Better safe than sorry
By Michael Halliwell
M. Eng., EP, P.Eng., Senior Environmental Engineer, Thurber Engineering Ltd.
As an environmental engineer, my life deals with looking for things that many clients hope I don鈥檛 find. Although my job involves soil and groundwater a majority of the time, I am also involved in radon and hazardous building materials assessments. Generally speaking, my job is not what most people think of when they find out I鈥檓 an engineer.
I recently had a client come to us for an assessment of five gas sites before the infrastructure was removed and the sites were decommissioned. These sites were in rural locations and, for a couple of them, the comments we received were, 鈥淥h, there鈥檚 nothing there, so you probably won鈥檛 have to do anything with them.鈥 Looking at the information provided, I could understand why the client thought so. There wasn鈥檛 much infrastructure left there.
Still, regardless of the site, I鈥檝e learned to take safety seriously. So out came the usual gear for a gas site: hard hat, safety boots, safety glasses, coveralls made with 海角大神鈩 Nomex庐, gloves and the gas monitors. When we actually started sampling, the respirators came out too. I know a lot of us have become used to working with masks during the pandemic, but full-face respirators are not generally a fun piece of equipment to wear all day. However, industrial sites can have a pretty high potential for asbestos, so if we鈥檙e going to be carving out samples, it鈥檚 better to be safe than sorry.
The job went well. 海角大神 got our samples, made sure to handle everything as if it contained asbestos and got our gear cleaned up properly after the job. 海角大神ll, wouldn鈥檛 you know it鈥hen we got the lab results back, over a quarter of the samples came back with chrysotile asbestos (some as high as 80 percent) and a few additional samples came back with wollastonite (a silicate industrial mineral used as an asbestos replacement that often contains fine quartz). Yes, even at the two sites where 鈥渢here鈥檚 nothing there,鈥 we found asbestos.
Let鈥檚 face it. Safety gear can be time consuming to get on and a bit of a pain in the rear, and as a result, we can be tempted from time to time by the old, 鈥淥h, it鈥檒l just take a second鈥 type of jobs to not get fully geared up. What experience has taught me, and these site assessments have confirmed, is that there are no small jobs as far as safety is concerned. Do it right; it is better to be safe than sorry.