This article is from page 6 of the 2014-03-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 6 JPG
CONCERNS have been expressed that children unknowingly played on and close to asbestos material, while their patents fished at Lislanaghan Lake in Kilkee.
Local people said there was no signs to indicate any danger from asbestos at the site of the former reservoir prior to the issue being raised by former councillor PJ Linnane last June.
Clare County Council admitted this week that it did not know how long the asbestos was illegally dumped at nine sites in West Clare, stating “the material appears to have been deposited over an undetermined number of years up to June 2013”.
Described by medical profession as “the hidden killer”, asbestos can cause four serious lung and respiratory diseases that can take years to affect those exposed.
According to the Health and Safety Executive in the UK, these illnesses “will not affect you immediately; they often take a long time to develop, but once diagnosed, it is often too late to do anything. There is a need for you to protect yourself now.”
It is understood the asbestos material dumped in West Clare is from broken pieces of the council’s own Asbestos Cement Water Mains.
It is also not known how much of this waste was deposited at the council depot in Kilkee, four other sites at Lislanaghan, Kilkee; the Dunlicky Road, Kilkee; the council depot in Kilrush; Ballykett, Kilrush and Breaffa, Kilrush.
Clare County Council said that it has commissioned an external independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the depositing of Asbestos-Cement materials and work is to begin this week on stage one of removing the dangerous substance.
It is ten months since Mr Linnane first reported the asbestos piping discovered near his home, and just over three months since the dumping in Kilkee was revealed in The Clare People .
In answer to a number of questions, a spokesperson for the council said yesterday that it had tested the pipe material at one of the sites.
“Some of the pieces of pipe consisted of white asbestos. Some of the pipes consisted of a mixture of white and brown asbestos. Asbestos cement pipes historically were made from white asbestos or a mixture of white and brown asbestos. All of the waste asbestos cement pipe material will be removed.”
Brown asbestos is considered by experts to be more dangerous to human health than white asbestos.
Meanwhile a Health and Safety expert told The Clare People that the asbestos pipes should have been identified before the process of removing them began. The asbestos material should then be double-bagged by those with special training and equipment before being removed by RILTA, the only organisation in the state qualified to do so.
“There is the potential of asbestos going into the air every time that the broken pipes were disturbed. This could be a danger to workers or anyone in the area that moved them in any way. The equipment used to remove the pipes would also be considered contaminated officially, but this would not pose a huge risk,” he said.