Asbestos worry

[monkeyadja]

Hello everyone

I feel like I’m in a bit of a nightmare and don’t know how to move on.

We have an air raid shelter underneath our house (access via a latch in our garden) and all went down to look at it at the weekend as part of a school project.

My son loved it down there as there was a lot to explore, and after he came up and it was all closed off again, my husband showed me some photos he’d taken. One of them showed our names having been etched by my husband into the shelter wall (using a screw driver). I am now horrified and so frightened because we don’t know what the wall in the shelter was made from and I’m scared he has unwittingly exposed my son to asbestos fibres (he was down there whilst my husband was scratching in our names).

I literally can hardly function I am so worried, any advice would be much appreciated.

If it was an Anderson type structure I thought they were made out of sheets of corrugated iron pinned together.
I understand your worry though.

@monkeyadja I hope you're feeling better. That panic is so awful (and almost always way out of proportion). So, even if it was asbestos, in my understanding, the kind of asbestos used in air raid shelters (cement bound, white asbestos) is not that bad, and even if your DH was scratching it, it wouldn't have released much. Most people will have had some level of asbestos exposure. Think about all the kids off playing who-knew-where in old buildings in the past. One-off, casual exposure like this would, I imagine, be dwarfed as a risk by SO many other things in life.