03-25-2024, 10:56 PM
(03-25-2024, 06:27 PM)argentus Wrote: Excellent report. I have a colleague who does that now. I have had to work with indoor air issues in the past as well related to mold and asbestos. Now I am more involved with ambient air data. One of my earliest gigs was working with some Vanderbilt Environmental Scientists who had some patents and I went to the E Coast and did sampling in warehouses that had explosions from a chemical and ran some samples against bioassays. It was crazy.
FINally the U.S. bans the USE of asbestos. I emphasized that because in the early 80s, the U.S. banned the production of asbestos in construction products -- floor tile, ceiling tile, fireproofing, boiler gaskets, pipe lagging insulation, sprayed-on acoustical ceiling (popcorn ceiling), etc. But! They did not ban the usage of asbestos products, thus all of the above flooded into the U.S. and asbestos mines continued to operate.
Asbestos is the California state rock -- Serpentine crystal. You can still find it all around the hills of San Francisco. It is beautiful, with green and white striations.
The whole thing is about friable -- able to crush with moderate hand pressure -- asbestos. That which is bound up in floor tile is difficult to make it respirable, even if it is chipped up. I know this because I was one of those night owls who took air samples during late-nite remediation during the 80s and 90s. I was a CIH -- Certified Industrial Hygienist, and I took my job very seriously. Lives and health were on the line.
One of the worst forms of asbestos was (and is!) Amosite. Amosite is from South Africa and it is hydrophobic. That means that it cannot be wet down by water. Most times asbestos is wet down in order to make it less airborne before removal. Amosite doesn't take to water and thus requires special treatment. Many MANY ceiling tiles in the 70s and 80s used Amosite as a binder. It was a really good binder, although very dangerous to people who were present when the tiles broke or were replaced.
Asbestos fireproofing is probably the very most friable form. It was literally blown in under pressure and created a fluffy fireproofing. As a fireproofing it perform in an excellent way, however often it was blown in into air plenums in buildings, which, of course, expose the innocent building tenants to the problems of asbestos.
Why is asbestos so scary? Well, because it is a fiber when tends to break in a linear manner along its axis. Fiberglass, which is also dangerous to inhale, breaks across the fiber, while asbestos breaks lengthwise, creating a sort of fishhook structure, such that when it is inhaled, it sticks in the alveoli of the lungs. Enough of them stick and they create a lung scar. Considerable inhalations and whole sections of lung show white on an X-ray, and the victim has what is called asbestosis, where these sections of lung lose the ability to transfer oxygen to the body. Severe forms of this disease leave people sipping tiny bits of air, wishing for more, until their tiny bits of air can no longer sustain their lives. It's a super shitty way to die. Some of the more fortunate ones contract mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lungs, which makes them stiff and also can transfer to other parts of the body.
The cooling towers of 70's and 80's of large buildings had fins made of asbestos. Water piping of the same age in some places was made of asbestos. In both cases, the water kept the fiber flow down, but there was some risk associated with the ingestion of the asbestos fibers.
My own personal opinion is that asbestos is a mineral that can be used in certain controlled situations, in which it performs marvelously, such as the gaskets in the Space Shuttles, and other isolated circumstances. I devoted 20 years of my life to the remediation of this mineral in commercial and residential buildings.
Bottom Line, IMVHO: If you are having work done in your home or business, contact a forensic lab and have them take and analyze samples.
