Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 28, 1993 TAG: 9403180052
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By REED IRVINE and JOSEPH C. GOULDEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Radio stations warned people to keep away from the bridge, and consumer activists warned citizens to pull down their windows and even take showers if they felt that any of the asbestos might have blown off the bridge and contaminated them. Motorists had to take lengthy detours around San Francisco Bay to get to their jobs.
But was this panic necessary? During the day, a San Francisco radio talk-show called a leading federal asbestos expert. "What should we do?" this reporter asked excitedly. The expert replied, "Bring out the fire hoses and wash the mess into the bay and go about your business. This asbestos spill is about as dangerous as sunshine. It isn't going to hurt anyone."
His answer startled the radio reporter. She asked, in a voice that he said seemed gripped with terror, "But that would cause cancer!"
The expert laughed. The rock formations at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, he explained, have already put far more asbestos into its waters than could come from the small amount of spilled construction debris. Any dangers, he said, were so minuscule as to be nonexistent. He repeated: San Francisco residents faced far more danger trying to commute on unknown routes than from the asbestos spill.
Because of a technical glitch, the asbestos expert never got on the air, and some lanes on the bridge were closed until after midnight, with one Highway Patrol officer calling the traffic mess "kind of a commuter's nightmare.''
What a great example of how the media don't do their job. The fact is that casual exposure to small amounts of asbestos poses no risk to human health. This has been stated time and again by objective scientists who have studied the subject.
Dr. Malcolm Ross of the U.S. Geological Survey, a former president of the Mineralogical Society of America, has been studying asbestos since 1971, when a scare arose over the possible adverse health effects of chrysotile asbestos in dust from a quarry in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Washington television stations introduced their stories with the skull-and-crossbones symbol.
Given the local panic, Ross wondered what could happen on the national level. He found extreme differences between the health effects of the three major types of asbestos: chrysotile, amosite and crocidolite. He found that chrysotile, the type most often found in schools and other buildings, poses no health risk. He began arguing this view in the federal government in the 1970s and published numerous papers on asbestos. He argued that a proposed asbestos-abatement program for schools not only would be costly, but also would release asbestos into the environment that was not there before.
Ross won the Interior Department's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, for his work on asbestos. But Congress ignored his sound science and mandated the abatement program. As Ross told the journal Nonrenewable Resources recently, "Since the [abatement] program started in 1985, well over $50 billion has been spent to remove asbestos from schools and other buildings. In 1992, asbestos abatement cost the nation nearly $9 billion, an amount as large as the 1992 budget for the U.S. National Institutes of Health."
In June 1990, William Reilly, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, reversed government policy on asbestos, stating that it was usually unnecessary to remove asbestos from buildings. Nonetheless, our media - and many public officials - continue to go into a frenzy at the sound of the word "asbestos."
The San Francisco Bay Bridge scare was not unique. Last August in New York City, school officials found that some asbestos, supposed to have been removed, remained in school buildings. The media whooped up a scare that forced officials to delay school openings for two weeks.
The media have helped perpetuate the fear of asbestos. The cost has been enormous in money and increased risks. Asbestos on the Bay Bridge posed no threat, but the stress and extra driving caused by the closure of the bridge increased the risk of death and injuries for thousands.
Reed Irvine and Joseph C. Goulden are, respectively, chairman and director of television analysis for Accuracy in Media, a Washington-based media-monitoring organization.
by CNB