This winter has been unusually mild, but it still proved fatal to our fifty-year-old oil burner in Baltimore.
We knew its days were numbered, but we were hemming and hawing, endlessly crunching numbers as we tried to decide whether to switch from crazy-expensive, foreign-sourced heating oil to historically cheap, natural gas fracked right here in the U. S. of A.
The procrastination ended last week when our faithful boiler weighed in and said, “Time’s up!”, a message sent by way of a pool of nasty radiator water down in the furnace room.
The demolition and removal of the old boiler has focused our attention on the cast iron piping in the basement, which dates to the construction of the house in 1913. More specifically, to the thick white cementitious insulation around those pipes, made from layer upon layer of corrugated asbestos paper, lovingly buttered with asbestos-rich joint compound.
According to the EPA, the best thing you can do with this stuff, providing it’s intact and in good shape, is to leave it alone. Asbestos-impregnated building materials are hazardous when they degrade and become friable — meaning they crumble from the pressure of a fingertip – or when they’re disturbed and release their dangerous dust into the air.
When in doubt, it’s a good idea to consult an asbestos-removal professional. Asbestos is nasty stuff — not to mention a lawyer’s dream. Litigation over asbestos is the longest and most expensive saga in the proud history of American torts, with close to a million claimants, and a cost of about 250 billion dollars in the U.S. alone, an inauspicious final act for a material that was a staple of the building trades for over a hundred years.
According to some anthropologists, human beings have been using the long fibrous crystals of silicate minerals – read, “asbestos” – for nearly five thousand years. Around 300 B.C., Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote about asbestos in his treatise On Stones, an analysis of minerals based on their reaction to heat. It wasn’t called “asbestos” back then; it’s name was “amiantos,” which means “pure” or “undefiled,” a reference to the way the mineral resisted being marked or stained by fire.
To this day, the mineral we call “asbestos” is called “amiante,” in some languages, including French.
As a matter of fact, “amiante” is a much more accurate word for it. The name “asbestos” is really a misnomer. “Asbestos” means “unquenchable” or “inextinguishable,” a characteristic of quicklime, which produces great heat when water is added.
We can thank Pliny the Elder for the bogus name. He was the one who confused the two minerals, and gave the fire-resistant one the name of the fire-producing one.
By any name, fibrous silicate really is a wonder. A favorite parlor trick in the palaces of the 5th and 6th centuries was for the king to hurl his napkin into the fire and retrieve it, intact, all of the dinner stains miraculously licked clean by the flames.
The napkin, of course, was woven of asbestos fibers.
Marco Polo, traveling in Siberia, encountered garments that wouldn’t burn. He was told they’d been woven from the fur of salamanders, a creature long associated with fire, and which was thought to possess mystical flame-retardant powers.
These legends may be based on the fact that salamanders can sometimes be found snoozing in the crevices of rotting firewood. The match is applied; the burrow becomes an inferno; the salamander leaps to safety. Voila — mythical fire-lizard!
Marco Polo was a skeptic. He didn’t really believe in furry salamanders. He pressed his Siberian hosts, who eventually admitted that the garments had been woven from a mineral that had fibers like wool.
Asbestos came into its own after the Industrial Revolution, when a cheap, durable, well insulating, chemically inert fiber was needed for all sorts of applications. The list of products that contained it is truly staggering, everything from floor tiles to cigarette filters.
Its health impacts only became clear after the industry matured. In this way, asbestos is like many other materials in history that followed a familiar trajectory: initial promise, leading to technical innovation; a profitable heyday of industrialization; the identification of health risks, followed by litigation; and ultimately, heavy regulation or even a total ban.
Radium, PCBs, and cocaine come to mind.
Sometimes it’s not just materials, but entire industrial processes that go the way of the dinosaur. One wonders, in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster last March, whether nuclear power will some day be added to the list.
Or, relevant to our efficient new natural gas boiler, and uncomfortably close to home: induced hydraulic fracturing in deep veins of shale.
(Read, “fracking.”)
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 08 March 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
