Asbestos Mining Towns: Asbest, Russia

Living in Australia, it is all too easy to assume that asbestos is feared and strictly regulated all around the world. Unfortunately, this is far from the reality and countries like China, Cuba and India still rely heavily on asbestos based products for automotive parts, building materials and insulation. Even the US continues to import large amounts of asbestos, importing 705 metric tons in 2016, almost twice the amount imported in 2015. 

So, where is all this asbestos coming from?

Although it isn’t the only country that still mines the dangerous mineral, Russia is by far the biggest miner and exporter of Asbestos, supplying roughly 60 to 75 percent of the world’s asbestos. 

In Russia, the deadly health risks associated with asbestos are covered up and it is even believed that the Russian mafia is behind a powerful pro-asbestos lobby. In short, the Russian love affair with asbestos is still very much in full swing, and nothing showcases this quite as well as the Russian mining town of Asbest. 

The Uralasbest mine is 11 km long, 2.5 km wide and 300m deep!

Like the name suggests, Asbest (which takes its name from the Russian word for asbestos), exists for the sole purpose of mining asbestos. The town is home of the Uralasbest mine - the world’s biggest functioning open-pit asbestos mine which is almost half the size of Manhattan! During its 100 years of operation the mine has shipped well over 384 million tonnes of asbestos all around the world.

To say the town of Asbest embraces asbestos would be somewhat of an understatement. Residents have an almost religious reverence for the stuff, seeing it as the town’s protector. Asbestos is referenced in folklore (such as stories about a girl with fibrous  hair made from the mineral), billboards in town proudly proclaim ‘ asbestos is our future’, and it is not uncommon for newly weds to have their photo taken overlooking the huge Uralasbest mine . 

It is not uncommon for people to take pictures overlooking the mine. 

Where Australians see the use of asbestos as a terrible mistake of the past, the Russians of Asbest view it as a sort of guiding light for the future.

Much like the now closed Australian town of Wittenoom, Asbest would cease to exist without the asbestos mining industry, of the 70,000 people who live there, 49,000 of them are directly or indirectly reliant on the Uralasbest mine for income. 

To make matters worse, the company that owns the mine also owns a significant amount of the town’s infrastructure. This means that for most of the town’s residents speaking out against the mine or acknowledging the health risks posed by asbestos isn’t really an option. 

As the global demand for asbestos gradually decreases, the future of Asbest looks more and more uncertain. Regardless of what the billboards in the town might say, the wide scale use of Asbestos has no place in the modern world. 

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Cuban Roofing Crisis

When Hurricane Matthew swept through Cuba’s Guantanamo province late last year, stories about how Cuban companies were making and distributing building materials to help the victims quickly made it into the nation’s news cycle.

Whenever the country is ravaged by a hurricane, one of the most repeatedly broadcast images on Cuban television is that of factories churning out asbestos-cement roofing sheets. Largely an exercise in morale boosting, these images of industrious factory workers working hard to manufacture roofing materials for those in need warms the heart of the nation. 

But there’s a slight problem… 

As is well known in most of the developed world, asbestos causes a wide variety of health problems if inhaled as it doesn’t dissolve or break down. This is because asbestos particles do not evaporate into air and don’t dissolve in water, meaning they linger around for a long time and are easily carried by wind or water. Drinking water can contain asbestos, especially if water pipes are made out of fibre cement.

Piping made from asbestos fibre cement. 

The link between exposure to asbestos and diseases such as lung cancer has been known since 1935. In 1991, the World Bank decided not to finance the manufacture or use of products containing asbestos. This subject shocked the world again in 2001, after the World Trade Centre collapsed, when asbestos dust was released into the air.

By means of a European Union (EU) directive, all of its member states have had to ban the sale or use of any kind of asbestos since 2005, and in 2006, the EU launched a campaign with the bold motto: “Asbestos is deadly serious!”

Inhaling abestos dust can lead to a variety of serious health problems. 

The World Health Organisation, international medical institutions and US regulatory authorities have drawn up a list of products that contain asbestos and cause cancer in humans. The use of asbestos has been banned in every developed country for decades now, although asbestos use continues in some developing countries, such as the aforementioned Cuba.

The international ban on asbestos is governed by the Rotterdam Convention (in effect since 2004), signed by over 100 member states, but not without controversy as some countries still mine and produce asbestos.

Fortunately here in Australia, there has been a full ban on asbestos since 2003, and we sincerely hope Cuba, and the rest of the world for that matter, follow suit soon. 

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The Cost Of Not Removing Friable Asbestos Safely

Canberra based demolition and excavation company, Samarkos Earthmoving, has been fined the sizeable sum of $60,00 dollars for work safety breaches.

The breaches occurred back in 2015 when Samarkos was contracted to demolish a house previously riddled with 'Mr Fluffy', an asbestos based insulation product. The house was located on Darke street, in the ACT suburb of Torrens.

Unlike a lot of other asbestos based building materials, which usually consist of asbestos fibres in cement, Mr fluffy is made of friable asbestos, which has its fibres exposed. This makes Mr Fluffy extremely dangerous, as fibres can easily become airborne. For this reason the removal of Mr fluffy is strictly regulated and the common practice for its removal is to use special vacuuming equipment. 

A roof containing Mr fluffy

My Fluffy never saw wide use in most of Australia (it is still found in some Sydney homes  and even recently in the Sydney Opera House); however, Canberra has a significant number of homes containing the product, most famously in its now defunct Radburn Estates.  

During Samarkos' ill fated demolition an excavator operator proceeded to demolish the property before workers had a chance to spray the house down with water. Although the friable asbestos had been previously removed in accordance with regulation,  ACT health and safety laws also required that the house be sprayed with water before demolition to prevent the spread of dust. 

Predictably, after the house was first struck by the excavator, a huge cloud of dust rose into the air. If it contained asbestos fibres this dust cloud would have posed a serious health risk to the neighbouring houses, as well as the Samarkos workers on site. Fortunately, no evidence of contamination has been found.  

The Darke street property post-demolition 

Samarkos plead guilty to the breaches and because the plea was submitted to the Industrial Magistrate early the penalty was reduced from  $80,000 to $60,000. 

This case and the hefty financial penalty it carried are a timely reminder of the importance of safely and correctly removing asbestos, particularly highly hazardous friable asbestos. 

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November Is National Asbestos Awareness Month

Today marks the beginning of National Asbestos Awareness Month for 2017.  The month long campaign takes place every November and aims to educate Australians on the dangers of asbestos. 

Sure, it might seem obvious, but asbestos still poses a huge risk to most Australians. Although asbestos has been banned since 2003, Australians still suffer from one of the highest rates of asbestos related disease in the world and the instance of asbestos related diseases is unfortunately on the rise. 

Since home renovators and tradespeople are the most at risk of asbestos exposure, the 2017 campaign has adopted the tagline Renovating? Go Slow! Asbestos it's a No Go. 

Although the campaign aims to share a variety of asbestos related safety messages, its key message is that many homes contain asbestos, not just those made from fibro. Asbestos is common in most homes built or renovated as late as 1990, and can be found in a variety of places like under floor coverings, in cement floors, in roofing or even in old dog kennels!

Australian actor and Wolf Creek star, John Jarratt, is the offical face of the campaign for 2017. John is a passionate asbestos safety advocate, being all too familiar with the dangers of asbestos after loosing his close friend, actor Harold Hopkins, in 2011 to mesothelioma caused by exposure to the deadly mineral. 

Wolf Creek star, John Jarratt, is the face of the Asbestos Awareness Month for 2017

When asked about his involvement in the campaign he said that 'Having the opportunity to warn people about the dangers [of asbestos] is very personal and important to me. I'm delighted to be on board to support this important message'. 

As a business involved with the removal and disposal of asbestos, Ausbestos is a passionate supporter of National Asbestos Awareness Month. We are excited to continue to educate the public about the dangers of asbestos and be involved in its safe removal and disposal.

Asbestos awareness month runs from November 1-30. To find out more or to get involved check out the Asbestos Awareness month website. 

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Asbestos Mining Towns: Wittenoom, WA

Today, Australians are all too aware of the dangers of asbestos. A ban on the use, manufacture and importing of the substance has been in affect for close to 15 years and strict regulations control its removal and disposal. However, Australia hasn’t always been so savvy when it comes to asbestos and you don’t have to dig too deep into our nation’s past to uncover our now faded enthusiasm for the deadly mineral. 

A prime example of this is the former Australian mining town of Wittenoom. Located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, Wittenoom was once home to a booming asbestos mine, famous for its blue crocidolite asbestos. 

Mining operations first began in the region in the 1930’s, although it wasn’t until 1943 that a blue asbestos mine was opened in Wittenoom Gorge. Fuelled by the increased demand for asbestos for gas masks and tanks for the war effort, the mine initially flourished, employing 7,000 men and women during its 26 years of operation. As well as those that worked for the mine, an estimated 13,000 people lived in the town and were in some way dependant on the revenue the mine created. 

Although the health dangers of asbestos were somewhat known at this time, they were easy to disregard when it was asbestos putting food on the table and money in pockets. This dilemma, and the plight of Wittenoom in general, was the subject of the 1990 Midnight Oil album, Blue Sky Mine; its titular track featuring the lyrics ‘But if I work all day at the Blue Sky Mine there’ll be food on the table tonight’.

If you lived in Wittenoom, exposure to blue asbestos was inevitable. Piles of asbestos tailings were dumped in gorges and those that weren’t dumped were used in everything from roads, to pipelines, and even in children’s sandpits. It is believed that roughly 2000 former Wittenoom residents and mining workers have already died from asbestos related health problems. 

Children playing in a 'sandpit' full of deadly blue asbestos tailings.

For this reason the town began to be scaled down in 1978 with residents being offered money to leave their homes. In 2007 Wittenoom was officially taken off the map and degazetted by the state government. Today it is largely a ghost town, with only three permanent residents who stay on despite government warnings. 

Wittenoom remains a foul mark on Australia's history, a costly tragedy that can never be erased. Fortunately, today in Australia the health risks of asbestos are very well known and strict legal framework is in place to prevent its mining and use. 

However, this is not the case all over the world, and countries like Russia still mine and use huge amounts of asbestos.

Join us next time when we take a look at another very different asbestos mining town. A town so in love with the substance it is named after it: the town of Asbest in Russia.

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Hiding In The Roof: Sydney Man Buys Home Riddled With Loose Fill Asbestos

It’s a home buyer's worst nightmare: you purchase a seemingly normal family home only to find out it is riddled with hazardous loose fill asbestos. This might sound like an unlikely scenario, but across Australia an increasing number of recent homebuyers are finding asbestos in their newly purchased home. As a result, forensic house demolitions are on the rise across the country.

One such unlucky homebuyer is Stuart Reese, who purchased his home at auction just over a year ago. 

Everything seemed fine until Stuart decided to renovate and came across dirty old insulation falling from the ceiling. At first he didn’t think much of it, after all dirt and dust are just part of renovating, but a couple of weeks later he realised what he had come across was actually loose fill asbestos.

Stuart Reese got more when he bargained for when he bought a house riddled with loose fill asbestos.

Also known as ‘friable asbestos’ or ‘Mr Fluffy’, loose fill asbestos is the most dangerous and hazardous asbestos building material. Unlike other more contained asbestos products, such as fibre board cement, loose fill asbestos is easily airborne and therefore easily inhaled. Found in ceilings and roof cavities, loose fibres from friable asbestos can move to other parts of the home, especially if the friable asbestos is older and has begun to crumble.

It's called 'loose' fill asbesbtos for a reason!

Loose fill asbestos is fairly uncommon, mainly seeing use in colder parts of the country, such as the outer suburbs of Canberra. But, as Stuart’s case proves, the hazardous insulation product can still be found in Sydney homes built in the 1960’s and 70’s.

If you do find loose fill asbestos in your home unfortunately the only viable option is to remove the asbestos then demolish the property. Simply removing the offending asbestos is not enough as contaminants can linger, so to ensure a safe environment the home must be carefully stripped of asbestos, demolished and then the soil must be tested for asbestos. 

It might start in the roof, but loose fill asbestos fibres can easily migrate to other parts of the home. 

For Stuart, the process of ensuring his property is asbestos free has only just begun. Although he was able to demolish the asbestos ridden property, he must continue to get the property tested every ten years to ensure no asbestos degradation or contamination has occured. 

As always, it is important that any asbestos products are removed by licensed professionals and disposed of in a legal and safe manner. 

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Dangerous Friable Asbestos Found In The Sydney Opera House

Like many other Australian buildings constructed in the 1950's, the iconic Sydney Opera House has been found to contain asbestos.

It was first reported back in August that asbestos fibres had been found in the building's wiringand that 25 workers were exposed to the carcinogenic material while working on a service duct. Last Thursday, more unexpected asbestos was detected while electricians were carrying out upgrades to the Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre. 

Samples of the substance were taken for testing on Thursday and confirmed to be friable asbestos on Friday. In response, the 35 electricians working on the Joan Sutherland Theatre refused to continue working due to the presence of the toxic substance. 

Friable asbestos products, such as ‘Mr Fluffy’ were generally used as insulation. Not particularly common in Sydney, friable asbestos saw widespread use in colder parts of the country such as the outer suburbs of Canberra.

Also known as loose fill asbestos, friable asbestos is particularly hazardous. While other asbestos products are usually only dangerous if disturbed or removed incorrectly, fibres from friable asbestos easily become airborne with little provocation. Breathing in just a single asbestos fibre can lead to serious negative health effects like mesothelioma.

The side effects of asbestos exposure can take decades to emerge and this latest batch of workers exposed to the toxic substance won’t know for between 10 to 30 years if their exposure is fatal or not. 

Although the company contracted to carry out the building upgrades, Laing O’Rourke, claims to have a comprehensive asbestos management plan in place, last week alone there were two unexpected asbestos finds, not including the workers exposed to asbestos back in August.  Such asbestos finds pose a serious risk for workers carrying out the upgrades. 

This high profile asbestos case is a harrowing reminder of the serious health risks posed by asbestos and how important it is that asbestos is removed carefully and by trained professionals. 

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Sydney's Most Relentless Asbestos Offender.

One of the state's worst serial asbestos dumpers has continued to illegally dispose of hundreds of tonnes of deadly contaminated waste across Sydney after narrowly avoiding jail. Already owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, Dib Hanna failed to appear in court as the environmental regulator pursues him over eight fresh offences. Hanna had pleaded guilty to dumping 80 tonnes of asbestos-laced material on vacant land he broke into near Picnic Point in Sydney's south-west in 2012. "The asbestos had the potential to be blown by the wind into the air causing potential harm to the health of nearby residents who might breathe it in," Chief Justice of the Land and Environment Court, Brian Preston, found.The excavator and demolition contractor who at the time is paying off more than $200,000 in fines at a rate of $300 a month until 2072, having committed more than a dozen other offences. The Environment Protection Authority found that in December 2015 he had ditched 150 tonnes of waste near a home on Seventh Avenue in Llandilo, near Penrith. He was ordered in February last year to clean up the site, but six months later the waste was still there. The EPA found Hanna had dumped at least another 750 tonnes of asbestos-contaminated waste at properties in nearby Wallacia, Cranebrook and East Kurrajong, some vacant, others occupied. A property owner, who did not wish to be named, said she had responded to a flyer Hanna left in her letterbox advertising free top soil. Instead, she was left with waste that contained small shards of asbestos. The EPA said it could not comment on Hanna's case now that it was pursuing him for eight "repeat waste" offences, which carry a maximum penalty of $250,000 in fines, two years' jail or both.

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Property development in Sydney is booming, just about every street in Sydney at present has a house or apartment building in a state of demolition, renovation or transformation. Whilst, we could all speculate that popular television programming like Channel Nine's The Block has lead to an increase of property owners trying to improve their living spaces by any means possible, the reality is that land is something that simply is not being manufactured; that is, there's a finite supply - and demand is massive. 

Copper pipe filled with asbestos

“Asbestos removal jobs in western Sydney have increased 64 per cent since 2015, while Sydney’s eastern suburbs have experienced a 50 per cent jump, year-on-year,”

— http://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/asbestos-removal-increasing-amid-nsw-renovation-boom-20161222-gtgh1x.html

As Australia's most desirable city and harbouring about 20% of the nations total population, Sydney has just about maxed out it's urban growth plan. Comparatively, New York with a total of 9000 square kilometres is home to 17 million individuals whilst Sydney has a whopping 12,000 square kilometres for a mere 4 million.
So why exactly are property prices in Sydney the second highest on the planet, second only to that of China?

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Mr Fluffy: A Concise Recap

Asbestos was used heavily in Australia for the better part of the last century, in fact, it wasn't officially made illegal until 2003 and even to this day, building materials imported from outside the nation are routinely testing positive for this deadly mineral. Of all the asbestos found in Australia, the most concerning is without a doubt loose fill or "friable" asbestos, although not as common as other asbestos products like fibreboard cement and roofing it was used in Australia's cooler areas as ceiling and wall cavity insulation. The predominant areas that utilised Mr Fluffy insulation "a blanket term coined to described Asbestosfluf, J&H Insulation and any other materials imported by Dirk Jansen during the 1960s and 70s" are located in Canberra's outer suburbs. Seemingly cursed from the beginning of development, the new homes being produced were planned in favour of an emerging design concept known as Radburn Housing. The concept born of resistance to the suburban boom incurred from the invention of the automobile introduced concepts of communal space, shared walkways and urban planning to minimise the use of vehicular transport. Whilst seeming well thought out, the gridded housing arrangement with thin access paths proved to do very little other than to become hot spots for criminal activity within any city that proceeded with the concept, from it's original New Jersey estate throughout the United Kingdom and even in Sydney's own Villawood. With failure spanning the globe, many of the Radburn estates were either demolished or redeveloped to conform with more traditional suburban layouts. 

“Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong,”

— Philip Cox, NSW Public Housing Architect

View fullsize

Remains of poorly thought out town planning.

Now, as interesting as this all is, what does it have to do with asbestos you may be asking? 
Well, as mentioned above, the majority of housing (both private and public) constructed in a Radburn'ian fashion was either demolished or reimagined within a short period of time to counteract the negative impact the layouts were having on surrounding communities. Simple enough of a task for most - however - by the end of the 1970s the Australian Government was already catching on to the harmful effects of asbestos and began measures to regulate the sale of loose fill fibres and certain other products and so began a battle of two evils. The question remained for decades, continue asbestos abatement works and deal with geographically isolated crime spikes or spend in excess of one billion dollars to create replacement homes for displaced public housing tenants and enact a process of land buyback for private owners. Well, it took a rather long time to come to a decision but eventually in 2016 the Australian Capital Territory Asbestos Taskforce announced a list of affected homes eligible for reimbursement via a buyback scheme, although seemingly an amicable solution for current property owners, further problems were raised when a number of title holders (unaware of the hazardous material contamination upon purchase) received what they believed to be less than the properties value when accounting for inflation, with one such family even going on to report that they were unable to afford the property in which they once lived after it's remediation. 

. . . .but the asbestos.

Now in the full swing of redevelopment these experimental suburban blocks are finally being addressed, officially recognised as some of the worst asbestos affected areas in Australia, it has been estimated that at least 30,000 individuals over the past four decades have been exposed to the raw mineral fibres that constitute the loose fill insulation. With more asbestos containing products being introduced from overseas industry, is there possibly a lesson to be learned from this story? Would less lives have been affected if the problem was addressed earlier, was it unavoidable? If you suspect that your property may contain previously undisclosed asbestos, it certainly pays to have it inspected. Ignoring the contamination will inevitably result in greater issues in the future. Don't be like Canberra - Call Ausbestos on 1300 045 355.

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