Most houses built before 1990 are likely to
contain some asbestos. It was a building product used widely back then because it was durable,
fire resistant and a good insulator. Now, of course, it’s banned from use.
Exposed asbestos fibres are a known health risk, but not something where you’ll see
an immediate effect. But don’t panic most asbestos, if it is
well-maintained and coated with paint or sealant, is unlikely to be a problem and the fibres
are usually tightly bound together in cement or some other material.
It’s only when you or someone else disturbs asbestos, through cutting, drilling, sanding,
water blasting, or removing asbestos panels, that the fibres are at risk of becoming airborne
and pose a higher risk to you and your family if they’re breathed in.
This means if you have plumbers, electricians, tilers, painters or the like visiting your
house to complete work or if you’re doing your own home renovations, it’s important
to know where it could be. So where are some places you might find asbestos
lurking in your home? Hopefully, Louie will be able to help answer
that question. Louie’s a former tradie who’s now a Workplace
Health and Safety Queensland inspector. What he doesn’t know about asbestos isn’t worth
knowing! He’s visiting Lauren today to show her where
she might find asbestos in her home and provide some hot tips on how to best manage it.
Hey Louie… How are you today?
How are you Good thanks…
Thanks for coming over No Problems
So this is the house We just recently bought this place so we’re
really excited to get into renovating but got a feeling there might be some asbestos
lurking around though, so we haven’t gone too crazy yet. But we’d really appreciate
your opinion. Sure. Typically for a house built like this
before 1990, the rule of thumb is treat whatever you see here as possibly asbestos. And already
straight up, I can see some fibro sheeting up on your gables. Also your gables at the
front here. And also your soffits or eaves.
Asbestos products can be found in many places in a home, a typical home, starting from the
roof down and the exterior. You’ve got your roof. You’ve got your gutters , your downpipes.
You’ve got your barging on the end . Your gable ends. Exterior sheeting on the walls.
Insulated doors sometimes came out with it packed with insulation.
If there’s asbestos up there, is that going to be a risk?
As long as the fibro sheeting is well maintained, and sealed, it’s no risk to anyone. I guess,
at the end of the day, if you start disturbing it, cutting it, drilling it, that’s when
it becomes a risk to you. Ok, well we do want to do some renovations
so I’ll bring you inside and you can have a look.
Ok, look forward to it!
Most of the people that are most likely to
contract an asbestos-related disease now would be tradies.
The builders, carpenters, electricians, because they're often drilling into things, to put
wiring through, or plumbing the pipes, or they're demolishing houses that they may not
have recognised contain asbestos. People doing roof repairs.
People can even be exposed to asbestos fibres hosing off their roofs, gurney-ing or high
pressure washing. Well it’s not just the tradies that are
at risk here, it’s the home renovator. The do-it-yourselfer. The person who may not be
able to afford to bring a tradie in, quite handy themselves, want to do a little home
project. They’ll take on the work and quite often who helps dad out with the work, could
be even the kids.
And that’s why we’re very concerned to make
sure that people that are working with asbestos, first of all, they recognise it, and secondly,
they take the proper precautions.
Welcome to my home!
Lovely! I’ll show you this little room first. This
is my study. Got a lot of great ideas for this little spot so I’d
really like your opinion as to where you think there's anything I need to be concerned about here.
Yeah, I reckon just coz of the age of the house and just looking at the dimple effect
on your wall sheeting here and the protruding nail, that’s typical of an older type asbestos.
And also your ceilings are the same so … Yeah I can see the nails up on the roof there.
But like anything you do get it tested before you do any work on it but I’d be treating
it as if it were asbestos, definitely by that look there. Other than that it’s all sealed,
so it’s safe the way it is, it’s only when you’ve disturbed it, have you disturbed
the asbestos in any way? One of the things my husband and I did when
we moved in was we put in a whole lot of picture hooks, on that little picture frame over there
was one of the first things we put up and we sort of went a little crazy I guess and
put them up everywhere. Is that something I need to be worried about, have we inadvertently
exposed ourselves in any way with that? Just keep in mind that drilling into asbestos,
there is a degree of risk. It’s a one off exposure so the degree of risk is very minimal
but please keep in mind that there is procedures for drilling asbestos.
The kind of asbestos dust that is harmful to health, is, of a particle size that
you won't see with the naked eye. When you're working with asbestos materials,
if you're wanting to drill it, or sand it you run the risk of creating quite a lot of
fibres, thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of fibres. And those are dispersed
into the air around, where the workers are working.
Asbestos fibres cause a problem in the lung because they're long and thin, they're easily
inhaled, and they're hard to clear from the lung.
And although our bodies can cope with a certain amount of fibres, there comes a point when
your lung can't cope with too much asbestos. Ah, small one-off exposure, our lungs can
deal with. There are three main diseases that asbestos causes.
One is Asbestosis, which is the scarring of
the lung tissue, and that prevents oxygen being absorbed through the lung and into the
bloodstream. The second more serious one is Asbestos Related Lung Cancer.
And the third and most serious disease is Mesothelioma, and that's the cancer of the
lining of the lung. Despite 20, 30 years of research, we still
don't have good treatments for it, and the average life expectancy is still measured
in months, rather than years. We should treat asbestos with caution. We
shouldn't be afraid of it. But we also shouldn't ignore the risk.
Louie one of the things I want to do is just get rid of this wall, and like open up this
space, is that something that my husband and I can do ourselves?
Even if you wanted to remove that one sheet
there, the same precautions are applicable, so it’s gotta be done by the book, the same
risks apply.
If I was an owner of a home or a property and I wanted to renovate or demolish or alter
in some way, shape or form, I would get some advice… and have the property inspected
by a trained professional. They will identify the areas where it will exist and then that
can be recorded. We can even put stickers and notify people that there’s asbestos
on the property. And you quite often will find them in electrical boxes or inside linen
closets or under the sink in kitchens, where a person or a tradesperson may normally go
to conduct their work. That gives the tradies or somebody coming to the property an opportunity
to identify that there is asbestos on the property before they disturb it.
So Louis, this is the master bedroom and one of the things I want to do in this room, is
do some kind of cool feature wall. Maybe a really nice wallpaper here. Is this wall the
same as the other wall in the study? What I’m looking at here is the flat walls
as such. There’s no joins in it like the other room, can’t see any dimple, dimple
look and just the feel of it, it actually feels like gyprock and also
your gyprock cornice up here and possibly your gyprock ceiling as well. So to me, this
has gone through a recent renovation. I’d probably get an electrician in, just to pull
those points off, get a sample behind those points just to confirm it is asbestos free
Hopefully it’s asbestos free because then I can get stuck into this room straight away.
Umm, in through here it’s a bit of a funny room.
I can see straight up, by some of the sheeting
here with the exposed nails and the dimple on some of the sheeting I can see... that
once again, just like the first room we looked at, it would most probably contain asbestos.
The same with your ceilings as well. I noticed also the soffit sheeting, that’s
typical of a fibro asbestos type sheeting. I can see all the holes are actually sealed
with paint so there’s no real issue to you unless there’s going to be new holes drilled
but I can see over here straight up you’ve got some cracking and that’s just from bowing
and stretching over the years. Those cracks are actually sealed with paint so there’s
no risk to yourself but if that was a fresh crack well of course you’d definitely get
that sealed, with paint.
Ok, I wanna show you this funny patch down the end of the room, what do you think about that?
My thoughts straight up is definitely. Like
you got your vinyl on top and that’s your underlay and that’s typical of your 70s
type vinyl that the underlay contained asbestos in that part here. And there’s a high concentration
of asbestos in there, probably 70 to 80 percent of the crisotile asbestos in there. So with
that type of product there, if we were going to remove it by stripping it, you’d need
a licensed asbestos removalist, to remove that there.
Even that tiny little patch? Definitely, don’t put yourself at risk.
We can take a sample just to confirm that as well.
Ok…This is the bathroom. Again this is a sort of funny room for me because the walls
are like a Melamine sort of material With this lammy type panel sheeting, that
is asbestos free. Same with this ceiling, however, what’s
behind it, I don’t know, at the moment here, the way it is, it’s definitely safe. But
if you go through another reno, just be aware of what could be behind the sheeting.
Also in cupboards, there’s also surprises. A lot of times when you do renovations, a
lot of people just leave that cupboard area as is so
Can you see the timber? That’s an MDF type timber sheeting which contains no asbestos.
But I don’t know what’s behind that wall of sheeting so just take precautions there.
This is the other Lino situation I guess. I really want to rip it up, it’s ugly. But
again, we weren’t really sure if it was something that we should be doing straight
away. What are your thoughts?
If you don't mind me pulling this strip up? No that’s fine.
As you can see there’s this one layer of vinyl here, and pulling it straight
up, it’s like a rubber back. So, out of all the samples that I’ve taken of this
type of vinyl, they generally come back asbestos free.
But, as you can see, underneath, we’ve got
another layer of vinyl and also the underlay and any of those two could possibly contain
asbestos. So, the precaution being, treat that as asbestos, or get a sample taken of
it. that’s a really good tip because just by
looking at it, if I’d assumed that it was ok, I would’ve just ripped it up not thinking
there would be other layers underneath If after the asbestos removal project is over
and you find that there’s some asbestos dust or suspicious dust left over. One has
to be careful too in the cleanup that you don’t just use any old vacuum cleaner. A
household vacuum cleaner isn’t designed for cleaning up hazardous materials, especially
asbestos. Don’t sweep it either. That’ll only create
more dust and it’ll spread throughout the house. Get some disposable rags, wet them
down and wet-wipe it up. And don’t forget, dispose of the rags as contaminated waste.
Hey Louie, I wanna show you our outdoor fencing through here. Is this something we need to
be concerned about? Ah, definitely Lauren, this is a profile called
super 6. Super 6 can pit because it’s not sealed so with hail, rain, wind, sun, over
time it starts to deteriorate and delaminate so at the end of the day, it is a good thing
to seal it. Well, that’s good because we’ve actually
sealed from the outside as well so I can show you that.
What about this little bit here? A truck actually backed into this. It totally wasn’t me but
is that something I need to be worried about? There is some bare fibres that are exposed.
The best thing you can do here Lauren is paint over that whole area, and that seals it…
Asbestos roofs, Super-6 roofing as they call it, and fences are a particular high risk
they’ve been subject to the elements over many years.
You get a gurney or borrow a gurney for the
weekend or rent one for the weekend and you start blasting off the roof…
The sand and cement that bonds the asbestos fibres within it
have been washed out so now you’ve got loose fibres.
Then fibres are being spread all over the neighbourhood .
Well Lauren, here’s some more, and what this is here is just some fibro packing and
because of the age of the building, we’d have to suspect some asbestos as well, but
having a look at it as you can see it’s all sealed….
It’s all very daunting, having so much asbestos in my home.
There’s no need to be worried, everything we’ve looked at, is sealed and safe, there’s
no risks of exposure of asbestos fibres into the air. There is one thing we will look at
is that lino which I’ll take a sample away for analysis, and I’ll get back to you on
that but everything we’ve looked at today is fine
I see people working on properties, doing renovations, little projects.
I see people not taking the precautions. Not having the appropriate PPE. Using power tools,
angle grinders. I’ve even seen people doing interior strip-outs of homes and throwing
the stuff on the front lawn for the kids to clean up or whatever later.
No matter whether you’re a homeowner doing a do-it-yourself project or a tradie, if you’re
doing any renovations on a property that has asbestos or you suspect has asbestos, you’ve
got to take precautions. I don’t think too many people take it serious
until they actually know somebody they’ve lost or it affects themselves. That is all
too late. It may only take a couple of minutes now to
drill a hole or knock out a wall, but really, is the risk worth it?
The safest way to manage asbestos is knowing where it’s located.
If you’re removing it then get a licensed professional to do the job, or if it’s minor
maintenance, then make sure you or the contractor in your house is using safe work procedures
and the right equipment. Definitely don’t break up asbestos sheets
and keep it wet down and wrapped in thick plastic until it can be safely disposed of.
you don’t want it to affect the health of your own family or that of your neighbours.
Disposing of asbestos correctly is really important too. The first port of call should
be to contact your local council for advice. If you’re concerned about work completed
by a contractor on asbestos at your place, then contact Workplace Health and Safety Queensland
for more help. Often it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie….
If asbestos doesn’t need to be disturbed, then don’t touch it.
Visit the Queensland Government website for more information: www.qld.gov.au/asbestos