Living in the Barnard dorms is a dream. There are laundry machines on every floor, it’s two feet away from the dining hall, and I was even lucky enough to get put in a dorm with air conditioning. The four first-year residence halls in the quad are all connected by floor, but differ greatly in age. This distinction wasn’t so obvious until one day in late September, when gossip began to spread in my first-year seminar class. Rumors circulated about how the students in the older dorm had been displaced due to contaminants found in the building. One student said it was mold, another was pretty sure they found asbestos, and a later email from Barnard Builds confirmed that asbestos had been found in the roof of Brookes Hall.
Fortunately, Barnard delt with the issue as quickly as possible, and everyone is back in their dorms safely while they work to irradicate the contaminants. However, this finding brings to light some important issues that people living in New York City should be aware of. So, what is asbestos, and why is it everywhere?
Asbestos is a mineral fiber that can break down into extremely small fibers which are easy to breathe in, and get lodged in lung tissue, later resulting in dangerous diseases such as asbestosis, mesothelioma, and lung cancer. Even materials with small amounts of asbestos are unsafe, because with long term exposure to asbestos, these diseases are at greater risk. Difficulty breathing and asbestos-causing diseases often arise between 10 and 50 years after initial exposure to asbestos.
If asbestos is so dangerous, why is it everywhere? Unfortunately, one of the most harmful materials the human body can be exposed to also comes in handy for a multitude of uses, most commonly as a building material. Asbestos is known as the “hidden killer”, because it is hidden in thousands of buildings due to its strength, low price point, and insulating capabilities. Its popularity can be traced right back here, in the city of New York.
Asbestos was first popularized by a manufacturing company in New York City in 1958. After that, because it was so easily accessible, pretty much every major construction project in New York and around the country had large traces of asbestos up until 1970. Shockingly, the harmful effects of asbestos were widely understood by 1949, with the link between asbestos exposure and lung cancer having been initially discovered in 1934. In the late 60s, personal injury claims began to pile up, and necessary regulation was reinforced to eliminate the presence of asbestos in modern construction.
There is somewhat of a silver lining to this issue in that it is so common that the department of health has gotten really good at dealing with it. Barnard is following all of the protocols issued by the NYC Department of Buildings and Department of Environmental Protection regulations, and have employed an air monitoring service to make sure the problem is completely solved at the end of construction. Until then, I’ll be keeping my 8th floor window closed.