
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 17, 1994                   TAG: 9401260015
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BOB BAIRD
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COLD FUZZIES

I HAVE a nice, fuzzy mineral specimen on a shelf in my office. When people come in, I ask them to guess what it is. It's interesting to see the reactions of different people when they encounter a real piece of deadly asbestos. It's hard for some people to believe that something so evil isn't man-made, but that Mother Earth makes it herself. It was even funnier when I was at Virginia Tech to see my geology students jump back when I told them what it was.

Although I have a good time with my specimen of asbestos, the tremendous expenditure of funds caused by governmental knee-jerk reactions to environmentalist claims is not at all humorous. The opening day of New York City schools was delayed last fall because it was discovered that the contractor supposed to have removed asbestos from the schools had not. In Richmond, asbestos encountered during renovation of a state office building is responsible for millions of dollars in cost overruns.

When I was at Virginia Tech, someone determined that material on the ceilings in the geology building contained 20 percent asbestos. And for two good reasons: First, it served as a fire retardant. Second, it helped deaden echoes and improve acoustics. Small roof leaks had caused minor detachment from some ceilings. Although minute amounts of asbestos were found on the ductwork, tests found no airborne asbestos fibers. A common-sense solution would have been simply to coat the material with sealant to stabilize it, and patch the leaky roof.

But common sense, as they say, is not so common. Instead, total, abject panic, where the knees knock together, the body freezes into immobilization, and the mind goes blank, set in at Virginia Tech. You might say that they got the "cold fuzzies." The "solution" was to spend more than $1 million dollars on two stairwells and a couple of rooms to remove the asbestos and "save" the students.

The removal process was itself such a Laurel and Hardy exercise that it could serve as a model of the "reinvention of government." Furniture was carted off to hazardous-waste dumps in case some of it harbored a fiber or two of asbestos. The rooms and halls were cordoned off and sealed with plastic. This done, a vacuum was applied to the room, and "specially trained" workers in moonsuits were sent in to remove the deadly plague.

What they did was stir up the asbestos more efficiently than anything else could have. One person on the floor below the asbestos "removal" had a stream of asbestos-laden water drip through the ceiling into his computer. He did not report this deadly occurrence because he did not wish his computer to be confiscated as hazardous waste.

Repeat this lunacy for thousands of school buildings nationwide, and you understand just one reason why so little education results from the high taxes supposedly going to finance that education. Parents are scared silly by environmentalist rhetoric and most, having no background to evaluate the facts for themselves, end up supporting calls for extravagant expenditures to remove the asbestos to "save the children."

But do the facts justify the mindless hysteria and tremendous expenditures? Hardly. There are principally two forms of asbestos, a long-fiber and a short-fiber variety. The short variety, two ten-thousandths of an inch or less, is implicated in some lung cancers. Only 5 percent of asbestos is the short-fiber variety.

A few asbestos fibers present no problem because only a small proportion ever reaches the lungs. Most are trapped by nose hairs or mucous membranes and eliminated when you blow your nose or swallow. Fibers reaching the lungs are coated with protein and rendered harmless. Only when high concentrations are inhaled over an extended time are the body's natural defense mechanisms overwhelmed. Even so-called asbestos-related lung cancer usually occurs only in conjunction with cigarette smoking.

Asbestos is responsible for about five cancer deaths a year in the United States, hardly justifying efforts to remove it. Only those who have been struck by lightning at least three times should worry about asbestos because the average person's risk of asbestos-related cancer is one-third that of getting struck by lightning!

So the fact that asbestos is present means very little. In nearly every instance, asbestos could simply be left alone or stabilized by a sealant without the need to resort to costly removal. Only an Algore would expect anything more than that.

\ Bob Baird, former senior geologist for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and a onetime visiting assistant professor of geology at Virginia Tech, is senior project manager for GES Environmental Inc. in Richmond.

by CNB