Quote:
Originally Posted by Boomer 2019
When I was a starving college student in 1972-73 I got a construction job to augment my VA payments. It was with a building insulation company working on a new hospital. The insulation material was something called Zonolite made by W. R. Grace and Co. It was a dry dusty material that came in bags. This would be added to water in a mixer, and then dumped into a powerful pump which then sent the mix through a long hose to where a worker would shoot it onto the structural steel of the building.
No one ever mentioned the word asbestos, and I certainly had never heard of its danger at the time. Turns out Zonolite was nearly pure asbestos. My job was to operate the mixer and the pump, and tear open the bags and achieve the proper consistency of the mix before dumping it into the hopper of the pump. I was enveloped in a cloud of dust all day and my clothes were covered with it. Thank God I had the common sense to figure out that breathing in this stuff was not a good idea, so I would take a deep breath and hold it before tearing open a bag and dumping it, and would not breath until the cloud had blown away. When I got home I would take off all my clothes in the yard (we had no neighbors) and would beat everything out of them that I could. Never the less I had to have inhaled some of it over time.
I did not hear about the danger of asbestos until about 5 years later, and worried from time to time for years if I was going to come down with asbestosis. It hasn't happened yet so I figure I'm good. I do consider myself very lucky though.
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My Dad's father would do boiler insulation as a side gig. My Dad told me of times he and his brother would make "snowballs" out of the asbestos slurry and throw them at each other.
There are towns outside asbestos mines where the instances of cancer and asbestosis are no higher than a normal town. And then there are towns near mines where the incidents are really high. A lot depends on the type of asbestos. Some is worse than others. I have a piece of the Berlin wall safely wrapped in plastic because it contains asbestos. Not taking any chances.