Edinburgh Council Fined For Asbestos Violations

The Edinburgh, Scotland, Council was fined GBP14,000 (US$23,280) for violating national asbestos worker protection laws. Workers found the white asbestos dust as they sawed a hole in a door that they had earlier removed during a renovation project at Castlebrae Community High School. Almost a dozen staff members, including construction crews and joiners, were at the site when the contamination occurred. In February, the council was also fined another GBP17,600 (US$25,595) for exposing workers to asbestos after knocking down a wall at the same building.

According to a report from the city sheriff, Isabella McColl, three of the workers were in close proximity to the hazardous material when they extruded it from the door. Sheriff McColl also said that the level of danger pertaining to the asbestos exposure at the site posed a "very grave" threat to worker's health and safety. Council members pled guilty at Edinburgh Sheriff Court to four counts of violating the country's Control of Asbestos Regulations, passed in 2006.

The portion of the remodeling project under investigation involved removing doors from the high school physics lab to make room for a hair styling salon. When workers removed the old doors to cut windows into the panels, they released the asbestos contained within those door panels into the air and inadvertently exposed themselves to the loose fibers. Work crews were apparently unaware of the potential for asbestos exposure as only one worker put on a protective breathing mask during the cutting process.

City official Sally Clark described the events that surrounded the discovery of the toxic fibers. According to her report, after the workers completed the work on the first door using a hand-held, battery-powered saw, they expressed concern about the amount of white dust that the door panels extruded. In order to ventilate the area, the workers opened large doors and allowed the breeze to carry the dust into the nearby parking lot. When the local worker safety inspector tested the dust, he found that it contained asbestos and the work site was shut down pending asbestos remediation procedures.

As investigators with the country's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) office looked into the work site, they discovered that the Council did not review any documentation regarding the potential presence of asbestos at the site. The procedure in place was to wait until anything that would require further scrutiny to stop work on the project. In court, the council admitted that they did not carry out the requisite risk assessment, nor did they provide workers with the proper safety gear in case they did encounter asbestos contamination.

Exposure to asbestos fibers is known to cause lung diseases such as pleural mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer that affects the fluid linings of the lungs. When diagnosed with the disease, a patient's life expectancy is typically less than eighteen months. Such severe disorders are usually associated with long-term exposure to the carcinogenic substance, often over the course of several decades. However, government health officials have recently taken extra steps to educate the work force about the potential dangers of asbestos exposure through a public service information campaign.

Sources: Edinburgh News, Safety Media

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