Asbestos rampant on campus
Caution taken by U of M to manage asbestos problem
Magally Zelaya, Staff
Forty to $50 million of work is required to remove or manage asbestos in the more than 100 buildings on the campus built prior to 1985 that are known to contain the potentially dangerous material.
To date, approximately $10 million has been spent on asbestos abatement at the U of M, according to Brian Rivers, director of physical plant.
Asbestos work at the university is ongoing. Efforts were increased in 2002 as awareness of the health hazard posed by asbestos became known and a portion of the provincial loan to the university was used for asbestos abatement projects, according to Rivers.
In fiscal 2006-07 the university spent $1.9 million on asbestos abatement projects, $2.2 million in 2005-06, and $767,000 in 2004-05.
The university’s environmental health and safety office (EHSO) has posted a 72-page report of all the asbestos projects completed since 2003 on its website.
In mid-January 2008, floor tiles containing asbestos were removed from Duff Roblin and the Parker building.
The EHSO has also posted a two-page list outlining current projects. Currently, ceiling plaster is being removed from the Buller building, and wall plaster is being removed in the administration building.
Asbestos, however, is pervasive on the campus.
“At this point I don’t have any idea how long it would take us to complete the entire campus. It will be years,” said Debbie McCallum, vice-president (administration). “As for a timeline: it’s sort of as funds come available.”
Asbestos is the generic name for a fibrous group of naturally occurring silica minerals. Known for its resistance to fire and insulating and reinforcing properties, asbestos fibers are durable, strong, and flexible. These properties made asbestos popular for industrial use in Canada up until the mid-’80s.
Asbestos can be further categorized as friable (easily reduced to dust by moderate hand pressure) and non-friable (bound in a matrix, such as cement, which inhibits the release of fibres), according to a reference guide published by the EHSO.
Undisturbed, asbestos does not pose health threats.
It is only when the fibres (0.11-0.24 micrometres) are released into the air that those who inhale it are at risk of various lung diseases including asbestosis (a scarring of the lungs), lung cancer, and mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the chest or abdominal cavity), according to Health Canada.
Asbestos-containing materials can be found in numerous materials on the U of M campus.
“It’s located in a variety of places; for example, in some cases it’s in floor tiles, it’s in ceiling tiles, it’s in mechanical rooms, it’s in walls,” said McCallum. “So to try and quantify that and determine precisely how much needs to be done is very difficult.”
“We have had surveys done, we have assigned priorities to the work. . . .We have been working diligently to abate the asbestos that has been rated as the highest priority, but there’s still an awful lot to be done,” said McCallum.
Grant McCaughey, director of the EHSO said, “We feel very confident that we have things well under control.”
He said there is no danger to students and staff who are in buildings during asbestos work.
“It’s all done under very tightly controlled conditions: spaces are put under negative pressure, there’s proper ventilation, there’s proper treatment of the air so that it’s essentially sealed up.
“Obviously, we follow, probably an excess, of government requirements, so there’s no problem with people being in the building when the work is being undertaken,” he said.
“Ventilations systems are shut down if necessary. Because we have to shut down ventilation, we like to do it off-hours, so a lot of the work is done when most people aren’t in the buildings,” said McCaughey.
As for existing structures that have asbestos built in, such as chalkboards, fire doors, and insulation behind walls, Jim Brophy, the executive director of Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers, said, “It doesn’t pose a problem.”
Both Brophy and McCaughey said that removal of asbestos is not always the best course of action. Often the removal would cause exposure, whereas leaving the material undisturbed and well-managed or encapsulating it better protects the public.
Brophy added, “In the long term we need to get it out of all of the building, because it continually poses a potential health problem. And the one thing that we know — and the World Health Organization says this — we don’t know what a safe threshold is for asbestos. That is to say, we don’t know at what level of exposure everybody in the population is safe. We don’t think there is such a level.”
Two professors from the anthropology department at the University of Manitoba are known to have died from mesothelioma — which has a latency period of 30-40 years from the time of exposure, according to Manitoba Health.
Though the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), said the professors “contracted mesothelioma from exposure to asbestos in their workplace,” — exposure suspected to have occurred in the 1970s. The U of M said there is no evidence that it is related to exposure at the university.
“You can’t really confirm that it was exposure at the university, it might have been in their own home, for example, or some other place that they worked,” said McCallum.
McCaughey agreed, “You can’t come to the conclusion that it’s as a result of a exposure to asbestos in a particular building or from particular circumstances because there’s a lifetime of potential exposure.”
As a result of the deaths, CAUT has formed a campaign to promote awareness of the issues surrounding asbestos and is calling for a national ban and funding from the government to aid in removal to ensure that its members and the general public are safe.
