Asbestos : Deadly Substance Lurks in Water, Cars, Schools

Each time you drink tap water, enter an older building or brake your car, you are likely to encounter a material linked to disease and death, a substance that has been the focus of governmental regulation and multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

The substance is asbestos. Despite a decade of debate and costly efforts to remove it from society, asbestos will probably remain a daily part of our lives well into the next century.

“It has been our sincere wish that we could announce the demise of asbestos by 2001. But it is very unlikely that it will happen,” said Stewart Huey, executive director of the National Asbestos Council, a coalition of contractors, building owners and scientists who advise on asbestos removal.

In the Environment

An estimated 30 million tons of asbestos has entered this country’s human environment since the turn of the century.

Its tightly wound fibers made the mineral a natural insulator, ideal for soundproofing buildings. Its heat-resistance properties earned it work covering steam pipes and shielding buildings from fires. Its strength and resistance to wear was put to use in brake linings and water pipes.

But its usefulness was eclipsed by another property: the slow, insidious way it can kill.

The links between occupational exposure to asbestos and lung disease and cancer have prompted regulations restricting its uses. Asbestos consumption has dropped by a third over the last decade as thousands of lawsuits were filed against asbestos manufacturers like the Manville Corp., claiming that exposure to airborne asbestos caused sickness and death.

3,000 Products

Although unrestricted use as a loosely formed insulator has ended, an estimated 240,000 tons of asbestos still goes into 3,000 different products annually, including floor tiles, protective clothing, gaskets and underground pipes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to eliminate most asbestos products and has proposed an immediate ban on asbestos-concrete piping, asbestos clothing and most asbestos building materials, including floor tiles and roof felting. It also wants a gradual end to asbestos brake pads and engine gaskets.

“Our position is that if it is in the air and can be breathed, it is dangerous,” said EPA spokesman Dave Ryan. “Our goal is to phase out all asbestos use in new products over a 10-year period.”

$2-Billion Cost

The EPA estimates that the ban would cost producers and consumers about $2 billion just for asbestos replacements over the 15 years it would take to phase out its use. But some say such steps are unnecessary.

“Asbestos is an extraordinarily useful mineral that, when appropriately handled, should pose no great risk for the worker or the general public,” said Dr. John Craighead, who is chairman of the pathology department at the University of Vermont’s Medical School and who has studied the health effects of asbestos.

“Unfortunately, it has become such an inflammatory situation the politicians find their hands forced by pressures that are unrealistic,” he said.

But even if the EPA recommendations go through after a series of public hearings, asbestos will remain part of our lives for decades.

Present Exposure

“Banning it reduces some of the problems 50 years in the future, but banning doesn’t do much about the exposure of the present,” said William Nicholson, associate director of the Division of Environmental Medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Years of use have left us with a legacy of asbestos.

The EPA estimates that more than 700,000 commercial, apartment, and federal buildings have pipe wrapping and sprayed insulation that contains friable asbestos, meaning that it can be easily crumbled and crushed into powder. The total includes an estimated 31,000 schools that provide daily lessons to 15 million students.

Congressional studies have put the cost of removing the asbestos as high as $2 billion for just the schools.

Complicated Process

Many school districts and building owners have begun the expensive and complicated process of removing asbestos, even though most experts agree it’s often safer to leave it until it must be disturbed by renovation or demolition.

“What you do depends on the condition of the material and the likelihood of the material being released,” said Nicholson. “The presence of asbestos per se does not mean the material has to be taken out.”

Problems often arise when it is removed; shoddy work can leave higher concentrations of asbestos in the air.

Danger Increases

“In some cases the action taken to reduce the risk has actually increased the danger,” said Rep. James J. Florio (D-N.J.) whose subcommittee on commerce, transportation and tourism is pushing legislation to establish federal standards for asbestos removal in schools.

Asbestos is also a part of the nation’s water systems. An estimated 400,000 miles of concrete-asbestos piping carries drinking water to 6,000 cities and towns with populations of more than 1,000 people. Towns, particularly in the fast-growing areas of the Southwest and West, are still adding the pipe to their systems.

The EPA’s plan to ban its use, based upon concern about the health effects on workers making and using the pipe, is being resisted.

Corrosive Soils

“It was the most cost-effective water supply material, and it had outstanding performance in ‘hot soils,’ corrosive soils that will eat away at metal pipe,” said Joseph Jackson, president of the Assn. of Asbestos-Cement Pipe Producers.

Jackson said cement-asbestos water pipes have remained intact after 70 years in the ground. But there have been failures too. Last November, reports of blue asbestos fibers clogging faucets in some Woodstock, N.Y., homes led to the discovery of a deteriorating length of pipe and asbestos levels as high as 300 million fibers per liter.

Such an amount is invisible to the naked eye, but EPA surveys of drinking water across the nation found that most systems registered asbestos levels of less than 1 million fibers per liter.

Public Health Issue

“We want it out of the system and we want the pipes out of commission. We’re dealing with the public health,” said Woodstock town supervisor John LaValle.

But asbestos is commonly found in drinking water, particularly in the West and Northwest where water flows through serpentine rock, a prime source of asbestos.

The EPA has found no link between asbestos in the drinking water and cancer. “The weight of evidence for carcinogenicity of (asbestos) by the dietary routes is slight at best,” the agency’s advisory board said in a recent report. “The data do not support a cause and effect relationship.”

Fibers Slough Off

Asbestos is also in the air. Natural contamination occurs around asbestos deposits. Construction, renovation and demolition scatters asbestos into the air of our cities. Each time you step on your car’s brake pedal, asbestos fibers are sloughed off into the atmosphere.

This constant exposure to asbestos was illustrated by separate studies in the 1960s of autopsies in New York, London, Paris and Johannesburg that found asbestos in the lungs of more than half the cases.

In the 1970s, when construction crews used to spray asbestos on building girders, Nicholson found 20 billionths to 60 billionths of a gram of asbestos per cubic meter of air in New York City. Today he estimates that a typical urban setting has about 1 billionth of a gram of asbestos in a cubic meter--about 5,000 times less than new OSHA standards of one-fifth of a fiber per cubic centimeter of air.

‘Natural Contamination’

“City levels can be 10 times that of rural areas,” he said. “But some rural areas can be high due to natural contamination.”

No one disputes the health consequences suffered by insulation workers and others with long-term exposure to high concentrations of asbestos. But there is serious scientific debate over how little exposure is too much.

“Anybody’s guess is good,” said Mark McClanahan, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “We can agree fairly well that at high exposure levels there is a higher incidence of illness. At low levels we can’t prove the cancer they are dying from is the result of asbestos exposure 20 years ago.”

Casual Contact

Craighead in Vermont feels there is little evidence that casual contact, such as working in a building containing asbestos, presents any danger.

“Studies indicate that the individuals tragically affected were exposed to large quantities,” he said. “Minute quantities of asbestos in public buildings and schools are of an extraordinarily different order of magnitude than that of industrial settings.”

Dr. Irving Selikoff, who has studied asbestos’ health impact in 30 years of research at Mount Sinai, said the rate of asbestos-related illnesses rises and falls with the amount of exposure.

‘Chances Remote’

“It is conceivable that one fiber could cause disease, but the chances are remote,” he said.

But Selikoff worries about the future. Once breathed in, asbestos fibers remain embedded in the lungs--potentially ticking time bombs for decades. Selikoff said the 20- to 30-year incubation period for asbestos-related diseases is coming to an end for millions of construction workers; he fears that the medical consequences of their asbestos exposure will continue in the years to come.

“We really have two legacies when it comes to asbestos,” he said. “We have a legacy of it in our buildings, our powerhouses and ships. And we have a legacy of the people who have been exposed to it in the past who face a very uncertain future.”