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Welcome to around the House with Eric G. Your trusted source for all things home improvement.

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Now, here's your host, Eric G. Welcome.

To the around the House show, the next generation of home improvement.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today.

This hour is brought to you by my friends at Monument Grills.

If you're out looking for a new barbecue for Labor Day weekend, now's the time to check them out@monumentgrills.com if you're a frequent listener of the show, you know that, well, I jump on discussing asbestos from time to time.

And I've got the show for you today.

I tell you what, this is one of the biggest misconceptions, I think, in home improvement.

And we have an expert here on the show.

Justinian Lane, Esq.

Is the founder of law offices of Justinian Lane P llc, a national law firm dedicated exclusively to asbestos claims.

So we're going to talk about this stuff so we can get you the right information.

Thanks for coming on the show today, brother.

I appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk about asbestos.

It's one of my favorite subjects.

So let's start out, man.

How did you get into this?

Because it's one of those things that a lot of people will see a commercial or something on television, but then they go, huh, what caused the.

What caused the.

Sure.

When I went to law school, I wasn't planning on doing asbestos.

I think I had basically just seen commercials on TV and was vaguely aware of it.

But the first law firm that I worked for as a summer associate did asbestos work, and I started to find it interesting.

They invited me back the second and third year and then hired me.

And as I started to learn about asbestos, it got really personal for me because I had lost multiple family members to cancer and had just assumed, oh, they were smokers, that's life.

But realizing, oh, no, they were exposed to asbestos daily.

And that dramatically increases your risk of cancer, even if you were a smoker, especially.

So I started taking a much deeper personal interest in that.

And I've always been a bit of a history nerd.

So when you get those kind of mixes of it affected my family, affected my life.

And it's an interesting story.

I just haven't really been able to put it down since I started doing that back in 2010.

Nice.

Yeah, it's interesting out there.

I think, as I said in the intro, this is one of the most, I think, misunderstood building materials out there because I think there's so much confusion that everybody mixes in that asbestos stopped in 1978 with lead paint.

And they couldn't be farther from the truth.

Absolutely.

Asbestos continued being used past 1978.

It was, I think, 24, 2024 where they finally banned the very last uses of asbestos in the country, which was actually used for places that would make like chlorine gas, things like that.

They would stuff asbestos into diaphragms in the cells to make those.

I've represented some gentlemen, that was their job.

And they would just describe 50 pound bags of ASBE, just shaking them up and dropping them down.

But other than those industrial uses, asbestos was still used into the 80s.

It was used in home construction, commercial construction.

Basically the 20th century was built with asbestos.

No question.

And if people.

I live in the portion Portland, Oregon metro area here and we have our waste and this has caused a lot of discussions as of June because beginning June 1st in my area, the people that handle the waste here in the Portland metro area, which is metro, they made it.

So any commercial structure demolitions.

So if it's somebody's restaurant or law office or commercial building that as of June 1, 2025, all of it has to be tested and lab tests are required before taking any of that waste to the landfill to get rid of it.

And it has caused some interesting discussions now and people are like, wait a minute.

What?

It's interesting.

Yeah, that sounds like it would be incredibly expensive to try to go and do.

And I can see real concerns with that.

I would say that you wouldn't even need to test a lot of buildings.

You could just know by the decade they were built, this was built with asbestos.

It was built in the 60s or 70s.

Absolutely.

It was 80s, maybe 90s.

Gets less likely, but it's still possible.

But the older it is, the more likely asbestos is there.

Just kind of period.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

You get into those old homes and in the basement, the nine by nine tiles that probably made by Armstrong or one of those main companies out there, the same ones that had in their ads, which I thought was absolutely amazing.

I've got a couple of them saved where I've got the magazine ads and Good Housekeeping or whatever.

Armstrong tiles now with added asbestos for durability.

It's so amazing how such a quote, wonder product.

We found out more about it and found out how really bad it is for us.

Yeah, Armstrong was one of many companies that, that made the asbestos floor tiles and they would add asbestos in to reinforce and make them durable.

Asbestos is basically, it's a rock.

It forms in a specific way that lets it be teased out and you can weave it and do things, but it's a rock.

So when you add a rock to something, of course it's going to be more durable.

And to your point about the ads, you know, my, my office, I have probably dozens of ads from the 40s and 50s and 60s just showing all of the many uses of asbestos and how great and wonderful it was.

Yes.

It used to be called a magic mineral.

That was, it seemed like magic that you could take a rock and weave it into cloth.

Right.

And then the health risks started to come out and industry downplayed and actively concealed because that would be the end of the asbestos industry, which it rightfully was.

Yeah, it's amazing out there.

My mom tells stories when she was a, in the 60s, a third grade school teacher and she took when they were doing clay day and they were making clay things to fire off, they were mixing in asbestos to make sure it wouldn't crack in the kiln and they were just taking it out of bags and mixing it in with the third graders.

And it wasn't that big a deal back then.

But we didn't know what we know today.

No, no.

And it's funny you mentioned that that exact use, the very first known use of asbestos was about 5,000 BC in Finland.

And the people there were adding asbestos to their clay pots to make them fire better and do all the same things that your mom was having going on in third.

So relatively early humans figured out, geez, this stuff completely resists heat.

It was used as wicks and Zippo lighters.

It just doesn't burn.

So they found that fascinating.

And obviously thousands of years ago nobody had any idea of the health risks.

But by the 1920s, workers were starting to get sick and die of a breathing disease called asbestosis.

And that's what kind of started to trigger the health cover up even before they found out that it can cause various types of cancer.

The amazing thing is that great example I saw somebody here probably had been six, seven years ago in my area.

A I think the guy was a real estate agent and he was flipping houses and had Somebody come in, take down the popcorn ceilings, take up the floor, and got hit with a hundred thousand dollar fine by not following the rules.

And many areas they have those fines, areas it's wild west in that there's nobody really paying attention to what's going on with the products.

Which means you can be moving into a house that was recently renovated and have those fibers hanging around for months or years to come.

And you had nothing to do with the renovation.

Absolutely.

It's so easy for those fibers to get suspended in air.

Like you can see bundles of asbestos fibers with the naked eye, but if they're teased all the way apart to a single individual fiber, optical microscope can actually see them.

They're 90 nanometers, sorry, 30 nanometers wide, which is smaller than the visible light wavelength.

Actually, that's how tiny these things were.

We didn't actually get to see an individual fiber until they invented the electron microscope.

Wow.

And what that means, those things hang in the air.

They've done studies.

I think there was one, and I want to say it was Japan, where asbestos fiber can travel.

I think it was 11 kilometers.

Wow.

Because they're so light, a single speck of visible dust could hold thousands of individual fibers.

So these things are super tiny.

So yeah, once they get in the air, they don't.

Gravity doesn't really do much to them.

They hang and they get blow around.

And something that I didn't learn until much, many years into this is how sticky that asbestos fibers are.

They carry an electrical charge, so they cling to things in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

So yeah, if you've had a remodeled house and they didn't do a really good job with the abatement procedures, asbestos could be in your house for the next hundred years floating around and you wouldn't even know it.

And so every time you take your just regular residential vacuum and you dust and everything else, you're just spreading it around, moving it around again.

And that filter inside the vacuum sure isn't going to grab that tiny piece.

And so you're just moving around and kind of like deck chairs in the Titanic, it's not getting captured by anything unless somehow it's statically being caught inside the filter.

But most of it's still just going to move around.

If you get the HEPA filtering and the negative pressure and all that stuff, sure, I guess you can get it out.

But it's better if they do that all during the renovation process.

So I would always be a little scared of if this is an older home that's been renovated.

What all did you guys do and how did you do it?

Like you mentioned floor tiles.

A lot of times they will just put something over the vinyl floor and that's fine.

Nothing's going to happen unless those things get disturbed.

So asbestos is only dangerous if you breathe it.

Touching it doesn't do anything to you.

It's not like radioactive.

It has to be inhaled or swallowed somehow.

So if when they do the renovation they get it covered or encapsulated as they'll call it, you'll be fine.

But if they don't, you could be breathing it and that carries risks.

What's interesting and on social media drives me absolutely crazy.

And I'm going to call this mythical person out because there's always one in a group someplace.

But there'll be somebody posting up what clearly looks like it's most likely asbestos, Canadian material.

In one of the groups, they post it up there.

Everybody else is saying, hey, you better get that tested.

And there's that one.

Generally a guy.

I've been doing this for 30 years and I've never.

You've seen it.

And it's that typical contractor that's been doing it.

I don't have it and I've been working with it for 30 years.

What I think is interesting is that it takes so long for any of the effects to show up to.

You don't really have it where you did a project and all of a sudden you're sick.

This could show up decades later.

Correct.

Like in the very early days of asbestos in the 20s and 30s when people were working with lot higher concentrations.

Even in those days, the minimum amount of time before you'd get sick would be about 10 years today because the doses are much smaller than they used to be.

They're finding, they call it a latency period from the time since first exposure, 50, 60, even 70 years.

So people exposed as a children are getting diseases that are caused by asbestos and their old age because it takes a long time for the damage to be done.

The way that asbestos can cause cancer.

To your other point, there's always that guy that I'm fine.

There's people that smoke every day and they don't get cancer.

But that doesn't mean you won't.

If you smoke every day, we still can't predict who will and won't get cancer.

Excellent point because yeah, those people that made it to 102 and they've been smoking cigars their entire life and they're fine.

Then you see the 40 year old with lung cancer and go, how did that work?

And it's just depending on their body.

Absolutely.

It's the thing about body and just the luck or bad luck of where asbestos fibers embed themselves because you'll inhale the fiber or swallow it and it will embed and that will start causing scar tissue.

And maybe it causes enough to cause the reaction that turns into cancer, or maybe it doesn't and it's just like with any other carcinogen.

You can never predict it.

All you can predict is that every exposure that you have to asbestos raises your chances of developing cancer by some amount greater than zero.

We can't be that much more precise.

We know it is what they call a dose response disease is the more asbestos you're exposed to, the higher the dose, the more likely you're going to have response.

But not everybody does.

So it's really a gamble.

Yeah.

And this was in so many materials inside your home.

And it's fascinating.

People will sit there and of course they look at the floor and go, oh, nine by nine tiles.

But not 12 inch tiles.

And I'll be first to say I've tested 12 inch tiles that had the exact same asbestos levels as the nine by nines.

Even though the nine by nines were in an era that it was widely used.

Right.

Asbestos was a real popular use as a filler in any kind of vinyl floor tiles.

And asbestos comes in different grades, or it used to anyway, based on length.

The shorter fibers were used for filler and it was dirt cheap.

It was a couple hundred dollars a ton for this stuff.

So they put it in and do their stuff with the floor tiles and it makes a stronger, more fireproof product.

But yeah, to think that it was only a nine by nine is definitely not.

If it was in a vinyl floor tile, it could have been in there.

And even if it wasn't in the tile, it probably was in the mastic underneath that they stuck the stuff down with because they put it in that too.

So asbestos was in every portion of the house, was in your drywall, it was in the joint compound, could have been in the electrical wiring, almost certainly the panels.

It was just.

That's why they called it a magic mineral or a miracle mineral, because there's pretty much nothing you couldn't do with it.

Yeah.

I see so many people in there that are posting up on social media that I've got the black tar looking mastic and anybody's ever worked with it, they know exactly what I'm talking About and anytime I see that and I've tested it, I think I'm 100% that I've run into that being asbestos containing material just of that era.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

I have, I have an acquaintance that he goes into condemned properties and surveys them for a city before they will tear them down to see what they can find.

And they sent him in as he's like the fixer.

He always finds asbestos.

He knows where to look.

And he says if the other guys haven't found it, they're just not digging deep enough.

As you mentioned, the mastic absolutely was a huge one.

And people don't think about that.

They used asbestos containing tape at some periods of time.

Even duct tape had asbestos in it.

Major paint companies mixed it in with the paint, so it's on your walls.

It would have been really tough to go into a house built in the 60s or 70s and not have any asbestos in it.

Just be incredibly tough.

Yeah.

My house built in 77, I was surprised.

I couldn't find it, but it was a unicorn.

And a lot of that was because I had hardwood floors everywhere.

You know what I mean?

There was not any.

And there had been remodels in the past, but there was not any vinyl anywhere in the house.

So, you know, that basically left wall textures.

And when I tested my house on the wall textures, I had popcorn ceilings.

I tested in nine different spots and couldn't find it.

But I see so many times people go in and go, oh yeah, I went in the closet and cut out a piece, sent it to the lab, and we were good to go.

But I think you should be testing all the different locations around the house.

So maybe one, maybe that area was repaired 25 years ago with a newer product.

And you have no idea.

And even the testing labs will tell you that just because this section here doesn't have asbestos, doesn't mean the one next to it does or doesn't.

Because asbestos would be mixed in random patterns throughout the things.

So the, the concentrations will differ from one area to the other.

In addition to that, there's also contamination.

So even if the house wasn't supposed to have asbestos in it, asbestos is a contaminant of other minerals that will get in there.

Like one of the big ones is talc.

Cosmetic talc, you may have heard, can have asbestos in there.

So could, you know, gypsum if you have drywall that wasn't supposed to have asbestos, if a vein of asbestos was running through the gypsum.

Now there's some Asbestos in your gypsum.

Oh.

And of course, we all have heard about, or many people have at least the problem with vermiculite was an insulation that was coming out of what, like Louis, Montana if I remember right.

And that had that same issue.

Absolutely.

It was contaminated with a variety typically called a tremolite was the biggest one.

There's six kinds of asbestos.

The tremolite wasn't supposed to be in the vermiculite, it just was.

And the analogy that I kind of use is if you take a bowl full of sugar and you pour a salt shaker in it, it and shake it up, you're never getting all of the salt out of that sugar.

It's just not possible.

So that's what ends up small amounts of contaminants.

I remember, I don't know, seven or eight years ago there was like a holiday CSI branded fingerprint kit to get your kid for Christmas to dunk dust for prints and play little detective.

It was contaminated with asbestos.

So you're taking a powdery substance, giving it to your child and they're spraying it all over.

And it's just, it's terrible.

It's still out there even when it's not supposed to be.

Yeah.

And that's just absolutely insane.

And there's really no recourse for homeowners out there because it's not like you can just go sue one company and say, hey, I've got this dangerous product on my house and I want you to fix it.

The homeowners now have to deal with this on a case by case basis.

And really it seems that your first line of defense with that is going to be testing the project before you even start.

For sure, getting it tested is your best bet.

Many, if not most of the companies that made asbestos products like floor tile, things like that, they ended up filing bankruptcy after all of the lawsuits when people were really getting sick.

So there isn't any real recourse against those manufacturers at all.

The recourse that there is would be against contractors and vendors that are not following the rules.

And that's something for people who, if you're commercially doing remodeling and stuff, you could be on the hook for that.

So definitely dot your I's and cross your t's and don't cheap out on it.

If not for your own health, but for the financial health of your business, you don't want that to happen either.

Yeah, you would not want to have that lawsuit come up against you as a contractor because somebody gets sick and Guess what?

The only known exposure is on your job site that they had a few years ago.

And all of a sudden they've got an issue.

And I really see so many problems like that.

I've run into it in my 35 years of design and construction where I walk into somebody's job site that's getting ready to order cabinetry or something like that, and I can see the tar on the floor.

And I'm like, huh, what happened here?

And they're like, oh, yeah, we just did.

Homeowners did demo last weekend.

And.

And it's tough.

And I think the issue is that people get so scared of the word and the abatement of what it's going to cost.

The fines are so much bigger in many areas than what the cost is.

So your.

Your best move for you, your home and your health.

And.

And for a future homeowner that maybe is buying the house to have all the paperwork to go, hey, look, I did this right.

It was tested, it was abated, it was tested again.

Here we go.

Versus somebody poking around and taking a look at it and wondering what went wrong in this house.

And then trying to clean the house up afterwards has got to be expensive.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

I mean, it's.

Those fibers are so small, they can get into anything.

And another issue too is we represent a lot of people that worked in like, refineries or places where they use tons of asbestos.

They also brought asbestos from work home on their clothes.

So even if they're the housing, the material the house was built with didn't have much asbestos or it hasn't gotten out there.

They could be bringing it into the house and it's just floating around, circulating in the air ducts and settles down.

And then the AC kicks back on and then it's blowing around.

So you have to check everywhere, not just for what the house was built with, but if the guy who lived there before was an insulator, guaranteed he brought that stuff home.

You just don't know.

So you'd have to do your air sampling and all those kinds of things.

Basically, the older the home is, the more likely that there could be some issues.

And if you're in an area where the house is near a refinery, maybe a guy who worked there at the refinery, something else just to think about.

When you think about it, those clothes go in the wash, maybe the towels or whatever are pulled together and thrown in the wash together.

Now you've got that potential cross contamination, and you're hoping that the dryer took stuff out but it seems like that stuff's sticky enough that it could stick around for sure.

And most of the clients that we have who remember talking about or remember washing the clothes, they would try to shake the stuff off.

Because if it's.

Even if you just have a pair of pants that's dusty, you don't just take them covered in dust and throw them in the washer.

You try to get some of that dust off.

Right.

A lot of those older homes, they had the laundry area in the kitchen.

So you've got this terrible situation where typically mom is doing the laundry in the kitchen, shaking the dust, and then the kids are down playing on the floor, as kids do, the dust settles down more into their zone of breathing.

And these kids are getting super high doses of asbestos from that.

It's just.

It's a tragedy up and down the ladder.

Nowhere, you know, where you look at it.

No kidding.

So what are you seeing out there as far as the litigation out there across the board?

Is it mostly workers against companies, or is it all across the board?

What's it look like these days?

The thing that for us has been newer is we're getting more of the children of the asbestos workers because they did start phasing it out heavily in the 70s.

So at some point, there won't be anybody alive who worked directly with asbestos themselves, but their kids were brought home with it.

And the thing that we're seeing is the children often have worse lung damage than their parents do, because the way children's lungs are, they're smaller, and the asbestos particles can do more damage.

So we're getting some of those cases.

There's a lot more of the.

We call them households.

It's typically a wife, but sometimes with a house husband doing the laundry.

But the biggest difference is we're seeing either really young clients or really old clients.

It seems to be how it shakes out.

And again, because of the latency, anybody who's exposed, no matter what you do with asbestos today, it's going to be at least a decade, probably several, before people get sick.

So that makes things.

Yeah, it's difficult.

We have to do a lot of detective work to figure out, where did you work, what school did you go to, what did your mom and dad do?

And try to find every source.

Because so many asbestos companies have either completely gone out of business or set up a trust to handle the claims.

It's harder and harder to find the companies that you can still sue.

And typically, you're going after companies that integrated asbestos into other products.

They Made for an example, a boiler company didn't make asbestos, but they insulated it with it or they knew you were going to insulate it and they didn't warn you.

So you're going a little more up the chain as to the levels of responsibility.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And that makes sense.

And I can just imagine that the kids that all of a sudden now they've got that stuff in their, in their lungs for 50 years, let's say, and the damage that does versus the adult that maybe had it in there for 20 or 25.

Yeah, exactly.

The longer that you have asbestos in your lungs, the more likely you are to get a cancer because it does take a long time for those reactions to happen.

And typically your lung for enough fibers embedded for the things to happen that cause cancer.

It's definitely not an overnight process.

And to that same end, a brief one time, quick exposure to asbestos isn't anything you need to freak out about.

It's not a good thing.

But just if you walk through a bar full of cigarette smoke, you don't have to be terrified that, oh my God, I was in this smoke for two minutes, I'm going to die.

Probably not.

It's technically possible you could get cancer, but it's the prolonged exposure is your real issue.

Yeah, but I wonder though, if you had a DIY asbestos cleanup where you sent friable stuff all around your house.

Now in theory you could be having multiple exposures because that's hanging around for years inside the home.

So maybe it's not the first time you get it, but year four and you're still getting it.

Every time that you're dusting and vacuuming and cleaning up the house.

Of course you'd be getting diminished returns on that because as it disappears, you could in theory then have a bunch of exposures and have some issue just from one event that was handled poorly.

Absolutely.

It's not theoretical, it's definitely proven.

I know you obviously know the company, John's Manville.

They were one of the largest asbestos companies.

They don't do anything with asbestos anymore.

But in, in the 70s, their corporate medical director testified to Congress that if asbestos gets into your home, you have a 24 hour day per day exposure scenario because it goes up in the air, goes down into your carpet, you walk on it, goes up and down, you're always breathing it.

So, yeah, I hope to be clear.

Your point is excellent.

If you're outside at a job site and you breathe asbestos for two minutes, you might be done with it.

When you go home.

But if the asbestos is in your home, you're breathing it every minute you're in your home if the concentrations are there.

So, yeah, a poorly done remodel that gets a lot of friable asbestos in the air.

It's very bad news.

So what are some of the remedies that you've seen out there for people that have maybe have had that bad asbestos removal in the house?

Is it just somebody coming in with a cleaning crew and just doing a super detailed clean on the house?

And of course, the H Vac system and everything else.

Yep.

Going through the H Vac is a big one to get anything that there can be out of the dust out of the ducts.

But you got to do have to replace carpet, because you'll never get asbestos out of carpet.

You could get it off of a hardwood floor with wet methods, things like that.

But really, the only good cure for a botched abatement job is a better, more expensive abatement job, unfortunately, because they have more mess to clean up.

Yeah, I could be anywhere.

I could see where that could be a really issue.

And even with ducts, it's still going to try to stick in there.

You're just going to be getting most of it, I would say, for sure.

Yeah.

I mean, it's.

Again, just because these fibers are so tiny, I've been having some fun, like trying to figure out the best ways to really illustrate how small asbestos is, and using some of the AI programs.

And the latest one that really puts it into perspective is if you were to take every asbestos fiber that we mined, and we've mined about 175 million tons of asbestos.

If you were to take that 175 million tons and could somehow lay every fiber end to end, it would stretch a little over 6000-000000-00000, which is the width of the entire Milky Way.

We've mined enough asbestos because those fibers are so tiny, it stretches from one side of the galaxy to another.

So, yeah, you're not going to get every fiber out.

They're just too small.

Wow, that's incredible.

And of course, I think, as we see is your point earlier, that as we get older and as time goes on more people are having abatements, that stuff's getting gone.

It's not in the new construction materials coming in, unless they're coming in from overseas, and no one's paying attention to that.

But really, it seems that 50 years from now, we might see a lot less of it, but there's still going to be that old home that has been in two generations that no one's touched, that it's still hiding in.

And it'll be a case of somebody's bad luck that they had the right genetics and they breathe the fiber in just the right time, that it will cause some sort of a disease.

And because of the latency, they might not realize that they had a childhood exposure at age 10, and they get mesothelioma at age 75.

They might never know where that even came from.

And as time goes further and further on, that's what's going to happen.

There's still the rest of the world.

Some portions of it still do use asbestos daily.

They still mine it in Russia and China especially, and they're dealing with the same kinds of problems from it.

They just don't care as much as we did.

Then we have natural disasters like what happened down in California, where you've got all these homes that potentially could have had it if they weren't remodeled and then they burned completely to the ground.

And the only thing you have left is ash and asbestos.

Pretty much, yeah.

And depending on how it's cleaned up, if at all, who knows where that stuff could go.

Because once the fire comes, there's smoke, and the smoke particles can carry asbestos, and we all know smoke can travel for miles, so can the asbestos fibers that hitch a ride on it all depending.

And again, breathing a little bit of asbestos dust for two minutes, you're probably okay.

You don't want to do it.

You don't have to be terrified.

But it's not just that one fire.

There's multiple fires and there's multiple situations.

They have what in every city, they call it a background level of asbestos, that there's no city on the planet where there's no asbestos in the air.

Some cities have more of it than others.

So everyone's getting a little dose always, and that adds up.

So every additional exposure you get might be the tipping point for you.

You just can't tell, boy.

So if you were down there in pacific palisades, you could have a serious issue, depending on how they clean those neighborhoods out before they start construction.

Because just a little bit of a breeze, all of a sudden, you could have a pretty significant concentration of asbestos, because that's what's left from those buildings, for sure.

And also in California, down near.

I want to say it's king city area, There were some.

Some very large asbestos mines, and they've tried to cordon the areas off because asbestos is at surface level, and when winds come up it picks the asbestos up.

And you can be out there hiking and get exposed to it there.

Wind will make it travel, and just as it can cling to the dirt or whatever after a fire, it's the same thing where that came from, the mines.

The stuff will be everywhere, man.

It seems that we had first lead paint.

Right.

That was the big thing in the homes.

And I think we're seeing a little less of that as people paint and things get remodeled and that kind of thing.

And then we've had asbestos.

And it seems like the next one that's emerging right now is.

And this isn't what we're here to talk about, but silica dust is creeping up on the next one for people's lungs.

It is.

And it's interesting.

Before they knew that asbestos was harmful, they knew silica was harmful because silica can kill you in months.

They had a tragedy.

I don't know if you ever heard of the Hawk's Nest tunnel in the East Coast.

They drilled a big tunnel to highway or whatnot, and hundreds of workers died from all of the silica that they breathe.

So they knew then this stuff is terrible.

And that kind of foreshadowed what would happen with asbestos.

But I was at a seminar recently for asbestos attorneys, and they had some footage in the Southern California area inside shops that are making all those lovely countertops that people want, and they're not doing things with proper protective gear.

And you're getting people in their 20s and 30s working at these fabrication shops that are getting sick and dying.

Within a couple of years, it's happening all over again.

We knew about this a hundred years ago, but people want fancy countertops and people don't want to pay top dollar for the right safety gear.

So you have a whole new group of workers that are getting sick.

Silica we're never going to be able to get rid of.

At least asbestos we could ban.

But silica is naturally in some of these counters.

Yeah.

And that one is so easily done as well because there's so many shops that can be using water to really keep that risk down.

I can't tell you how many times I'm driving around on the freeway and I see somebody over there, not a dust mask on safety glasses, and they're dry cutting concrete over there.

And they've got a.

They've got a dust cloud from 30ft long going across the roadway.

And the guy's just covered white like somebody poured chalk over him.

And I'm like, ah, not good.

Yeah, not at all.

And I Just will make the point.

Those, the 3M dust masks, they don't stop asbestos.

They just don't.

So for Quite a while.

3M even got sued a lot because they've implied maybe they don't.

So even the little one doesn't work.

You need the respirators.

You said those particles are so small, if it's not a HEPA or other good filtering system, it's going to get through.

And yeah, he's saying like we've had so many clients say that they felt like they were covered in snow that looked like they're just drenched in white powder.

It's a very, it gets really easily airborne and clings and it's, it's a unique material, put it that way.

Yeah.

And that's again another one of those things that I don't know how many times I've seen.

Maybe it's the mason that's up there working on the chimney, repointing it to a countertop guy that's out there cutting the sinkhole in the driveway with a grinder.

Again, we're putting more people at risk and that's a whole other show on its own.

But it seems like we're just getting ready to do the same thing over and over again and then there'll be another product that we'll run into.

And the one thing that.

And you and I talked a little bit about this when we chatted, but I think one of the biggest ones that I'm seeing now out there is that we see all of these new luxury vinyl plank floors.

They have a stone core.

So then when you call the manufacturers and have done this and they say, hey, what's in your stone core?

And they say, oh, it's a post consumer or post production recycled stone dust.

And I'm like, what's stone?

They said some of it's limestone.

Okay.

If someone is out there with a chop saw installing this luxury vinyl plank flooring, all of a sudden you've got an issue there with silicos.

That's because all of a sudden you've got that inside the house because somebody's in there cutting away.

Absolutely.

And what the industry would be doing, I actually, I was unaware that the luxury vinyl could add silica in the core.

I don't cut a lot of flooring myself.

But like the game they would be playing is by the time these end users get sick, they'll never know whose dust they breathed.

That's what these fastest companies did for decades.

They realized you're never going to know whose Products they worked with, if they even know that's what made them sick.

So that's really offensive to hear that companies today are putting products that they know could cause silicosis and not giving proper warnings.

Like the whole game for the asbestos industry was we don't want to put warning labels on stuff because then people won't buy it.

That's all you have to do.

Like, it's not illegal to sell something dangerous.

You can go to the gas station and buy gasoline.

It'll blow up, it can kill you, you.

But there's a warning on a gas container and on a gas pump.

You just have to put a warning sticker on these things and it'd be a get out of jail free card.

But many companies chose, they see the warning, they might buy something else.

So let's not do that.

Yeah, the marketing department was not happy about putting that on there and I get that.

But wow, that also opens up the legal department for that as well.

Definitely.

The asbestos companies, the big boys, they got away with it.

By the time it caught up what they had done, it took 50 years, but it tanked their business.

John's Manville is doing good today and doesn't make asbestos.

They had to do a big pivot.

Their whole industry, everything they made poof.

Because they lied and they concealed things.

And if there had been some honesty about the risks of asbestos, then maybe there have been some other uses for it.

The fireproof nature is really interesting of asbestos.

And I think to myself, like, my grandfather died of cancer in part because he was exposed to asbestos on World War II ships.

Would the world have been a better place if he would have burned to death at sea?

Probably not.

You're trading lives and when you have safety things, it's all trade offs.

The problem was the big companies wanted to make those trade offs for you and not even tell you about it.

You should know your risks and make your decisions accordingly.

Makes sense.

Justinian, what should someone do if they're a homeowner and they hired a company to come in and do their maybe kitchen or bath or whole house remodel and they see that things weren't done correctly, that maybe their contractor took some shortcuts and could have run into some serious asbestos issues and they come in after the fact.

The first thing I'd want to do in such a situation is get some testing done, some samples of some materials, maybe some air samples to see if there's an issue.

Maybe there's not.

And the sloppy contractor didn't cause any issues.

But if there are, and you are seeing those materials that shouldn't have been there and yet the air sampling is not turning out well, you might have some recourse against the contractor.

We don't really do the property damage that we call that.

I'm aware of how those procedures work, but we really help the folks that get sick.

I will say that if you're going to do a remodel, you might want something in your contract with the contractor about a special justice, that if they find it, they will do A, B or C, or notify you.

The first thing is protect yourself from the start.

And then they might be on the hook.

If they screw those things up, you can make them pay to get the things done properly.

And I would say too, if you own an old home and you think that there could be under the three layers of flooring or whatever, make sure that your insurance policy is going to cover that abatement.

Otherwise that's going to be something.

You're on the hook if you have a water leak or someplace like that.

Because many times those floors were used in wet areas, whether it's a kitchen, bathroom, or an entryway or something, something like that.

Because they wanted something durable.

Definitely.

It's a very durable material.

I was reading one of the asbestos companies, they built.

They built a shack to protect some pump or whatever out of transite the concrete that was really reinforced with asbestos.

And they were curious, 50 years later, they had to tear it down.

How much did this stuff wear?

It had nowhere in 50 years, it was still the same thickness.

And they actually ended up saying, we will warranty the asbestos that we make longer than will warranty any of the steel you attach to it.

Wow.

Like, it's crazy durable.

It's a rock.

Rocks don't.

They don't really die like that.

So, yeah, the, the durability of it is why it was so popular and why it's so hazardous to the health and all of that.

Yeah, that makes perfectly good sense.

And then there's the people out there that maybe their dad was working in a mine, maybe they were working in industry out there, or even on World War II ships, and all of a sudden they're getting sick.

What should they be doing?

Yeah, if somebody was exposed decades ago, they might have some legal recourse.

I know we offer free asbestos health testing to people that would have worked in that era.

The way that you test asbestos causes certain types of damage to the lung, just like silica.

Silica tends to damage the top part of your lung.

Asbestos tends to damage the bottom and they leave their own unique fingerprint.

So you can get an X ray and specially trained doctors can tell the difference.

I've looked at thousands of X rays.

I can barely see it myself.

But they've got better eyes and they can see these little squiggles that look like ground glass.

And that's scar tissue.

What the asbestos does is it damages your real lung tissue and turns it into just.

If you cut your hand and you get a scar, it's a little collagen matter and it just doesn't work.

But those scars can show up.

And if you have scarring on your lungs, you could have some compensation options if, God forbid, somebody has mesothelioma that's almost exclusively caused by asbestos.

There's asbestos exposure in their past and then lung cancer.

My grandparents were both smokers, so I just assumed that's what did it.

But I learned that if you smoked and you were exposed to asbestos, you are substantially more likely to get lung cancer than if you were just exposed to asbestos or were just a smoker.

They call it a synergistic effect.

It's more like a multiplier.

It's not.

You're five times more likely here and five times more likely there.

So it's 10 times.

You multiply them and they'll say it's 50 to 90 times.

Wow.

So what I tell people is don't blame just the cigarette companies.

Asbestos did this too, and they have liability for that.

And the treatments, very expensive for cancer chemotherapy, things like that.

Don't make your family suffer that burden.

Make the people who did this pay for that.

That.

Good call.

Good call.

Or running out of time.

What have we missed and not talked about today?

Let me think.

What.

I guess what I'd like to stress for asbestos is it was in any device or product or building you could think of for about 50 years.

They put it in so many things you'd have never thought of.

I have a wonderful drink serving tray from, I believe it was John's Manville, showing that the best name in beer is John's Manville.

Because every beer manufacturer filtered asbestos.

They filtered their beer through that.

I don't know which company.

I've been trying to find out for years, but I know one company used it as a filler in dog food.

I can't imagine that.

Wow.

In dog food.

Yeah.

You're not supposed to eat it, by the way, but they would put it in any possible thing that they could.

So don't just assume something is safe I have pieces of little toy train set sets that were made with asbestos.

Your child is playing with it.

It was as common in the 50s, 60s and 70s as plastic is today.

Wow, that is massive.

If somebody needs help out there with any of these issues, how do they track you down?

Sure.

My website is AsbestosClaims Law.

You can find us there.

Or if you have questions, the phone number is really easy.

8, 3, 3, 4.

Asbestos.

That's all we do as asbestos.

I'm about as immersed in it as anybody could possibly be.

And even I tell people like I come on shows like this, anybody today who's exposed with asbestos, by the time they get sick, I'm either going to be dead or retired.

I'm trying to make sure people don't get sick 30, 40, 50 years from now, even after I'm gone.

I'm trying to tell a story that the companies never really put out there and make sure that to whatever end, we can put a period on this tragedy.

Yeah, it makes sense.

And I was just thinking too that how many garbage men and people working in the waste management type of business, not the company, but the people managing our waste out there, how many times those people have been exposed over the years as well?

And that's just mind boggling to think of those numbers because all those materials in your house, when they were broken or anything else got thrown in the trash.

Absolutely.

And if you have unethical contractors that aren't doing proper abatement, they're exposing the sanitation workers too.

It doesn't just go into a landfill, never to be seen again.

That dust will go everywhere.

It'll flow out of the back of the trash can into or into a neighborhood.

It's just, it's really dangerous stuff that people should pay at least a little bit of attention to, if not for themselves, for their children and the future generations.

Justinian, thanks for coming on today, man.

I love your knowledge on this and I hope that really helped our audience navigate this because there's just so much misinformation out there.

I was happy to get this where we could clear it up a little bit for them.

Thanks so much.

I appreciate you the invite and had a great time on the show.

Thanks man.

It's been great.

I'm Eric G. And you've been listening to around the House.