July 23, 2008

Report says asbestos in some Calgary roads poses risk to public health

CALGARY

An Alberta researcher who studies asbestos says that Calgary roadways containing the substance pose a risk to the public.

A recent report found that some major roads in the city contain asbestos, which was commonly used in asphalt prior to 1985.

Kyla Sentes, a public health sciences PhD student at the University of Alberta, says asbestos poses a serious health risk even at trace levels.

City officials say there is no public danger but say they will perform safety tests.

Sentes says the most worrying part is that crews are not wearing proper protective gear while working on roads with asbestos.

“People should look like space men when they’re out there — there’s zero excuse for that,” she said, pointing to decades worth of research into the toxic substance.

“I was kind of floored that some kind of assessment wasn’t made public to the people in Calgary that this was in their roadways.”

She says she’s concerned that the city is continuing its practice of using recycled asphalt containing asbestos when it prepares new material for road surfacing.

“It still tops every occupational disease mortality data every year in the country,” Sentes, a member of Ottawa-based Ban Asbestos Canada, said about asbestos.

Toronto city officials have issued warnings to residents that road work was being done in the borough of North York on surfaces that contained trace elements of asbestos.

Due to stringent regulations by Ontario’s ministry of labour requiring safety precautions at job sites with more than a 0.5 per cent concentration of asbestos, any road work being done with asphalt requires workers to wear hazardous material suits, wet down pavement to keep dust under control and recommend the public close doors and windows and avoid the area during construction.

In Alberta, the eight-hour occupational exposure limit for asbestos is 0.1 fibres per cubic centimetre, or an approximately one per cent concentration.

Canadian Press

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