Comment by stephen_g
2 years ago
It’s incredible how bad tradies are at PPE. When my solar panels were being installed on my house, the electrician was happily about to drill through asbestos cement eave lining before I stopped him, and at least made him put on a disposable P2 respirator mask I had lying around. But he still released asbestos fibres into the air and the ceiling cavity where his colleagues were working, and will have got it on his clothes and hair. How many times had he done it completely unprotected at other people’s houses without even thinking? (Australian houses often contain AC sheeting in houses built between the 50s to the 80s)
With silica it’s a similar story, we were moving in to an older office block that again had asbestos in the ceiling tiles, and I was wearing a respirator because again electricians had drilled it in a bunch of places (inside this time, ended up going through very expensive decontamination a couple of days later including ripping out and replacing half of the brand new carpet). Anyway, I was in the server room where an air-conditioner guy was installing a split system unit, and he asked me about it and I told him what was happened. He then said something like “Oh yeah, I definitely should have been more careful with that kind of stuff when I was a young fella”, and then proceeds to start drilling through the double brick wall (to install the piping to the outdoor unit) with no mask or hearing protection… Cutting brick and concrete releases silica into the air too, most tradies just give no thought to using proper PPE…
Sadly that's just the culture. I've seen apprentices laughed at by old timers and called pussies because they were taking basic precautions and wearing PPE. And then to fit in they themselves took on that same attitude.
It hurts me when I see my tradie trainee husband (at school to be an auto mechanic) skip PPE in places he really shouldn't (e.g. latex gloves when handling carcinogenic fluids). I don't really know as I can do much other than state my objections to deaf ears though.
Both my grandfather and father received identical forms of bladder cancer due to improperly handling solvents without PPE. It's preventable and stupid.
A similar situation exists with mostly men who work outside and refuse to wear hats or sunscreen but develop malignant melanoma at far greater rates than other groups.
The definition of stupid is someone who believes they can smoke 5 packs a day and not get cancer. But it's the inconsiderateness of someone who doesn't love their family enough to watch out for their own health to not leave them prematurely rather than hurry death along.
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Those fluids are carcinogenic to drink, not to get on your skin.
Don’t be a scold, show the benefit, which is it’s easier to clean up after work.
Also latex gloves cause latex allergies frequently, vinyl gloves can be a good alternative.
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I think I permanently trained myself out of that by looking at some arc welding when I was about 8 years old. Looked pretty, and brighter than anything I had seen before. (sun, lightning, lasers, etc) Didn't seem to hurt or cause any immediate issues.
Realized how wrong I was when I woke up the next morning, felt like I had gritty sand in my eyes for two or three days.
I walked past a guy using a pneumatic drill the other day. It was so loud I crossed the road to get away from it and my ears were ringing for a while after I'd passed him. He wasn't wearing any form of ear protection at all.
He can't have been much older than 20.
He could have been using small earplugs - I hope!
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The talk in the trade is that asbestos is way overblown and it mostly affected people installing it in ships for the Navy. They worked in tight spaces with lots of asbestos in the air, lining the ship and its pipes with it, all day every day.
I don't know how true that is but I've heard the same exact story from several different contractors. I do know that getting those linoleum/asbestos floor tiles ripped up will cost you a lot to get somebody to do it for you, but there aren't any real safety precautions you need to take since it isn't getting airborne, it's basically just pure profit for the contractor.
Many people underestimate the risks from asbestos as the disease can take 20-40 years to develop after exposure but it shouldn’t be underestimated.
Asbestosis killed over 3,600 people in 2015. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis
Asbestos has affected all sorts or people, not just in the Navy. A close relative of mine who was a plumber has been diagnosed with it and it is an awful disease.
This woman is dying from cancer caused by inhaling asbestos dust while washing her husband's work clothes. https://www.thompsonstradeunion.law/news/news-releases/asbes...
It’s also that relatively few people are affected. That’s approximately one in 100,000 people, twice as many people in the United States were murdered in 2015. It is really easy to know nobody who died from asbestos.
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I'm skeptical of the story. Husband wears asbestos ridden clothes all day, maybe wears PPE and what not, but we've tied it the cancer the wife has because of her exposure to the clothes while handling them in the wash?
Even if the husband took off his clothes, separately bagged them and then handed them to his wife to clean, it's hard to see how his exposure is less to the point where only she was diagnosed.
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My understanding is that there is not a very obvious dose response curve for mesothelioma. There are some people who had occupational exposure for their entire working life and don’t get it, while there are some people that had a small number of individual exposures and do get it. I think this is what drives a lot of people to dismiss the risks of asbestos. They work around the stuff and they work with people who work around the stuff and they don’t see people getting mesothelioma, so they assume it’s not a big deal.
Official statistics (in Spain, which is where I'm from and have read them) don't agree with that. Plenty of construction workers and various related workers, like plumbers, etc. have died from asbestos.
As an anecdote, you could even die from asbestos from working at a TV station... The Spanish public TV station used asbestos as insulation in stages and apparently, when there were vibrations from loud sound, applauses, etc., dust particles fell on the workers and public. A famous TV anchor, José María Íñigo, died from that, as well as other workers from the station.
There are different varieties of asbestos. None are good for you, but some are far more deadly than others.
Western European countries (including Spain, I am guessing) and Australia tended to use the most dangerous varieties of asbestos - crocidolite and amosite. By contrast, North America and ex-USSR countries used the less carcinogenic chrysotile.
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I had some conversations with some folks who worked in asbestos removal. In the US, everyone who touches the stuff owns it forever. The bags used to pack it have the name, license #s and contact info for the company removing it. If the landfill decides 20 years from now that they no longer want it in their landfill, your company gets to pay to remove it and then dispose of it in a new landfill.
The general feeling was that every asbestos removal company goes out of business (dissolve, chapter 7) in order to escape the permanent liability of the stuff. At which point it now becomes a SuperFund issue.
I used to make a living scanning the lungs of people who were young enough to have been told the risks.
Sadly no better here in Germany, which surprised me. In the UK health and safety is much more extreme. Here in Germany it’s rare to see workers taking any kind of safety precautions
My dad, who is permanently sunburnt from his half century in construction (and wasn’t terribly into most other safety measures against abstract risks), tsk-tsks the laxity of German road crews allowing workers to wear shorts in the summer. Sturdy jeans go a long way as basic leg protection, and he couldn’t imagine any construction worker in much hotter Texas forgoing them, no matter how much they have to be yelled at about hardhats.
The main thing I noticed in Germany was open construction sites with little to protect pedestrians walking through, lack of any kind of masks when working with fumes or dust, no ear protection, and no hardhats.
But still the "real men" on UK building sites and trades shun PPE. It's just a dumb man thing. I often wonder if they think every day there's a chance of a woman seeing and thinking how manly and hot they are for not even needing wimpy protection. Here the construction vehicles have a green flashing light on to indicate that the user has a seat belt on. They get round that by just buckling up then sitting on the belt. Tbh that one seems a bit silly but there's probably a good reason for it.
Perhaps, though still my experience seeing building sites in the UK still seems to have way more health and safety and risk assessments. As I said in the other comment, in Germany it's not rare at all to see road workers with heavy machinery, fumes, and dust, who are wearing no ear protection, no goggles, no mask, and no hard hat. That would be an extremely rare sight in the UK.
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Doubt it has anything to do with women. More like poor long term risk assessment leading to immediate tasks and short term goals being prioritized over more abstract longer term goals.
You've probably crossed a road at a non-ideal location right? Because you had somewhere to be and you figured you were paying attention - the risk was managed. Same dynamic basically.
I've seen some behavior on German job sites that blows my mind as an Australian (and from this discussion it's pretty clear Aussie tradies aren't saints).
Zero compliance with hard hats, straddling a 4th story window without fall protection, incredibly sketchy scaffolding, dust everywhere etc. I was half expecting a worker fatality at some point.
Though I'm not sure I'd blame the Germans (other than for very lax oversight) it was an entirely Eastern European work crew. Which seems to be the case for many job sites around here. Bunch of young folks hustling for money to take home with zero regard for health and safety.
There's a lot of people living in really old substandard houses with Asbestos here in Canada too. The decline of the middle class, and economy where a new house costs 1 million, while the average salary is 59k made it nearly impossible for people to afford to build a new house. So the vas† majority of people in old homes will be stuck in them.
Asbestos is fine if you dont drill/breathe it. If its fire insulant between drywall it was never proven to be health issue. Its not like its radioactive or something
NRK had a great article about this recently:
https://www.nrk.no/vestland/xl/kvartsstovet-som-gjer-folk-sj...
Seems to work fine in Google Translate.
I mean, you probably should disclose your property has asbestos to trades working on your house - and they probably would wear the right PPE. Lots of people are fine with small risks with regular materials like sheetrock on small jobs (cutting a hole or something). But really, that should've been disclosed to workers as they enter your property.
I honestly don’t think it would have made a difference - he was going to drill it anyway after I stopped him, I had to ask him to please use the respirator.
In the commercial case we had also very clearly told them that it was asbestos containing but there was some miscommunication to the workers, so they just drilled all these holes…
Anyway, at the end of the day, while there are rules for commercial buildings to have asbestos registers, I wouldn’t expect every homeowner to know what every part of their house is made of, but at the same time, basically every building built for a period of more than 60 years in Australia contains (or contained) asbestos containing materials - so it’s a pretty scary lack of training or ignoring of the risks for somebody working in the building industry to not take even basic precautions when at least 1/3 or so of the houses these people are working in contains asbestos. For the solar guys, the eaves are the most likely place for it to exist, because even when houses have been pretty extensively renovated inside and had a lot of the AC sheeting removed indoors (as mine has), or might not have had asbestos sheeting inside originally (plaster was more expensive, so a more premium finish), it’s one part that was very likely to have still been AC sheeting (since it was mould resistant) and much less likely to have been replaced with non-asbestos fibreboard in the meantime.
Okay well you clearly have a great life with a lot to live for, but that's not really the case for everyone. How about you don't judge people you're calling "tradies" for how they decide to live their lives.
Did you even read the article? These people are very young, and deeply regret the way they decided to live their lives. And tradies is not some kind of slur, it's how they refer to their colleagues across the trades. And wtf is up with just assuming these people who don't wear PPE don't think they have a great life with a lot to live for, there's literally a 35yr old dude with 3 loving kids in one of the pictures of affected persons.
Sorry if that was off base, I'm not in a good place right now.
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