Someone at work got a new office. He decided he wanted a second door and tunneled through the wall to make it.
Someone at work got a new office. He decided he wanted a second door and tunneled through the wall to make it.
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 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?
Always start with OSHA for anything in a workplace
OSHA (https://www.osha.gov/form/osha7) and/or the EPA's Asbestos Ombudsman (https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/forms/contact-us-about-asbestos)
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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
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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
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.
They're breathing the cleanest air of anyone in the 1960s. The asbestos is like a force field protecting them from plutonium, lead, and cigarette smoke.
Oh. The blue asbestos is the worst.
EDIT: oh shit we're in the same thread where you were talking about this so you probably saw it. ignore me
My wife: what are you typing so fast on your phone
Me: someone mentioned Asbestos on the internet
The left doesn't want us to have this
🎶If I work all day on the Blue Sky Mine🎵
🎵(There'll be food on the table tonight)🎶
You can't even have two doors anymore because of woke.
See I don't know. Apparently the patriots are still in control and you can spontaneously decide to destroy a wall in an office without any kind of oversight. The woke mafia is persecuting asbestos traditionalists but I think I can still dig into a clean wall if I get my own office.
Look, all I know about asbestos is that Dick Cheney did 9/11 so he didn't have to pay for abatement.
Where the fuck do you work that employees can just start demo'ing the office?
Critical support
One of the last places you'd expect for that to be the case. I'm trying to start a pollinator garden and it looks like I have to go through multiple departments and potentially different committees just to put a sign in a garden bed which saves us money.
oh so all of the sudden it isn't cool to tunnel?
It's only a tunnel when it's underground. This is a sparkling passage.
Lmfao why, just why. I can't imagine just being like ME WANTT DOOR and tunneling through a wall of a building i don't own. And he tunneled into the supply closet?? did he not... know what was on the other side of the wall???
I think his new role involved overseeing the supply room but I don't know who mole man is/was, just some admin. The walk between the two normally takes 20 seconds.
Ironic, appointed to oversee the protective equipment closet when in fact the closet needed to be protected from him. Truly poetic
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
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.
Yeah, it sounds weird, but critical support to asbestos in highly specific occasions.
At least a mandatory marking of every wall containing asbestos so mole man can be contained
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.
Love living near a small airport where petit bourgeois fucks can spray aerosolized lead on me from their planes. Hope they don’t Harrison Ford into my (landlord’s) house.
Mole Man follows his instincts. Mole Man has lymphoma.
Worked with a guy who didn't want to wear PPE because it was uncomfortable. We were demolishing a building and he was sawing thru old insulation tubes. We had to wear PPE because the tubes were full of asbestos. He didn't wear PPE, he understood what asbestos was. I still can't figure it out.
i'm pretty impulsive sometimes, but arbitrarily making a hole in the wall is beyond my powers
On three separate occasions this past school year, some contractors were removing asbestos from one of the labs in the basement. The only notice was a paper sign posted very inconspicuously on two of the building doors, the day removal started.
They did some sealing on the hallway that room was in, but otherwise no precautions were taken. My office was two hallways down, and all classes in the building ran like normal. Very safe, very good
I see we have a resident asbestos expert. A few years ago I was responsible for removing some equipment that was mounted to the drop ceiling before they demolished a room to renovate. A few days after my part while they were mid demo the asbestos remediation signs showed up and big tubes were strung through the hallways. I didn’t work in that building so I’m not worried about what was disturbed by demo and spread around but have to wonder how much exposure I got being in the plenum space for about fifteen minutes.
That's a great photo. I also like how the yellow tape is made by Body Guard
That rules
