For interest. The following extracted from the < alt.home.repair >
news group that covers mainly North American threads.
> >> A Baltimore fire department spokesman says more than a dozen people at
> > >> a Baltimore school have been isolated after broken thermometers
> > >> prompted concerns about the mercury inside.
> > > At a school not far from here, it was discovered the near 100 year old
> > > building had asbestos in the ceilings. So they had an emergency
> > > evacuation and closed the school until it was removed months later. Good
> > > thing they did not wait another 90 minutes to the end of the school day
> > > to send the kids home.
> > Unfortunately this is the kind of sky is falling in stuff that really
> > discredits (and rightly so) these government agencies.
> > Someone I know is replacing one of their business locations with a new
> > building. One of the procedures for tearing down the old small one story
> > building was to get some sort of hazardous materials permit. Some
> > inspector had to be hired and he found that a 5x5' (yes, 25 sq ft)
> > office had floor tiles that "may contain asbestos". So it cost $3,800
> > and delayed the project by two weeks until the proper outfit which was
> > rated to handle the highly dangerous non-friable asbestos could be > > hired.
And then I posted the following.
I think the two parts of the following anecdote connect???? And are somewhat on topic with the foregoing?
My late father born around 1901, grew up in London UK and told me about workers who job it was to paint the luminous paint markings onto WWI aircraft instrument dials, 'luminous' watches etc. It was done by hand; required some artistry and a steady hand. It was the habit of the workers to wet and rotate their brushes between their lips in order to shape the fine pointed ends of their brushes to produce the fine markings. Many years later it was noticed that a significant number of the workers died from various forms of throat, lip and other cancers and it was traced to the small amounts of radioactive luminescent paint that the workers had ingested!
My father, who was of course a child, during that first war died in the late 1960s
A few years ago there was press story about an old building in that same area of London that had had variuos uses (possibly at one point it was tobacco warehouse?) during the last century was being renovated once again. Memory escapes me but it was possibly being upgraded to high end apartments? It was discovered almost accidentally that the floors of the building were highly contaminated with some type of radioactivity. Very expensive to remove and replace apparently. Investigation showed that the building had at one time, back around WWI, been used as a small factory for producing aircraft instruments etc. The radioactive floors were the result of variuos spills/ splashes of luminous paint!
So I wonder? In my mind the two separate stories seemed to connect?
I guess that item "Check for radioactivity" is not on most 'Approved for Occupancy Permit check-lists'?
Have fun. terrry