Asbestos In Public Buildings

The ongoing risks of asbestos building materials used in public buildings.

A retired nurse in the United Kingdom has filed a lawsuit against the Northern Ireland-based Belfast Health Trust, claiming that she developed mesothelioma after being exposed to asbestos while working at the Royal Victoria Hospital. 

According to the BBC, the plaintiff, Monica Johnston, was an employee at Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for almost 50 years. In January of 2023, after her retirement, she was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a life-threatening cancer often caused by working with or living around asbestos. 

Legacy Asbestos is a Global Problem

In both the United States and in the United Kingdom, people who are treated for asbestos-related illnesses are typically older adults who worked in certain blue-collar professions at any point up until the early 1980s. 

Johnston, 66, said that receiving a mesothelioma diagnosis “was like a bomb [being] dropped on my family”; nursing, as an occupation, has never been associated with an unusually high risk for on-the-job asbestos exposure. 

“I kept thinking, ‘How could this happen?’ I’ve only ever worked as a nurse,” Johnston told the BBC. “It has changed our lives forever.” 

However, Johnston had lived on-site in the nursing quarter at Royal Victoria Hospital, which had been constructed in the early 1950s, near the peak of global asbestos production and use. 

Later work on the site, as recently as 2015, included asbestos removal and abatement efforts.

Johnston’s story, while tragic, isn’t necessarily an anomaly: on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, many American schools, hospitals, and other public buildings remain contaminated by potentially hazardous amounts of asbestos. 

Understanding Asbestos

We know today that asbestos is a carcinogen: it can cause chronic conditions and serious illness, including cancers like Johnston’s mesothelioma. 

Asbestos, however, isn’t a potent chemical or an artificial compound. It is, instead, a naturally-occurring mineral that can be found in relative abundance in many different parts of the world. 

Asbestos, in fact, has very legitimate uses. Aside from being practically fireproof, it is inherently strong and durable. Asbestos is also resistant to both corrosion and electrical currents, yet is so malleable that it can be reduced to fiber and baked or woven into any material imaginable. 

Not only is asbestos useful, but it was relatively inexpensive and easy to obtain, too. 

In the past, this wasn’t the case. Asbestos was once so scarce that, in Medieval Europe, it was attributed near-mythical origins; some thought it was shorn from the fur of fire-breathing salamanders. The later Industrial Revolution brought a change in thinking, along with the technology and trade infrastructure needed to make asbestos an affordable commodity.

Asbestos’s strength and fire-resilient qualities made it attractive to industrialists. Between the late 1800s and the early 1970s, asbestos production increased, surging and skyrocketing in the decades following World War II. 

Eventually, it is use was banned in the United Kingdom and restricted in the United States. 

But, in both countries, asbestos contamination remains widespread, affecting tens of millions of structures and the hundreds of millions of people who have, at some point, lived or worked around asbestos. 

Asbestos in Public Buildings

The Royal Victoria Hospital is scarcely alone in its continuing struggle with asbestos contamination. In the United States and in the United Kingdom, most buildings built before or during the 1970s are presumed to contain at least some amount of asbestos. 

Since it was inexpensive and durable and fireproof, asbestos was a preferred material in the construction of public buildings like hospitals and schools. But, though governments were willing to regulate asbestos, they could not practicably order the asbestos industry to abate or remove every asbestos-based product ever sold. 

In the United States, many government agencies and public bodies took measures to remove asbestos from their buildings. However, in many cases, asbestos that was hidden away in boiler rooms or airducts or floor tile or drywall was determined not to pose enough risk to warrant removal. It was, instead, allowed to remain in place until degraded and unsafe. 

Nearly every building constructed before the 1980s contained asbestos materials. (Unfortunately, many still do.)

The scale of residual asbestos contamination is immense. Over the course of the past year alone: 

• A public library in New Jersey was closed after asbestos was found inside.
• A public school in Philadelphia announced that it would close for an entire year over asbestos-related concerns.
• An Iowa school district was fined $70,000 after it failed to warn employees not to enter an asbestos-contaminated building that had been ordered evacuated by state regulators. 
• The Cayuga County Office Building in Upstate New York, already under repair, was found contaminated with significant quantities of vermiculite asbestos. 
• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined an Illinois company nearly $400,000 after it allegedly exposed employees to asbestos during the demolition of an eight-story hospital. 

The scale and scope of residual asbestos contamination has tragic implications—not only does asbestos continue to harm those who work in and visit affected buildings, but each school closure, renovation, and fine comes only after generations of employees have been subjected to unsafe working conditions. 

Asbestos fibers become most dangerous when they are airborne, usually from damaged or exposed asbestos-containing materials.

Today, asbestos-containing materials pose little hazard if they are left undisturbed. However, almost any substantive repair or construction work can dislodge remnant asbestos fiber. Once airborne, these microscopic fibers are easily inhaled and ingested. From the throat, they can make their way into pleural lining of the lungs. Unremovable, asbestos fiber can scar tissue, traverse the bloodstream to other organs, and trigger the genetic mutations that give rise to cancer.

Asbestos is Regulated, But the Asbestos Industry Continues to Avoid Accountability

Monica Johnston’s lawsuit tells a story that is, unfortunately, anything but unusual: receiving a life-altering diagnosis, unexpected, and caused by asbestos exposure that had likely occurred decades in the past. 

“Even as an experienced nurse, I had never heard of [mesothelioma], and the doctor explained that the only way you can get it is by coming into contact with asbestos,” Johnston told the BBC. “There was nothing in my childhood, my family, or their work that connected me to asbestos; the only possible exposure was through my own work.” 

Others have filed similar claims against United Kingdom-based health trusts, with shipbuilders constituting the largest contingent of individual litigants. 

In the United States, courts of all levels have repeatedly ruled that employees have a right to remain safe and aware of risk. Historically, there is now overwhelming evidence that the asbestos industry knew that its products were dangerous decades before almost anyone—but, instead of informing workers and warning the public, actively sought to suppress any information that could affect its revenue and profitability. 

Asbestos companies left a tragedy in their wake.

After the first wave of asbestos litigation in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these same companies were forced to file for bankruptcy. As a condition of their bankruptcy, some were ordered to establish special trusts for all potential claimants who had been hurt by the industry’s products and practices. It is, however, difficult for many former workers to determine how, when, and where they were exposed, leaving full accountability elu