Harmless, until some contractor accidently disturbs it, and people have to have their home vacated (just happened to a friend of mine).
That story might just be an anecdote, but the US has really normalized the "it's ok to live with poison, just don't awaken it". Same with lead pipes, lead paint, etc.
Government remediation is long overdue. This is a price we pay as a society, we should treat it as a society.
If it's dangerously unknown to the contractor, chances are inhabitants won't know better. The contractor only exposed for a few hours, inhabitants live there.
Average construction zone concentrations of ACM during demolition hover around 1fcc. It can be higher for some specific cases (zonolite or high concentration asbestos insulation) but for general things like contaminated drywall, duct wrapping etc it is generally low. This is during actual demolition of ACM mind you, not just disturbing a little drywall here and there.
When disturbance is completed, concentrations fall of with the air exchange rate and clear usually with 24-48 hours back to background levels.
Diluting that by the volume of the entire building not under construction would generally put that at or below the 0.1fcc OSHA limit without PP. The OSHA limits assume 1 extra cancer death/300 workers for someone with maximum exposure limits for 8 hours per day, 250 days / year for 30 years.
That is to say… A contractor spending a day kicking up asbestos results in 1/7500th ish of the dose required to cause an excess of 1/300 deaths.
And this assumes that acute low exposures hold the same linear dose response rate as high dosage chronic exposure. That is a controversial assumption in the literature.
My information is based on reading over 50 asbestos related journal articles, EPA and OSHA policy documents etc.
From all the informarion available, it’s just not that big a deal for the average building occupant.
This is a community based out of San Francisco, the once city levelled by the San Andreas Fault. Accepting low probability dangers to reduce costs is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff.
idk "it's in a bucket forever" sounds like a pretty good remediation strategy to me. dollar-for-dollar that government money probably has more impactful things to do. eg plastering public spaces in cities with bollards (see the awful awful west portal crash)
That story might just be an anecdote, but the US has really normalized the "it's ok to live with poison, just don't awaken it". Same with lead pipes, lead paint, etc.
Government remediation is long overdue. This is a price we pay as a society, we should treat it as a society.