Asbestos in many schools: Not a hazard if contained

By Debra Ann Vance, Kentucky Post

The asbestos scare that closed Latonia Elementary School for a second day today underscores a health risk that many public schools still face.

Of the state's 3,800 school buildings, 3,000 contain the cancer-causing substance, said Parker Moore, manager of the state's Division for Air Quality's special program branch.

Once a common insulating material, asbestos often is found in older buildings and poses little problem unless disturbed. As long as asbestos isn't friable - that is, crumbled or reduced to powder by hand - then its risk is minimal.

"Asbestos products in themselves are not hazardous," Moore said.

"The problem arises when those materials are mishandled and causes fibers to go out into the air that we breath. You just don't want to crumble asbestos up. That will cause it to get out into the air we breath. That's the problem with asbestos, it's bad if we breathe it."

Covington school officials agreed to send Latonia Elementary students home Wednesday and keep them home again today after workers installing a computer line for Internet access stirred up asbestos in a ceiling.

The problem arose during work Tuesday night. School district officials first decided the disturbed area could be sealed off and classes could proceed on schedule. But when parents arrived Wednesday morning and saw warning signs posted, they complained. Some took their children back home. By 10 a.m., Principal Connie Ryle had called an assembly and called off classes for the rest of the day for at the school of 550 students.

Since the late 1980s, the state and federal Environmental Protection Agency pushed schools to identify asbestos hazards and establish a plan to control them if they are found. The EPA required asbestos to either be removed, encapsulated or isolated.

"The idea with this requirement was not for everybody to panic and go and tear out asbestos right away, but instead to manage any asbestos that they had in their schools," Moore said.

Covington Superintendent James Kemp said Rainbow - a company that exclusively cleans up asbestos - has been hired to clean up the dust at Latonia Elementary.

School officials also have scheduled a community meeting for 3:30 p.m. today in the school gym. The school's environmental management consultant will be on hand to explain to parents the results of tests done on the dust.

"This will be our opportunity to give them a lot of information, and for any fears they have, this will give us the opportunity to allay those fears," Kemp said.

"There's been a lot of misinformation and a lot of confusion."

Wiring for the Internet, which began this summer, is being done at night. A custodian noticed dust from the area the contractor was working on Tuesday night and informed school officials. About 10 p.m. Tuesday school officials and the district's environmental specialist went to examine the substance.

They then decided to seal eight rooms - six upstairs and two downstairs - because they found some dust "that looked suspicious," Kemp said.

"We didn't know what it was," Kemp said.

Proper procedure was followed in sealing the rooms, said Miley Twyman, supervisor of the Division for Air Quality's office in Florence.

The district also followed its asbestos management plan when preparing for the wiring, Kemp said.

The school knew it had some asbestos in the ceiling, which the district had previously identified and isolated according to federal regulations. Before the wiring began, portions of the ceiling where the contractor was do the wiring work were removed whether it contained asbestos or not, Kemp said.

Asbestos used in old buildings
Asbestos, which was a common building material from 1930s through the 1960s, is found in floor tile, insulation, around pipes and ceilings.

Kentucky schools are required to have an environmental specialist conduct asbestos surveys of their buildings. They also must keep an asbestos plan on hand.

Some schools spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1980s to remove asbestos.

State officials estimate that two-thirds of the schools in Northern Kentucky contain asbestos.

Newer schools buildings aren't built with asbestos materials. When districts renovate older buildings, asbestos is generally removed.

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