Thread: Asbestos removal

Originally Posted by Roverlord off road spares

BMKAL,. it the roof was damaged by storm wouldn't your insurance cover it, since Asbestos can't be repaired they would have to pay for a new roof.???

That is certainly what I would expect. Still waiting to hear whether insurance company will accept the claim. They had builders and an assessor up here last week from Perth looking at a number of damaged properties.

So far, the insurance company that he had the Mazda insured with has accepted the claim, and will pay out the write-off at agreed value. Hopefully, the insurer for the house will also do the right thing.

A relative of mine was a fitter and turner for a sand mining operation his entire life. One routine operation was turning asbestos pipes on a lathe to move sand slurry around the plant.
He died of old age.


Yes it's dangerous, but it's not an immediate or definite death sentence.

Remember years ago in Canberra a company called " Mr Fluffy" thry pumped asbestos into the home roofs as installation. I have cellulose insulation in my roof, after seeing that program I rang CSIRO to get mine tested, they replied to me and asked if I saw the TV program, and said I would have wasted my money if I had them test it. They said in Vic it wasn't used. They said get a match and burn it if it burns then its not asbestos.
Made me feel better as I had been up in the roof many times disturbing it.

One of the issues with asbestos is that there have been two types used in Australia, white asbestos and blue asbestos. Blue asbestos is far more dangerous than is white, probably because the fibres are more brittle and don't usually break into bits small enough to inhale.

Most Australian manufacture used white asbestos until the 1950s, when increasing production meant shortages of raw materials, and blue asbestos increasingly was added to the mix. There is no practical way of telling which is present in any particular case.

It seems to me that the risk is likely to be overstated in most cases - for example, until the 1980s, nearly all brake linings had large proportions of asbestos in their composition. And what happens to brake linings? They are converted to very fine dust, which ends up widely dispersed, so that it is a reasonable assumption that almost everyone, at least in the urban population, was exposed to asbestos for fifty years or more. Yet asbestos diseases remain rare in the general population.

I only know of two people who have had mesothelioma, and both of them were easily able to identify specific occupational exposure to gross levels of asbestos dust. One was during his National Service in the RN fifty years before he developed the disease, the other was able to attribute it to using an angle grinder on dry fibro sheeting. On the other hand, my brother-in-law worked in Hardies fibro factory in Sydney for over thirty years, and died in his late eighties from a heart attack attributed to his war service (smoking!). Despite his wife washing clothes covered in asbestos fibres for over twenty years, she is still going in her eighties, and while not in the best of health, none of her issues are asbestos related.

Horrid stuff and I worked at a place in the UK where they used it as part of cladding along with bitumen, of corrugated iron for the sheeting of walls and roofs of factories and housing.
In this place they had a section where the asbestos was pulverised was sheer hell with dust everywhere. I never worked there luckily.
Safety equipment back then was a little face mask worn by many these days for things much less dangerous than that stuff. I believe the company is one of those in the UK who have been targeted for the deaths of employees.
I do not know of how many from there have died as a result of working there.
But I have known 2 people who died of it... one was an RN fitter who lagged steam pipes with it and the other was a lady who washed hubby's overalls. I met the RN bloke on a cruise ship and he dragged his battery powered oxygen bottle with him everywhere, and the lady was a fellow worker in a TAFE here in Perth. Dead in her late 40s or early 50s. She died after washing hubby's overalls full of asbestos dust but he's still alive.
On the other hand they built many "prefabs" after the war in the UK to house people and I don't know of any that died of sickness bought on by living in them. Maybe because they were fully sealed with paint etc. with no dust in the air.
Asbestos sheeting is one of the most illegally dumped items in WA where it was used for fencing...... tip charges and complying with regulations are too expensive for many people.
AlanH.