Asbestos Removal Questions

Is this the water feed into the house from the main on the road?

Is this insulation wrapped around the existing pipe and has it been tested?  I think that would be my first action.

Alternatively get someone else to install a new feed to the house from the road using a different route and leave the existing pipe in place..

(Yes, some councils will take asbestos is it's double bagged and has been pre-booked)

I have actually read that on our local council website that you can just take asbestos to your local tip (by agreement)

Do you want to mess with asbestos though?

First thing to do is establish if it is asbestos by getting it tested. Could be a load of old cement roofing sheets. Or it could actually be asbestos sheets - it's the sort of thing people did just bury. If it is, BG won't be equipped to deal with it so no point having a go at them.

I had an asbestos shed removed recently and it cost more than the new shed! If you are in the midlands these are who I used and they were very good. Similar price to others and very efficient...
https://www.midlandsasbestossolutions.co.uk/

Agree with Sharkbait.

In any dealings i have with sites/contractors. If you uncover anything suspected to be asbestos - the edict is to stop work immediately.

So get it tested to see if it is asbestos as a first step.

We won’t start or continue doing any work in
your home if we believe there’s a health and
safety risk, for example: hazardous chemicals,
pest infestations, verbal or physical abuse, or
harassment. And we won’t return to finish the
work until that risk is gone.
If any asbestos needs to be removed before
we can repair your boiler, appliance or system,
you’ll need to arrange and pay for someone
else to remove it and give you a Certificate of
Reoccupation which you’ll need to show us.

Ive just found BG's T&C's. it sounds like last week BG poorly advised my parents, and they are within their right to say the asbestos has to be removed.

However I guess the question still stands. Do they get a certificate for the hole thats currently been dug and risk uncovering more, or get the asbestos people to dig to the road at my parents expense, but just pay once ?!

You can get it tested for under £100, but reality is, if they want it done, you may be better off doing it yourself and bagging up as above, our council do asbestos disposal at their sites, i got rid of all my old garage roof panels this way, just double plastic and sign the book.

I also had to dig up my back garden and destroy half a lean too due to a water leak, painful, but you can work out the pipe route to the road and then dig up, it's usually just 2 or 3 foot down, the water company wouldn't do it as they only dig up if they know exactly where the leak is.

However I guess the question still stands. Do they get a certificate for the hole thats currently been dug and risk uncovering more, or get the asbestos people to dig to the road at my parents expense, but just pay once ?!

On reflection - if they are still connected with the old pipe I'd be inclined tell them to sod off though and finish the job they started, especially as they instigated it. Have they got legal expenses cover on their home insurance? If so it may be worth a call.

And it's Cadent who should be doing the work, not British Gas. From Cadent website...

[i]Who is responsible for gas pipes?
If you live in the North West, West Midlands, East Midlands, South Yorkshire, East of England or North London, we look after the gas pipes in your street. We are responsible for all the gas pipes running up to your meter.[/i]

https://cadentgas.com/help-advice/frequently-asked-questions

Unfortunately a lot of this relates to my parents getting old, and they are finding the whole thing very stressful. More and more scenarios are cropping up as they get older. Each time we ask they involve us at the start, but they never do until its too difficult for them.

Apparently its the fresh water feed from the main which is a good 30m down the drive. The local Water Co 3 weeks ago told them they had a leak and they needed to repair it within 2 weeks (the law apparently ?!) So like on previous occasions they got BG to come in and do it.

BG started digging and found the asbestos. They have it tested at their expense and found it to be chrysotile asbestos.

My parents then appear to have got all confused to what BG have said they will do / not do. BG have confirmed to me they are happy to continue their works past the rear of the house as they think it is localised, they just want someone to come and remove the existing stuff and dig the existing trench probably a meter or two further. They then want to leave the existing pipe in situ, and route the new pip down the middle of the drive away from the existing path. As its outdoors they are saying they dont need a certificate.

All sounds very logical and reasonable to me.

Re council, I was just really surprised they will let you bag the stuff up yourself and taking to a tip, agreed or not ! I certainly wouldnt be touching the stuff

Yeah, it's a little known service, you'll get lots of shady companies running if you mention asbestos, but reality is the local tip, or tip in your area can take it, there's set amounts though, for the roof panels it was 6 x 2 metre panels, we took it down in 4 loads.

Is the asbestos found lagging, or is it the actual pipe, trying to get my head around where it's been discovered if it's the supply pipe, it'll just be a pipe running from the communication pipe via your water meter (if they have one), so shouldn't really have any lagging, well any asbestos lagging anyway, and if it is the pipe that's asbestos, then why are they talking about leaving it in-situ to replace, sounds weird.

Is the asbestos found lagging, or is it the actual pipe, trying to get my head around where it’s been discovered if it’s the supply pipe,

the thought is that the house was built on the site of an old shed. We know for a fact that the house was built by a cowboy in the 70's, so he probably just knocked down the old shed and started building on top. I dont think its a pipe itself that is being questioned, just it was a new pipe need to be laid that uncovered the asbestos.

If it's a whole shed there could be quite a lot of it then? Potentially spread out further than the area?

It sounds like it's likely to be asbestos cement sheets, which at least isn't licenced removal work. So effectively anyone who's willing to can remove it. Worth getting some quotes for removal as that won't cost anything, though I'm not sure what estimate they'll give if they can't see the full extent of how much there is.

As others have said, step 1 is to get it tested. It's my understanding that you can't tell if it's the Bad Stuff by sight alone.

At my local tip recycling centre they allow you to take asbestos, but it has to be double-bagged in bags which they provide and you can only transport so much at once. This is a free service to domestic consumers but chargeable to the trade. This is, as far as I know, the rules at my local place rather than across the board so I'd suggest talking to your local services to ask what the craic is.

We know for a fact that the house was built by a cowboy in the 70’s, so he probably just knocked down the old shed and started building on top.

Asbestos wasn't know to be an issue in the 70's so that was the default practice.  TBH the councils just bury it now anyway.

As said, if it's asbestos/concrete sheet then it's low hazard anyway - just don't smash it with a hammer, grind it up and then snort the resulting powder!

Re council, I was just really surprised they will let you bag the stuff up yourself and taking to a tip, agreed or not ! I certainly wouldnt be touching the stuff

Its because its actually safer for them to let you do it and provide the safest way possible do that (double bagged, clearly labelled etc) than say its not permitted and then have people who know full well its dodgy breaking it up to stick in mixed garden rubble and chucking that it the main skip for the workers to be contaminated with.  Same argument for a lot of hazardous waste - make it easy for people to do it right and you reduce the frequency of dealing with the mess when someone tries to dodge it.

They have it tested at their expense and found it to be chrysotile asbestos.

OK so you now know there is some nasty stuff to deal with.  How nasty depends on the format, how easy to remove it (e.g. if it needs cut to get it out etc).    As you are coming to realise - this is becoming your problem even although its technically not.  Without being too morbid, presumably one day you are going to inherit part of this property (and or be an executor) or be helping them sell the house when they move into something more suited to their age/care etc.  It likely at some point you will have to complete some form about things you know about the property to disclose to the buyer - if you want to play that safe and honest (and asbestos is a bit too evil to "forget to mention" IMHO) then that will be much easier if you can say "there was asbestos under the driveway, we paid to get it removed, here's the invoice/report, and we don't know about any more.

 As its outdoors they are saying they dont need a certificate.

I am a little bit surprised at that.  OK the certificate might not be relevant as its about safe for habitation, but if I was working on that site I'd want proof that ALL the asbestos was gone from ALL the areas where I was working.  So perhaps not a certificate but some sort of report on what was removed, how it was done, how far beyond the current trench was checked etc.  It is possible this is mostly obvious by looking in the big hole and not seeing sheets of material - but given the problem particles are microscopic I'd expect some more questions.

If its an easy job a contractor isn't going to be too expensive.  If it is a nightmare job you don't want to DIY it anyway.

https://asbestoswatchdog.com/

The forum seems to make this link into Ann unviewable image! Here’s the address. https://asbestoswatchdog(DOT)com/

Ps, I’m no Telegraph reader. This info came from the asbestos watchdog people.

“Booker Column 13 October Sunday Telegraph 2006

Imagine that a very experienced, knowledgeable and brave whistleblower sets out to expose a commercial racket which is ripping off businesses and members of the public to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and which a government agency, despite being supplied with factual evidence, does nothing to stop. If a leading BBC ‘consumer affairs’ programme learned about this story, might one not expect it to throw all its resources into exposing the racket?

It might seem odd that, using evidence supplied by the very people who are behind the scam, the BBC would instead pull out all the stops to discredit the whistleblower. Yet such is the bizarre situation which will arise this Wednesday, when Radio Four’s You and Yours programme attempts to sabotage the four-year campaign waged by Professor John Bridle, Britain’s leading practical asbestos expert, to expose the malpractices of many firms in the asbestos industry,

This column has supported Bridle’s crusade since 2002, when the Health and Safety Executive proposed new asbestos regulations which, on its own original figures, would cost £8 billion. Introduced to me by the Federation of Small Businesses, Bridle explained how these regulations were so seriously flawed that they would open the door to shameless exploitation by many of the firms to which the HSE gave the exclusive right to handle asbestos.

When I checked this out with some of the leading asbestos scientists in this country, they not only endorsed what he was saying but said they were enthusiastically behind his campaign. Such support did it win from members of the public, not least readers of this column, that Bridle set up Asbestos Watchdog, a company dedicated to giving honest advice to the ever larger number of people who found themselves victims of the racket.

So powerful was Bridle’s case that Asbestos Watchdog was given the HSE’s official support, and on November 26 2004 was appointed by Bill McDonald, the HSE’s head of asbestos policy, as an official ‘stakeholder’ to advise on policy. One leading asbestos company was so alarmed by the practices rife in the industry that it even gave Asbestos Watchdog significant financial backing.

But so vast were the sums now at stake that there have recently been clear signs of a concerted move by the powerful ‘anti-asbestos lobby’ to silence Bridle. One of their greatest successes to date has been winning the support of the You and Yours team. Fortunately the programme has informed him of 18 of the charges they plan to throw at him, all of which have been levelled before by different branches of the anti-asbestos lobby. It is hard to believe that the BBC will be so reckless as to repeat them (when he offered documentary evidence to refute their charges, one journalist said they were so confident they were right that this was not necessary).

Some charges are laughable, such as that Bridle falsely claims to have been made in 2005 an honorary professor of the prestigious Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Confirmed by the academy’s official certificate, this was widely reported in Russia at the time as the first occasion on which anyone had been so honoured.

They charge him with falsely claiming to have advised the Conservative Party leadership. Yet in 2002 when, following a briefing from Bridle, the party’s then-leader Iain Duncan-Smith wrote to the government asking for the regulations to be delayed until they could be debated by Parliament, Bridle (and I) gave extensive written and verbal briefings to John Bercow, the front-bench Tory spokesman who led the debate, as You and Yours could have confirmed by consulting Hansard.

The BBC denies that Asbestos Watchdog, much to the rage of the asbestos industry, has saved businesses and homeowners tens of millions of pounds by advising how asbestos work could legally and safely be carried out for a fraction of the sums they had been quoted by contractors, as I have reported here (not least because many of the beneficiaries were readers of the Sunday Telegraph). The BBC did not even want to look at the evidence.

The central point on which the whole asbestos scam rests, as You and Yours seems unable to grasp, is the confusion, now made worse by some very bad law, between two completely different minerals, both passing under the general but unscientific term ‘asbestos’. One includes the genuinely dangerous blue and brown forms (amphiboles, which have sharp metallic fibres, remaining in the lungs, can cause cancer). The other, very much commoner,‘white asbestos’(chrysotile, the soft silky fibres of which dissolve in the lungs within 15 days) is usually encapsulated in cement or textured coatings, from which it is virtually impossible to extract a single fibre.

Yet it is on the sleight of hand allowing the dangers of one mineral to be attributed to the other that huge sums of money are now being made by those who play on public fear and ignorance, and which the HSE does nothing to stop.

As itself a victim of this confusion, the BBC seems desperate to pin on Bridle the damning charge that he claims that ‘white asbestos is harmless’. Yet he is always scrupulously careful to cite the most comprehensive review yet conducted of the scientific literature (Hoskins and Lang 2004) as showing that white cement products pose ‘no measurable risk to health’. Instead of falling for such distortions and untruths, the BBC team should be asking why they plan to give credence to the most disgraceful commercial racket flourishing in Britain today.

******

Booker Column 12 July 2012 Sunday telegraph
What is the most outrageous Government-supported scam in Britain today? Obviously there are a number of competitors for this dubious title, One is PFI (Public Finance Initiative)m whereby we pay private contractors up to three times the value of the hospitals and other public infrastructure projects they build. Another is the ‘Great Wind Scam’, whereby we must pour billions of pounds into the pockets of the wind industry, for supplying us, very unreliably, with derisory amounts of electricity, But there is shortly to be a legal challenge to at least part of another hugely costly scam, based on the way powerful lobby groups have managed to hi-jack Government policy on the emotive and widely misunderstood subject of asbestos,
On behalf of some 50,000 farmers, and supported by the National Farmers Union, Brian Edgley, who farms 2,500 acres in Berkshire, is asking the High Court to declare unlawful a new set of asbestos regulations which his lawyers will claim are wholly unworkable, not based on proper science and could face farmers with a quite unnecessary bill for £6 billion,
The story of how the framing of Government asbestos policy has been taken over by a group of lobbyists centres on the deliberately created confusion between two quite different minerals, both passing under the unscientific name ‘asbestos’. It is 50 years since the world first learned of the danger posed to human health by exposure to the ‘blue’ and ‘brown’ forms of asbestos fibre, iron silicates which remain in the lungs for years and can cause horrifying lung diseases such as mesothelioma.
But in the years that followed, a systematic attempt was made to blur this together with the very much commoner ‘white’ asbestos, a magnesium silicate which quickly dissolves in the human lung, and which, particularly when it is used as a bonding agent in cement, poses no measurable risk to health at all. The fibres in cement (90 percent of all asbestos products) undergo a chemical change which makes them no longer respirable.
The lobby groups which chiefly benefit from this confusion include the licensed asbestos contractors, who charge exorbitant sums for removing asbestos cement; and the lawyers who bring compensation claims on behalf of clients who no longer need prove that their disease was caused by asbestos. This is abetted by the insurance companies who no longer contest such claims, knowing that they can be paid for by raising premiums to all their other customers.
Farmers are particularly vulnerable to the scam because some 50,000 farms in Britain have buildings made of asbestos cement which must eventually be replaced – and the new Control of Asbestos regulations, which came into force in April, make it virtually impossible for farmers to remove and dispose of asbestos cement without calling on the very costly services of the specialist contractors who lobbied for them.
Mr Edgley, supported by expert scientific advisers, is seeking a judicial review of these regulations, on the grounds that they conform with none of the six basic criteria governing such law, not least by creating an ‘exposure threshold’ which cannot be scientifically measured. Among many other requirements, they compel anyone needing asbestos to be removed to pay for everyone involved to be medically examined every three years thereafter, with all records to be kept for 40 years.
Since 2010 Mr Edgley and his advisers have been trying to put their case to ministers of the Department of Work and Pensions, responsible for asbestos regulation through the HSE, to the point where the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddinngton, a population biologist, was asked to hold an inquiry, But Beddington’s committee consisted almost entirely of members already committed to the official view, and Mr Edgley was astonished to discover that the technical evidence he and his team supplied to the inquiry was not even passed to the committee.
That is why Mr Edgley has finally concluded that the only way the farmers’ case can be heard is by bringing a case in the High Court against Iain Duncan-Smith, as the DWP’s Secretary of State - although responsibility for the conduct of the Beddington inquiry lay with his junior, Chris Grayling, whom Mr Edgley’s legal team will ask to attend the High Court, to explain why the committee was not shown the evidence.
Like many other businesses, the farmers face a double whammy, thanks to an extraordinary judgment in 2010 by the Supreme Court, which opened the door for almost any business to be sued for compensation by anyone who can claim to have been dangerously exposed to asbestos while working for them. Lord Justice Phillips, as I reported at the time, not only made no distinction between the harmful and harmless forms of asbestos, but began his judgment with a scientific howler, by stating that probably every case of mesothelioma results from exposure to asbestos.
Phillips had clearly not read the scientific literature, which shows that at least 25 percent of mesotheliomas occur naturally; many more can be attributed to the Salk polio vaccine; and, as the HSE itself stated in 1996, virtually none, if any, have been caused by exposure to white asbestos. But Phillips’s curiously ill-informed ruling has paved the way for an avalanche of new compensation claims from people who may not have been damaged by asbestos at all - but which, thanks to his ruling. are scarcely worth contesting.
At least one part of this many-headed racket is about to meet a serious legal challenge; and it will be particularly interesting to hear Mr Grayling explain why the Beddington committee was not allowed to see the scientific evidence which was the reason it was set up in the first place,

as above there is 'ok' asbestos and really bad stuff.  important to understand what you have.  cement board stuff is disable, use safety kit,double bag and local tip.  if its lagging or insulation that's a professional job.

worth taking a look at the site and whether the drain can go in a different place.  doesn't have to go exactly where yhe old one is.  you could avoid the buried stuff.

I was digging a fence post hole a few weeks back and hit some old flooring tiles quite a way down in an old flower bed, a chance of asbestos, so I moved the fence line slightly and avoided it.  much easier with a post hole though