There was a secondary railroad line which ran behind the famous Sears Roebuck Tower and Smokestack on the west side of Roosevelt Boulevard, then under the Boulevard, and then east in a kind of man-made chasm along Allengrove Street and then through Frankford to the Kensington & Allegheny section of Philadelphia to supply what was left of the post-Civil War factories still in operation down there. (Amazingly, even in the early 1960s, some factories were still in operation down there.)
When we were kids, we played in a piece of undeveloped real estate along the railroad which we referred to as "The Lot." I did an article on The Lot for a paper called The Frankford Gazette not too many years ago ...
http://frankfordgazette.com/2011/09/18/the-terrifying-railroad-staple-machine-guns/
Contractors would engage in illegal dumping in The Lot. As kids, we used to pick through the piles of contractor's debris for "useful" items -- 2x4s for the roofs of our "forts," for example, and tin cans as targets for rock-throwing contests.
Once I found an entire pile of asbestos chunks. Probably, Johns-Mansville and other companies manufacturing asbestos products in that era would sell leftover asbestos debris to furnace builders for use as fill between super-hot giant iron fireboxes in their furnaces and the brick exterior of the furnaces constructed by them. Perhaps a demolition contractor replacing the old furnaces at Sears served by the famous Sears Smokestack ditched his load at The Lot to save on tipping fees at the landfill.
In any event, I took home two of the asbestos chunks, each of them looking something like this ...
... and added them to my mineral collection.
A few years later, our father somehow acquired an amazing asbestos fire blanket from a Philadelphia fireman for us. I say "amazing" because of what we used to do with it.
As kids we went fishing year-round -- even in the Winter, when we would take the bus up to Pennypack Creek in Northeast Philadelphia, break through the ice and try to catch something through a hole in the ice.
We would also take a bus to the Schuylkill River, south of the Boathouse Row dam, but just north of the Vine Street Bridge, at the foot of the Art Museum, cross through the not-yet-refurbished Fairmount Water Works, and wade through the shallow frigid tidal water to some rocks, not yet drowned by any global warming water depth increase, that were maybe 200 feet from shore.
There we would pile-up driftwood and scrap lumber, generate a roaring fire, and throw our fire blanket over it and literally sit in the fire, to keep warm in the screaming cold winds racing along the river's surface, while we fished in the Schuylkill !
I did not learn about the problems posed by asbestos until after I moved to New Jersey and became a New Jersey lawyer, sometimes providing representation in asbestos-related cases: Asbestosis and mesothelioma. Those little, teeny, tiny asbestos fibers become airborne, and are inhaled, and permanently implant themselves into lung tissue, a condition which nature never learned to cope with. As the number of fibers per square inch of lung tissue becomes greater and greater, the more likely it is that the individual with the high number of asbestos fibers in his lungs will develop debilitating lung damage, referred to as asbestosis, or even the mesothelioma form of lung cancer, and die.
In my first encounter with an asbestos case, I was in Nate Friedman's office in Cherry Hill where I was assigned to function as "second chair" in a mesothelioma case, writing interrogatories, answering interrogatories and working on motions connected with the case. It was then that I learned the etiology of mesothelioma -- how the asbestos-caused sickness develops in our bodies.
The next case connected with asbestos was about a demolition contractor trying unsuccessfully to remove and dispose of asbestos shingle siding on a house in a cost-effective fashion.
The problem was (and continues to be) this: Asbestos costs a bloody fortune to correctly and legally remove and dispose of.
To give you an idea of the size of the problem ...
Once, when I was on Council in Magnolia, as the School Board was cranking-up to build the addition to the public school, an inspector found a mere 75 feet of asbestos insulation on a single 75 foot long pipe in the basement of the school. We've all seen it in our homes as we grew up ...
The Borough was ordered to hire an asbestos abatement contractor to remove it.
Just the idea of hiring a separate asbestos abatement contractor to remove a few lousy yards of pipe insulation was astonishing to me. In one of the Borough Council meetings, I grumbled that "I wish that I had put on a surgical mask, snuck into the school basement, cut the insulation off with a utility knife, and carted it out of the school in a trash bag. I would have charged you a dollar to do it." Here, we had to solicit bids from asbestos abatement contractors to do it.
And then the bids came in for the removal of the asbestos insulation on a single 75 foot length of pipe: $105,000, $90,000, and $75,000.
$75,000!!! For a single, crappy little 75 foot piece of insulation!!!
That came out to $1,000 per foot!!! The price was obscene!!!
When I inquired as to why the cost was so enormous, the $75,000 contractor said, "Well, the guys who go in to do it go in dressed like astronauts ...
Each piece we remove has to be carefully wrapped for permanent storage in an expensive licensed asbestos landfill. So do the suits themselves. The disposal protocol was written for public and environmental safety -- not for cost effectiveness. Our costs are enormous. You'd be surprised how little money I'm making."
Now, the problem which the above poses for contractors involved in the demolition of homes in the United States, in New Jersey, and in Magnolia, itself, is this: One-third of the homes in America are covered with asbestos shingles ...
Yup! That's right! That stuff! A lot of the people reading this -- probably about one-third of you -- have asbestos siding on the outside of their homes!
When I sat down in the 1980s, as I became aware of the absurdly enormous cost of asbestos removal under existing legal protocols, and estimated the cost of removal of all of the asbestos siding in the United States, it came out to more than $200 trillion.
I burst out laughing and realized that it was never going to happen. The economic value of all human enterprise in the history of the world up to the 1980s, when I made the calculation, did not add up to $200 trillion. The then-current asbestos removal protocols would have to be trashed.
Well, the State of New Jersey had imposed fines of about $50,000 on the contractor I was representing for not following those early "$200 trillion protocols," as I called them in court.
When we first walked into court, I made my opening statement before the State's Administrative Law Judge, and as I was predicting that our expert witness would show that the government's absurd asbestos abatement protocols would cost the homeowner about $1 million, I held up a piece of siding sealed in a zip-lock baggie in my hand, as I talked about it.
To my intense astonishment, the Administrative Law Judge jumped out of his chair and partially ducked-down behind the judge's bench, for fear of the asbestos siding in the baggie!!!
This is real!!! It is not an exaggeration!!!
I thought, "Oh, my heavens!!! Look at this kook !!! My client has no chance in this courtroom!!!"
So I immediately filed a motion for recusal of our judge on the grounds of extraordinary prejudice. In argument on the motion, like the lawyer who ate the roach in open court in the famous there's-a-roach-in-my-soda case, I stood up in open court and licked the baggie holding my asbestos shingle several times, and said, "Here I am licking the baggie containing asbestos shingles, without fear of harm. I invited State's counsel to pick up an unwrapped piece of asbestos at the beginning of this hearing with his bare hands, and he did so. Your Honor jumped out His chair and literally hid behind his chair at the last hearing, when I merely held up a sealed baggie of asbestos shingle about 15 feet from Your Honor.
"If that is Your Honor's attitude before judging my client's case, how can we possibly get a fair hearing? I have another asbestos shingle wrapped in plastic, here. I invite Your Honor to take this other baggie of asbestos from me in Your Honor's hand, right now, as I speak, to prove to all and sundry that you are not prejudiced !"
I had the judge trapped.
If he took the baggie from me to show that he was no fool, and could judge correctly, he had to imply that he had been a complete fool in the previous hearing.
If he didn't take the baggie, he would dramatize that he was prejudiced to the point of being mentally sick on the subject of asbestos.
If he ruled that he was prejudiced, and recused himself, he'd almost be shouting to his colleagues on the bench that he was the biggest fool on the bench in New Jersey.
If he didn't recuse himself, any decision he rendered against my client was hopelessly poisoned, and would never stand up on appeal.
Court is like chess.
The judge turned blood red and stared at me with the evil of Satan. Finally, he called a recess, spoke to the State's counsel ex parte (out of my hearing), and State's counsel offered an off-the-record settlement where my client would pay an off-the-record fine to the State of $2,500, and the state inspector would be pulled from the construction site. My client, the contractor, agreed.
Then my client went back and disposed of the rest of the asbestos shingles "in the wrong way" -- while the State's inspector stayed away, my client's workmen carefully pulled the shingles off the wooden superstructure underneath (to avoid aerosolizing asbestos fibers), stacked them, and put them in construction-quality polyethylene bags that would be acceptable to the asbestos landfill and then they drove the bags in their trucks to the asbestos landfill -- about 4.5 man-days of labor costing $2,500, and about $1,000 in costs.
In another case, I was representing a couple selling their house in Mount Ephraim, New Jersey. The home inspector hired by the contracted-for buyers, an unmarried boy and girl, observed that there was a tiny, ramshackle shed in the back yard covered with asbestos shingle siding. That was fine with the couple, and no one complained, until the couple announced that they had changed their minds, and they were breaching contract allegedly because the property was characterized by a "dangerous asbestos presence" in the back yard. I and my clients immediately went out to the property, tore down the useless little shed, scraped-up the dirt it had been sitting on, took the asbestos shingle siding and dirt in thick polyethylene bags to a licensed landfill, and announced to the lawyer whom the boy and girl had hired to represent them that "there isn't a molecule of asbestos on the property."
He told us that his clients were unpersuaded, and were still breaking the contract.
I said, "Okay, then I'm going back to my office and draft the breach of contract complaint against them."
The lawyer offered to compromise by having us pay a lab to test for an asbestos presence on the property.
We agreed.
The lab tested the area where the shed had been in the back. They could not find one molecule of asbestos in the back yard.
Finally they found one tiny asbestos fiber in one of six "traps" placed throughout the house -- the one next to the front door.
I called the lab and asked, "Was the front door closed or open?"
The lab said, "Closed and open."
I asked, "Well, how do you know that the single fiber you collected was not from outside the house?"
The lab manager admitted, "We don't."
The buyers were stuck. The home was sold.
Okay, so, how is all of this connected to the Magnolia Life Blog?
It's this ...
Every night, now, there are those ads on cable urging victims of asbestosis and mesothelioma to come forward and make a claim for their asbestos-related condition. The ads are restricted to those who have worked in industries characterized by chronic exposure to asbestos. Ship building, boiler installation, demolition contracting, and so forth.
However, two factors suggest that that limitation on collecting from the fund is unfair. (a) A 21st century study of lung tissue, announced in 2010, removed the lung tissue from cadavers of Americans never exposed in their jobs to asbestos found that each gram of lung tissue contained between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of microscopic particles of asbestos.
(b) Among female baby boomers who simply never worked in an asbestos-related industry, a certain baseline percentage comes down with asbestos-caused mesothelioma, anyway, probably due to that presence of those tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of asbestos fibers found in each gram of lung tissue.
Some, where does it come from, that asbestos in the lungs?
Two places.
(1) From the homes in America with asbestos shingle siding; and (2) from automobile brake pads.
Re (1), asbestos-sided homes, people are unaware that our homes "breathe" like people every day. When the sun comes up in the morning and the house heats up, the air inside the house expands, and the house "breathes out" past the asbestos shingle siding, carrying millions of microscopic asbestos fibers into the air around the home. When the sun goes down for the night, the air inside the house contracts, and the house "breathes in" past the asbestos shingle siding, carrying millions of microscopic asbestos fibers into the air inside the house.
When a sun beam comes in through a window of a quiet Sunday afternoon, and you see those millions of little dust particles floating in the sun beam, a rather high percentage of those dust particles are actually asbestos fibers "inhaled" by your home from your siding or your neighbors' homes' siding!
Re (2), though asbestos brake pads were illegal under the federal Clean Air Act for a few years, a legal challenge struck down the federal prohibitions as unconstitutional.
So, asbestos brake pads are back.
Every time a driver whose car has asbestos brake pads touches his brake pedal, an invisible cloud of asbestos particles comes spraying out of each wheel of the car. You and your kids breathe those clouds when you are outside the house, and when the clouds float inside.
The bottom line for "Magnolia-ites" and for other homeowners on this subject is this: There is a respectable chance that the presence of asbestos shingle siding on the outside of your house will interfere with the sale of your home by you when go to join Jerry Seinfeld's parents in Florida, when your kids want to "put you out to pasture" in the old age home, or by your estate when your estate goes to sell your home after you are "pushing up daisies."
Maybe I should add, "If you are lucky, you'll come down with asbestosis or mesothelioma and recover damages equal to the value of your home equity."
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