I’m a geologist, among other things. That’s also how I know that asbestos is not invisible and that it doesn’t have a smell. You can’t remove invisible asbestos; that only exists in some people’s imagination.
I remember sitting in an office at the Westergasfabriek while the terrain was being remediated. We were talking about the cyanide pollution on the site. The guy I was talking with clearly knew that I knew what’s what because when someone came in and hesitated, he got the nod. They’d found an asbestos pipe. It was under water.
Btw, some cardboard pipes look like asbestos, but aren’t.
(There was a major panic at the Westergasfabriek one summer day, when the sunshine caused the release of actual cyanide gas. I missed it. I think I was in the States at the time. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259841685_Living_with_cyanide/ Cyanide and manufactured gas plants or MGPs go hand in hand, but people were very sensitive about it.)
My dad had a cooling facility that was clad with Eternit plates sheets (siding, cladding). I remember that the plates sheets were cut into shape on site. At our home. We didn’t know much about asbestos yet in these days, so I doubt that protective measures were taken.
I’m sure I would have remembered, you see. There is a photo of the huge garage being built, years earlier, with me standing there in a red-and-white knitted – or crocheted – dress, sticking my nose into everything, wanting to know what was going on. I was what? 2, or 3? That curiosity is also how I once burned my hand. My dad was showing an uncle how well the fire was going in the wood stove in the kitchen and I wanted to see what was going on and put my hand on the stove surface to prop myself up so that I could see for myself.
I was born with a great deal of scientific curiosity. I observe. I analyze. I’ve always asked questions. Why this, why that? My dentist of many years sometimes had to laugh because I kept asking questions to which he didn’t always know the answer. To me, that is part of the fun in life. Finding out how stuff works. Finding out what is going on.
To come back to asbestos and Eternit, which some people might freak out about… there is a lot of cancer in my family on my mother’s side, but it’s all very different cancers. There’s no heart disease, only some high blood pressure, and no dementia. One uncle had a fatal stroke, I think, and another one had or has Parkinson’s, both on my dad’s side. Health-wise, our family is truly blessed. None of the “youngsters” have a huge chance of getting anything specific. We are all going to die eventually, but in our family, we have a lot of control over how healthy we are, because of the choices we are free to make and because no genes are destined to mess things up for all of us.
Some of us, in our family, have a negligible deformation in our spine. I have it too. It comes from my mother’s side.
I’ve worked with toxic substances (bromoform and osmium tetroxide) as well as with very hot acids in the lab. I’ve had training for how to deal with radioactive substances in the lab, both in the US and in the UK. Asbestos does not freak me out, invisible or real.
