PRICHARD, Alabama – School officials say that students at Faulkner Career-Technical Center in Prichard were never in any danger at all from the asbestos found in the attic, but they have decided to relocate them to another school for the rest of the school year.

About 150 students in the cosmetology, health care and child care programs will be finishing out the school year at the nearby Whistler Elementary School, which is currently vacant after the new elementary school opened in Eight Mile. A school employee found asbestos in a pipe while working on an air conditioning unit. The school hired a contractor to remove the asbestos as required by law, and the contractor found more asbestos in the attic of the school.

School officials are adamant that the students were not ever in any danger, since the asbestos is in the attic of the school which is off limits to students. Tommy Sheffield, facilities manager for the Mobile County Public School System said that air quality tests at the school show no asbestos in the air, further supporting the departments contention that the students were never exposed to asbestos.

The students in Faulkner’s other programs remain at the school in different buildings.

A spokeswoman for the Mobile County schools pointed out that most buildings built before the 1980s have asbestos somewhere in them. Asbestos was one of the most widely used building materials from just after World War II until it was banned from many uses in the mid-to-late Seventies. By that time, though, asbestos containing products had been used in thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of public buildings across the country.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the public became aware that asbestos dust caused major health problems, including asbestos cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma. In the 1980s Mobile school officials examined and performed asbestos abatement throughout the entire system. At that time, they removed all asbestos that was in areas accessible to students and the general public. Officials from the school department re-check all asbestos-containing materials regularly to ensure that they don’t deteriorate and present a health hazard.

Because the asbestos in the Faulkner school attic is not in an area accessible to students, the law doesn’t require its removal; however school officials have decided to be proactive and remove it for safety’s sake. Removing the asbestos will cost the school department about $60,000, and should take no more than a few weeks. However, the school department is taking the opportunity while the students are out of the building to make other much-needed repairs such as replacing ceilings and lights in the building that was built in 1923.

Asbestos is not a danger as long as it is not airborne. When materials that contain asbestos become deteriorated or damaged, tiny asbestos fibers can become airborne and possibly inhaled. Airborne asbestos has been definitively linked to asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, among other serious health conditions and disease.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Alabama, Asbestos Exposure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.