Staff and pupils dying from asbestos in schools

[nobodysdaughternow]

I am completely shocked to discover I have potentially sent two of my children to schools which could potentially kill them.

The Times today detailed the story of Chris Willis diagnosed with mesothelioma (a cancer caused by inhaling asbestos fibres) at 29 years old. He died last year at 34.

Newcastle City Council paid substantial damages to Chris for his exposure to asbestos, which he believed happened at Kenton School between 2000 and 2007.

Schools with asbestos are told not to publish asbestos management plans.

10,000 teachers, pupils and staff who have died from asbestos exposure at schools in the past four decades.

If your child goes to a 'block built' school with asbestos, which is at or past it's design life expectancy, then they are at risk.

I naively believed asbestos exposure ended with my grandparents generation. I am very, very angry.

My middle ds went to a special school which was literally crumbling. It was an appalling school and when my son was distressed, he would throw himself at the particleboard wall which I now know may well have contained asbestos.

I didn't have a choice where I sent my kids to school. I thought poor Ofsted's were my biggest worry.

Aibu to ask if you know about the danger to teachers, staff and pupils from asbestos?

Yes and declining all the time. They will be exposed years ago and working in factories making the stuff, or their partners/parents would have.
im not saying it’s ok but ripping it all out of schools is much much much more dangerous!

@NotmyRLname there are around 2700 new mesothelioma patients diagnosed per year. And yes it is a rare cancer, but the prognosis is particularly grim, and it is a cancer that could be avoided.

Our school has asbestos. It's checked regularly and is safe as long as it isn't disturbed and the fibres are circulated. It's not a secret as contractors need to know it's there.

@Wednesdayonline but everyone losing their minds and ripping it out is the greater danger. If all schools decided to do it it will be worse than leaving it undisturbed.
statistically the people suffering are people who worked with it directly likely for years or their partners including people employed to rip it out now.. It’s banned now and it worries me that schools will start disturbing it all and then we really will have issues.

You do realise that schools hire actual contractors in to do it? The site manager doesn’t just decide to get his crowbar out one day? As I said up thread, our school had some removed as it was in danger of becoming unstable. It was done in the summer holidays, and staff weren’t allowed to be on site once they actually started doing it. I was there when they arrived to set up as my classroom was in the block they were treating and I needed some resources. It was like a forensic murder scene. Huge plastic tents, hazmat suits, the lot. Schools aren’t exactly just “ripping it out” themselves. 🙄

True, ripping it out without correct procedure is madness. But really the safest thing that could be done is schools and hospitals having all asbestos removed by trained professionals with correct equipment. This represents a lower risk than leaving it in place. Sadly I can't see this being done simply because of the cost :(

@Tygertiger it’s a very fine dust. theres still a risk. And I wasn’t saying they aren’t being careful now. I’m saying cases with it now would have been exposed decades ago when everyone was having it taken out or ripping out their own artex in their homes. Coming from a family of surveyors I would be more comfortable to have it left there undisturbed and managed is all im saying.

Have you read the article? It says a spike is expected.

This really scares me! As I'm sure it does you all too. I haven't read all the posts.

Does anyone know if we can see our schools asbestos surveys? Our kids are in these buildings a lot of the time! Our school is also a 1960s school old and worn down.

@Piggywaspushed yes because in the 90s everyone freaked out about it and started disturbing it all. There will definitely be spikes coming and it will be because it’s being disturbed.

Or because the school estate is crumbling...

When you mention asbestos to most people, they tend to think it was a problem of the past that’s been dealt with. When you tell them it’s still all around us, they’re surprised. When you tell them it’s the UK’s biggest work-related killer, they’re shocked. And when you tell them it’s in most of our schools, they tend to become worried.”
“A tragedy is unfolding as we watch,” said Professor Kevin Bampton, chief executive of the British Occupational Hygiene Society, the leading charity on asbestos control. “We are currently sowing the seeds of a spike in cancer that will hit us in 30 to 40 years if we don’t act now. There is a perception that asbestos is a thing of the past, but it isn’t.”

I worked for a housing association and used to publish the leaflets in asbestos in homes

And how high was the figure for the HA you worked for

Yes sadly asbestos materials do degrade over time. So it isn't just that it is disturbed, it can literally start crumbling etc.

I work in a building that is used by the public. We have to have an asbestos inspection every ten years, costing a few £1000s for our insurance.
The irony is the building has no asbestos in it. There never has been any asbestos in it. This seems a little overkill to me.

Asbestos is pretty widespread. The garages round here (built in the 70s) have asbestos in them. Many schools do, but also other public buildings, the local library, for example, shops etc. How do they know that 250 deaths a year (out of around 2500 deaths from asbestos) are directly from schools? I mean, if you have someone whose job was clearing asbestos from schools you can probably hypothesise it was probably from that, but a pupil? Even a teacher I don't think you could conclude that with certainty.
Every one of us will have had contact with multiple sources over the years. It's a bit like saying that a specific cigarette you smoked in August 1999, must have been the cause of lung cancer.

And 10 000 over 40 years is fairly small numbers in the grand scheme of things.
Put it this way: the 8 days between 18/1/2021 and 26/1/2021 there were 10 000 deaths from covid.

Mesothelioma is the UK's biggest work related killer.

I am interested in the people on this thread popping up , claiming to have more knowledge than the cited experts in the article.

@MargaretThursday it is scary that it is in schools, because the thought of children being exposed is horrific. But really it's less an issue that's it is in schools, and more an issue that it is so widespread that a person might not know where they were specifically exposed. But surely at a minimum it should be removed from public buildings, schools etc, considering it presents such a risk. Why put children at risk when it could just be removed and the risk to them is gone.
And it is different to smoking in that just one single fibre of asbestos could cause cancer. Someone might knock something against an asbestos containing ceiling, breathe in one fibre of asbestos from it, and that is it for them.

When I left one school I was advised by an ex colleague to have a chest XRay, because pipe cladding in a store room that we used had asbestos in the insulation and it had turned dusty. That X ray was to show the state of my lungs at that time. That was a 1960s secondary school.

In the article on it The Times published a few weeks ago it said that education and healthcare workers were getting asbestos related cancer at twice the rate of the general population. Our buildings are crumbling, hospitals and schools are in a shocking state. I work in a 1970s building, almost certainly full of asbestos, the steel frame has started creaking when there's a strong wind. They've attached fairly new extensions to either end of it so there's no chance of the rooms I'm in getting torn down anytime soon. No one has ever mentioned asbestos, will there be a survey somewhere?

The message just isn’t getting out there that school buildings across the uk are now unsafe because the funding meant to manage / rebuild them was scrapped in 2010.

And that the Tories voted down a bill in May this year and to publish which schools were officially ‘unsafe’.

Asbestos is just one way in which school buildings are unsafe. And the asbestos is newly ‘disturbed’ because the buildings are crumbling.

What is it going to take for people to realise how bad the situation with school buildings is?

@wonderstuff I think if they've added extensions on, they usually do asbestos surveys before any work is carried out. There could be older ones as well from when other work was done. You may be able to access these under a FOI request but I'm not 100% sure.

What is it going to take for people to realise how bad the situation with school buildings is?

I dunno, I posted in December about the risk of schools collapsing being very likely, and the thread got barely any replies.

Until a school actually collapses and kills someone (there have been collapses that have thankfully not caused deaths), people are just ignoring it. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4703940-risk-of-school-buildings-in-england-collapsing-upgraded-to-very-likely

One of the walls in our playground was in a dreadful state and looked about to crumble. It was reported frequently but nothing was ever done. Unfortunately it took the death of a girl in an Edinburgh school for the council to take notice. The very next day the council sent people out to inspect our wall and cordoned it off until it was repaired.
Despite this initial knee jerk there has been no improvement in the long term maintenance or repairs of our buildings.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/girl-12-dies-after-collapse-of-changing-room-wall-inside-liberton-high-school-in-edinburgh-9228001.html

I think we need to give a bit of thought to the how, where and when with stats about deaths at work.

When I had responsibility for H&S and risk assessments ten years ago the focus was on driving at/for work. That's because RTCs are a thing that happens on the job and kills people while they're 'in harness'. I was regularly hassled over lack of control measures for a few hundred miles a year when people drove to meetings - or to the station/airport to get to London once a month.

That's a very different thing to dying at 80+ with Mesothelioma on your death certificate because of somewhere you worked in the seventies. I say that as somebody who has notes of exposure to it in a government building c1990 when I was 30 on my records. Father of a friend died of it last year; it was in an office he worked in before he retired in 1985.

Friend of my parents who lived next door but one in the sixties and worked for Turner and Newall died of what we then called Asbestosis within months of getting his pension. His wife, long disabled by Polio, died of it too shortly after he did; fibres came home on his work suit etc.

Not, even for a minute, saying this stuff does not matter. If there's a current risk, whether in schools or any other older buildings where people live or work it needs to be sorted tomorrow if not sooner. Money no object.

But exposure over a lifetime of work that ceased on retirall 30 years ago has to be seen in context.

Oh that definitely makes it ok then that '10,000 in 40 years is an absolute tiny amount '. You try watching your parent be crushed physically and mentally, fade away and die an absolutely horrible, premature death because they went to work in a school that had bits of asbestos crumbling off. Don't you think their lives mattered?

Some of the whataboutery on this thread is making my eyes roll right back 🙄 it must be wonderful to live in your heads and believe schools have this under control and are managing it effectively. They don't, and they aren't.