Airing troubles: Call for asbestos register
An innocent visit to a building site highlights the risk to all of us from potentially deadly asbestos and the absence of a national strategy to deal with it, writes Rob Stock.
‘‘This needs urgent attention. We need a central database of buildings.’’ Brett Pietersen vice-president, Demolition and Asbestos Association
High-profile class action lawyer Adina Thorn has fallen victim to New Zealand’s lax attitude to asbestos.
Thorn breathed in large amounts of asbestos-laden dust at a construction site where builders had not identified the presence of asbestos, so there were no warning signs.
The incident occurred in 2017 when she was looking around an Auckland house she owned which was being worked on by builders after flood damage.
‘‘I decided to go in there and just have a look. I was just interested,’’ she said. ‘‘The building was all shut up. The windows were shut. There were some exposed ceiling areas.’’
‘‘I was coughing in there, but it didn’t occur to me that there was asbestos.
‘‘When I came out, I was dizzy. I felt a bit sick.’’
She went home, but the feeling got worse. She called friends, who raised the possibility she had inhaled dust containing asbestos.
It was a terrifying thought. ACC paid for a lung scan, which revealed dust in her lungs.
Tests organised by her insurer identified asbestos was present in the property.
Like Australia, New Zealand was an enthusiastic user of asbestos in building materials, and many older commercial properties and residential homes – an estimated 40,000 in Christchurch alone – contain it.
But unlike Australia, New Zealand does not have a national asbestos strategy, a source of frustration to 88-year-old Dr Bill Glass, whose pioneering work on protecting workers from industrial disease, including that caused by asbestos, was recognised in his award of the 2019 Senior New Zealander of the Year.
‘‘While I did work for Worksafe, I argued that the government should have a national strategy, but I didn’t get very far,’’ Glass says.
‘‘It struck me as logical given that New Zealand used a lot of asbestos in its construction, and that people are concerned about that nationally.’’
Glass, who is recovering from a stroke, does not expect to see his wish fulfilled, despite asbestosrelated disease being the country’s largest workrelated killer.
More than 170 New Zealanders die each year from diseases related to past asbestos exposure, and every tradesperson is likely to come in contact with it.
Left alone, most asbestos is not a health danger, but when asbestos fibres are released into the air through cutting, sanding, water-blasting or product deterioration, it poses a health threat. Diseases such as the cancer mesothelioma, caused by breathing in asbestos dust, can take decades to appear.
Exposure like Thorn’s was unlikely to cause disease, but mesothelioma can occur even after small levels of exposure to certain types of asbestos.
Workers exposed to the dust over longer periods of time are more likely to fall fatally ill.
There was a brief flurry of concern over asbestos during the early stages of the Christchurch rebuild, but a report by the prime minister’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, concluded the rebuild was unlikely to result in any significant increase in risk to homeowners and occupants of damaged houses, unless they repeatedly performed such work themselves, without taking proper precautions.
Australia is taking a much
stronger line.
The country remembers a bitter fight for justice and compensation against James Hardie, which was dubbed the Killer Company. Australia created the government-funded Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency with the ultimate aim of cleansing the country’s buildings of asbestos, and tracking the health of people exposed to it.
‘‘It’s an unenviable fact that living in Australia means potentially living with asbestos,’’ Eric Abetz, Australia’s employment minister said in 2015, when the agency was set up.
‘‘With up to one in three Australian homes containing asbestos, families doing simple renovation jobs around the house run the risk of exposure without even realising it,’’ he said.
‘‘We have more work to do to raise overall awareness about the dangers of being exposed to asbestos – not just at work, but in our own communities.
‘‘The Australian government strongly believes in the need for a coordinated national approach to tackling asbestos.’’
Recent evidence indicates there is now a third wave of asbestos-related disease caused by nonoccupational exposure associated with home renovations, the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency says.
A national survey in 2016 found a shocking disregard for safety among Australian homeowners, landlords included.
Australia has ratified the International Labour Organisation Asbestos Convention, which requires signatories to effectively ban DIYers from removing ‘‘asbestos from buildings or structures in which asbestos is liable to become airborne’’, limiting such work solely to properly-qualified contractors.
New Zealand, sandwiched between fellow nonsignatories Nepal and Nicaragua, has not ratified the Asbestos Convention.
In New Zealand, DIYers can’t plumb in a toilet, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern found in 2017, but it is legal for a DIYer to remove asbestos, though there are legal requirements that they do it safely.
Two cases from the Tenancy Tribunal in January this year indicate haphazard handling of asbestos in homes is occurring.
In the first, a landlord had work done on a garage where his tenants stored possessions.
Despite being made aware of the tenants’ concerns that the garage wall and ceiling panels contained asbestos, the landlord, and the builder he hired, dismissed the concerns.
The builder told the tribunal that ‘‘he had been trained for asbestos’’, and ‘‘this was definitely not it’’, and that ‘‘it looked different’’, but the tenants paid for a test showing it was.
‘‘Understandably the tenants are now
concerned that they may get affected by some illness at some point in the future,’’ the tribunal ruled.
In the second case a rental property was contaminated by asbestos as a result of DIY.
Brett Pietersen, vice-president of the Demolition and Asbestos Association, said the cost of specialist licensed asbestos removers created a financial incentive for building owners to overlook the presence of asbestos, and reckless builders to oblige.
Pietersen would like to see a national asbestos database established to map its prevalence and reduce the chance of incidents like these occurring.
‘‘This needs urgent attention,’’ he said. ‘‘We need a central database of buildings, and ideally, containing copies of asbestos management plans.’’
Commercial property owners and workplaces must have asbestos management plans for their buildings – including residential rentals – and workplaces where asbestos is likely to be found.
These plans could be compiled into a register, which could be audited for compliance, Pietersen said.
‘‘Despite two years into the new regulations, we are still coming across building owners who are unaware of their obligations to manage asbestos in their buildings.’’
He believed a register, however, would be of interest to property buyers, and to workers, but acknowledges a register the public could access could have an impact on property prices.
‘‘It would need some very careful thought about how that was created, and how that information was used,’’ he said.
Asbestos plans do not have to be revealed to workers, or tenants, just as homeowners who are aware there is asbestos in their homes do not have to reveal it to prospective buyers.
Thorn’s exposure is not a rare occurrence. Glass wrote in 2017 that there were upwards of 22,000 people listed on the nonpublic national Asbestos Exposure Register, operated by Worksafe.
Apart from DIYers, former service people, tradesmen and factory workers are among those exposed at points in their lives.
Worksafe believes instances of exposure is under-reported and many are unlikely to know they were exposed.
New Zealand has not been ignoring asbestos, as the licensing of asbestos specialists, the prosecution of builders not handling asbestos carefully, and the requirements for building asbestos management plans shows.
Large government agencies such as the Defence Force and the Ministry of Education have honed plans to manage asbestos in their buildings.
There have also been some attempts by government departments to lift awareness, in the form of guides such as the Ministry of Health’s Removing asbestos from your home.
Homes built before 1940, and after 1990, are unlikely to contain asbestos products.
It can be found in building materials including vinyl floor tiles, carpet underlay, cement flooring, flues to fireplaces, pipe insulation, ventilators, walls and ceilings, kitchen splashbacks, backing for electrical meter boards, downpipes, fences, garages and sheds, gutters, and roofing tiles.
But Pietersen wants to see New Zealand create an equivalent to Australia’s asbestos agency, though he does not see political interest in doing it.
‘‘It is unusual for one country to learn from the experience of another country; it is even more unusual for a country to learn from the experience of its own past,’’ Glass wrote in a co-authored article two years ago.