On the morning of 9/11, Dr. Arthur M. Langer
was at home, not far from the twin towers of
the WTC. Dr. Langer is a mineralogy
professor at the City University of New York. He
was intimately familier with the WTC and
expected that the towers would survive after
being hit by a plane. Langer was
involved with the construction of the towers and had
been at a meeting where fireproofing
for the buildings had been discussed and had
been somewhat disturbed when his
boss, Irving Selikoff had insisted that asbestos
not be used on account of new found "dangers"
of asbestos in office buildings.
Asbestos will not burn and in addition is a pretty good insulator.
Today, Dr. Langer says of asbestos, "Knowing
what I know thirty six years later, I
would have said we need this material
. . . these materials can be used with relatively
little risk. The substitutes do
not perform well". In short, he would have made a more
emphatic argument against the denial of
asbestos fireproofing in the buildings. Had
the buildings been built a few years earlier,
the steel would have been covered by an
asbestos spray-on fireproofing which would,
at least have postponed the collapse and
probably have prevented it alltogether.
If those steel columns had been protected by
asbestos, it would have taken a lot longer
for them to get so hot they would distort and
thus fail. (Note: contrary to
some popular baloney, they did not melt)
Four years after 9/11, the National
Institute of Standards did an investigation of the
collapse of the buildings. Shyam
Sunder, who led the investigation, stated," Even with
the airplane impact and jet-fuel ignited,
multi-floor fires, which are not normal
building fires, the building would
likely not have collapsed had it not been for
the [lack of] fireproofing".
The popular "News Media", led by the famous
New
York Times, lionized all the whistle-
blowers who had warned about the vulnerability
of airlines, failure to track and profile
terrorists and every failing except the
poor fire protection. Only Fox News Steven Milloy
"Junk science" commentator
gave coverage to the comments of the late scientist and
inventor Herbert Levine - who invented
the spray-on asbestos fireproofing that had been
include in the original plans for the
buildings. The original plan forsaw the remote
chance of a Boeing 707 (the largest commercial
airliner of that time) impacting the
building and provided the fireproofing
needed to guard against that.
So, why did it happen?
Some shipyard workers of WWII contracted
a lung disease called mesothelioma. In
most cases, this disease showed its symptoms,
20-30 years after the workers worked
in the WWII shipyards and the type of
asbestos involved was amphibole - - a brown
material with long fibers imported during
the war and representing only about 5% of
all the asbestos in use. I lived
in Vancouver, WA during WWII. My dad helped to
build Kaiser's shipyard there and some
of my friends and relatives worked there.
It was an emergency situation. Ships were
being built in days and hours rather than
months and years as previously and the
work environment was almost as hazardous
at the front lines in some cases.
Nobody was worrying much about air quality and
things that are given top priority today.
So, naturally some of the workers became
casualties of the war.
Environmental groups raised a cry about
the dangers of asbestos and paniced the
NY Port Authority into substituting some
mostly untried coatings - some of them the
testing laboratory reported could be removed
by the human hand - for the tried and
true asbestos. It's clear that not only
were these products inferior, but much of it had
been removed by the initial impact vibration
so the steel was bare.
Enter, the lawyers
Lawsuits against asbestos product manufactuers
became an industry - a goldmine for
lawyers and they are still working that
mine even though they have managed to bankrupt
most of those manufacturers, starting
with Johns Manville Corp (over 60,000 jobs lost -
cost is approaching 200 billion) If you
enter "asbestos" into Google, the first thing you
come up with is an ad by a scumball lawyer
promising you millions of dollars if you just
let him run a lawsuit for you.
A subsidiary industry is that of removal
of asbestos in existing buildings. This is being
done extensively, especially in schools,
in spite of the fact that removing the stuff puts
more of it in the air - so any real danger
is magnified by that action. About $50 Billion
has already been spent on this endeavor.
1989 New England Journal of Medicine
report says: "Recent epidemiological
studies of persons with low exposure
to asbestos provided little support for
the concept that there is an increased
risk of cancer."
Asbestos is a natural substance which exists
everywhere. There is an almost 100%
probability that everyone in this room
has some of it in their lungs. Every time someone
steps on the brake pedal, microscopic
quantities of asbestos are released into the air.
But, there is an old and many times proven
adage: "The poison is in the dose" and the
human body deals quite successfully with
quite a number of substances (such as table
salt) which in sufficient quantities would
be fatal. Face masks are a much more sensible
remedy than banning a very important,
much needed, life saving product.
What does the EPA say about asbestos:
"Don't panic . . . . .LEAVE and asabestos
material that is in good shape, ALONE"
In short, while there is some risk from
asbestos, the risks involved in fire are so
much greater, there is simply no comparison.
Once again, an hysterical rant
trumps common sense and real science.
What does today's politically correct
EPA have to say about asbestos?
From their website: "Don't panic
. . .Leave good asbestos material alone,
If it gets frayed, have it professionaly
removed".
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