PPE is considered contaminated now. Was it just the drywall mud containing or was the insulation behind the wall containing too
I know so much about asbestos
Moleman has now begun the process of transforming into a being of pure scar tissue. Takes about 20-30 years
The supply room and everything in it was immediately blocked off. But now we have neither uniforms nor full PPE for our outdoor jobs with hazardous conditions.
I’m not sure where the asbestos was exactly, only that it’s a giant maintenance garage built in the early 1970s. They probably heavily fireproofed the whole structure. It’s nasty shit but I kind of want to make a little hole in the wall to get some for one of those magic Roman bags that cleaned itself.
If you want to be more Roman just wipe your doodoo ass with a vinegar soaked sea sponge. Avoid the magic bag of doom.
I exclusively tradshit in public bathrooms with no stalls, but asbestos bags show the brilliance of Greco-Roman culture. Imagine the convenience of tossing your clothes in the fire after a long day of watching slaves murder each other for sport. They come out perfectly clean without any washing or drying. Why would the gods make this magic if it wasn’t good for us in moderation?
