Asbestos

Although Upper Dublin school officials feared they would find dangerous amounts of asbestos at the Jarrettown Elementary School, tests last week found no cancer-causing fibers. Upper Dublin School District facilities director John Parker said Monday that the air collected in the Friday and Saturday tests would be subjected to further laboratory tests to be certain that there is no deteriorating asbestos in the school's 34-year-old heating system. Federal guidelines require deteriorating asbestos-containing materials to be removed or contained if tests show that there is more than 0.01 of fibers per cubic centimeter in the air. Asbestos has been shown to cause lung cancer and other diseases.

The Wenonah School Board on Tuesday night selected Testwell Craig Testing Laboratories of Westville to test for and identify asbestos in the Wenonah Public School, which houses 185 students. According to Robert Campbell, the vice president of Testwell Craig, the inspection should take about one day and is expected to cost $2,000 to $2,500. A date had not been set for the work to begin. "Inspections are done at a rate of about 20,000 square feet per day at $40 per bulk sample," Campbell said.

The Southeast Delco School District will request an extension from the state Department of Education to submit an asbestos emergency-management plan later than the Oct. 12 deadline. During a regular meeting Thursday night, the Southeast Delco school board voted, 5-2, to request an extension, with school board Vice President C. Franklin Hall and board member Joseph G. Jones dissenting. School board President Lynn Krautheim and board member Robert D. Bell Jr. were absent. After the meeting, school board secretary James A. Asciutto said the federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act mandated that the district submit an asbestos emergency-management plan by Oct. 12. Asciutto said that an inspection of schools had been completed and that a final report and plan might be completed on time.

One of the major obstacles to regulating the production of and exposure to most chemicals suspected of being hazardous to human beings always has been a lack of incontrovertible scientific evidence linking cause and effect. Exposure to dioxin, for example, is presumed to cause cancer. Consumption of food contaminated with the pesticide kepone is believed to damage the central nervous system. Contact with water containing the solvent TCE is thought to cause birth defects. But nobody can say for certain.

The concourse level of the Municipal Services Building - a government crossroads for citizens paying tax bills and applying for zoning permits - should be evacuated immediately because of crumbling asbestos, a municipal workers union said yesterday. "I'm concerned about asbestos contamination of the people who work there and the public," said Thomas Cronin, president of District Council 47, after taking his case yesterday to Managing Director James S. White. Cronin said rainwater leaking onto the ceiling of the below-ground concourse was causing asbestos-coated material to fall into a large central lobby.

A Georgia Tech researcher envisions the day when he can drive to an old building, pull out an asbestos blaster and turn the carcinogen into driveway gravel. Lou Circeo, director of Georgia Tech's Construction Research Center, is refining an asbestos-melting process that he says would reduce the amount of asbestos that is dumped into landfills. The method uses a new technology - the plasma arc torch - that produces an ionized gas that heats to 7,000 degrees Celsius. It melts asbestos into harmless chunks of gray, glasslike rock that Circeo says can be used as gravel or concrete aggregate or molded into products such as bricks.

In the midst of an asbestos cleanup of a Bucks County apartment complex, the complex's management has criticized the Environmental Protection Agency, saying it distributed a "misleading" fact sheet about the cleanup. But about 45 angry residents of the complex, the Salem Harbour Apartments in Bensalem, lambasted the management during a meeting yesterday morning. They said they trusted the EPA. Salem Harbour hastily called yesterday's session on Friday night, hours after the federal agency sent residents a three-page fact sheet about the cleanup of asbestos shingle debris at the complex.

The Springfield Township Board of Education, alleging breach of contract and negligence in the scheduled cleanup of an elementary school, has filed a $130,000 suit against an asbestos-removal company. The lawsuit, which was filed July 14 in Superior Court in Burlington County, alleges that Eastern Environmental Services Inc. of Secaucus, Hudson County, breached its contract with the school board by failing to remove "any and all of the asbestos on the pipes" underneath the Springfield Elementary School on Jacksonville Road, as well as several bags of asbestos left in the crawl space.

The Haddonfield Public Library is scheduled to operate out of borough hall on Kings Highway above Haddon Avenue for eight to 10 weeks beginning Nov. 19 while asbestos is removed from ceilings and pipes in the library building. Library director Doug Rauschenberger said last week that asbestos ceiling plaster in the new sections of the library and asbestos insulation on the boiler and pipes posed no present health hazard to the public or library staff, but could release hazardous particles in the future.

Three employees of a Philadelphia recycling company were charged yesterday with criminal violations of the federal Clean Air Act in the dumping of a truckload of asbestos in unauthorized areas three years ago. Alex Fineman, Gregory Boone, and Michael D'Avocato, employees of HMC Recycling Corp. of Philadelphia, were charged with the violations in a five- count information filed in federal court by the U.S. Attorney's Office. The alleged illegal dumping occurred when Boone and D'Avocato drove a trailer "loaded with bags of asbestos-containing waste material" from an unidentified site in Philadelphia to Chesapeake City, Md., where most of it was dumped, the information said.

The flood of out-of-state lawsuits filed in Philadelphia over alleged asbestos injuries and defective pharmaceutical products has slowed dramatically after a series of procedural changes to reduce the case backlog of the city's Court of Common Pleas. Asbestos and pharmaceutical filings, called mass torts, declined from a high of 2,690 in 2011 to 816 in 2012, according to Judge John Herron, administrative head of the court's trial division. "From the court's perspective it is an excellent reversal of the trend," Herron said.

A Lumberton man faces up to 30 years in federal prison and a $1.5 million fine after a jury Friday found him guilty of conspiring with another contractor to illegally remove and dispose of asbestos. The men removed a boiler and pipes insulated with the toxic substance to dodge the expense of proper abatement. Gene Cornell Smith, 43, also was found guilty of five Clean Air Act charges. "There is no safe level of exposure to asbestos. Its unsafe disposal endangers human health," said David G. McLeod Jr., special agent in charge of EPA's criminal enforcement program in Pennsylvania.

Back in the 1880s, Ambler was a company town, and asbestos was the company's product. It was a good place to raise a family. Work was plentiful, and asbestos manufacturer Keasbey & Mattison Co. was community-minded, constructing affordable housing and a building for a library and an opera house. About a century later, the factory closed, leaving behind enduring concerns about the impact of asbestos on former workers, current residents, and the image of the Montgomery County borough.

Officer Paul Zenak's trouble with the brass started a year ago, he says, when he was coordinating the Police Athletic League of Philadelphia's center in Wissinoming. The basement was undergoing renovation, and the officer didn't like the look of some mold on the pipes that run through the homework room. It was worse than that, a New Jersey contractor named Joe Bailey told him - there was asbestos. Zenak was already wary of the stuff. His uncle Bill, a Philadelphia Gas Works employee, had died of mesothelioma, a cancer that comes from inhaling asbestos fibers, in 2008.

NEW YORK — On Tuesday morning, Old City developer Michael Yaron stood in the hallway of a Manhattan courthouse with friends and family, framed by a tall open window, the Empire State Building rising up behind him. A few hours later, inside Courtroom 21D, Yaron learned that the empire he started from humble beginnings in Israel, in the storied halls of Oxford University, and on the streets he transformed in Philadelphia, will come to an end...

Philadelphia is no longer quite the draw it was only a few months ago for out-of-town lawyers filing asbestos and pharmaceutical lawsuits. Court administrators say that filings have dropped precipitously since the enactment of rules aimed at reducing the growing case backlog. In particular, the rules target filings by out-of-state lawyers alleging harm from prescription medications and asbestos. Through the end of this year, court officials project about 1,068 filings involving asbestos and pharmaceutical claims, a 60 percent decline from 2011.

OFFICER PAUL ZENAK thinks he's been asking too many questions. That's the only way he can make sense of it. Why else did Zenak — a decorated 21-year Philadelphia Police veteran and former Officer of the Year in his district — go from being what a sergeant described as an "outstanding" and "highly recommended" director of the Wissinoming Police Athletic League center to a cop with a tarnished reputation and two bizarre reprimands in his...

In a decision with potentially broad implications, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has disallowed scientific testimony in asbestos lawsuits asserting that even the tiniest exposure could cause cancer. The unanimous opinion, written by Justice Thomas G. Saylor, said plaintiffs alleging asbestos-related disease could no longer argue that the mere exposure to even one fiber of the cancer-causing substance could be the basis for a claim. The court said plaintiffs would have to show some relationship between the amount of asbestos exposure and development of the disease.

IN 1989, Michael Yaron begged a federal judge in Philadelphia for another chance, one more opportunity to use his Oxford education and business prowess for good. It wasn't the first time Yaron, a Philadelphia developer, philanthropist and political donor, had asked the court for mercy and it might not be his last. On Feb. 2, Yaron, 67, and three other individuals were convicted of wire and mail fraud in Manhattan stemming from an eight-year conspiracy involving kickbacks in excess of $2 million, the FBI said in a recent news release.