It seems like every country has one or two or seventeen towns that you really shouldn’t visit anymore. There was an accident. Or an on-purpose. Or a “look, we didn’t know, don’t blame us for the glowing cats.”
With the most heroic of clean-up efforts, some major disaster areas can be made safe enough to stop them from causing any further damage.
Then there are places we looked at and said, “naw.”
Today’s Moment of Science… Wittenoom, the asbestos ghost town.
There are several forms of asbestos, and you shouldn’t fuck with any of them if you value breathing. The most common one, chrysotile, is like a devil rock sent from hell that creates magically strong and flame resistant fluffy fibers that silently goddamn kill you. About 90% of asbestos ever used in the US was chrysotile.
Most forms of asbestos have similar qualities, to varying degrees of ‘fuck up your life.’ The type commonly mined in Africa, Bolivia, and for today’s story, Wittenoom, Australia, is called crocidolite, aka blue asbestos. It’s suspected to have killed more people than any other form of asbestos. Its fine, sharp fibers make it incredibly carcinogenic.
It somehow feels right that Australia grows the deadliest asbestos.
As has happened every time there’s been asbestos mining through history, so went the familiar cycle in Wittenoom. Asbestos was first found in the region in 1917. In the early 1930s, grand asbestos deposits were found in the Wittenoom Gorge, with operations slowly taking shape towards the end of the decade. A mining town sprung up around where the good paying mining jobs were, and the town swelled to a population of 20,000. Life was good for a while, as the mine continued to produce jobs and a stable lifestyle for the town through the 1960s. The mine was shut down in 1966 due to a decline in profits.
Oh, and the horrific rates of cancer.
To date, approximately ten percent of the workers and residents have died of mesothelioma. People who didn’t ever work in the mines developed mesothelioma at alarming rates as well because the local environment became choked with asbestos fibers from the mine.
It’s approximated that Wittenoom is polluted with over three million tonnes of asbestos tailings.
When they realized they’d shat in the pool, they didn’t order everyone out to drain it and decontaminate. They just ordered everyone out and left the shit there to float.
According to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Lands, Ben Wyatt, nothing can be done to possibly make the place livable. They’ve salted the earth and they’ve salted it forfuckingever.
At this point no electricity or water runs to the town. Actually, it’s not really a town; Australia has taken it off the maps and, essentially, declared it no longer a town in 2006. It’s a nameless asbestos wasteland.
Y’all, they cancelled Wittenoom.
Though most people moved out, some stubbornly remained even after seeing friends and loved ones succumb to the fibers that drown you in your own lungs. As of 2017, four people were left. In 2019, only one resident remained in the town. It’s unclear from recent reporting if they’ve moved out now.
In recent years, people have been warned against visiting Wittenoom as a tourist attraction. Because of course that’s a thing. I guess if visiting an old nuclear haunt in Eastern Europe wasn’t enough of a thrill, you just gotta check out the asbestos ghost town in Western Australia.
This has been your daily Moment of Science reminding you that there’s still asbestos mining in Russia.
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When I was a child in Art class, Canada, mid-1950s, we made many of our our models in plasticine. Another modelling medium was ‘Asbestos Paste’. I remember watching the teacher add water to the powder until it was a good texture. As a modelling medium, it wasn’t great. Fell apart easily. Being foolish as children are, we played with it. We flattened it and powdered it. We stuffed it into each others’ ears, or up our own noses …. I wonder what they’d find if they did a follow-up study ….
Yeah, we did the same with elemental mercury as kids.
We’re all fine fine.
Two things:
1) The worst use of blue asbestos was in cigarette filters. This is no shit.
In the 1950s people were starting to get worried about how dangerous cigarettes were. And of course, instead of…well, y’know, not smoking them anymore…they went on a long search to invent a cigarette filter that would let people smoke safely. That certainly worked, right? Well…the Lorillard Company created a filter that could strain out particles down to the micron level, named it Micronite, and put it on their new Kent cigarette. The filtering medium in the Micronite was good old blue asbestos. The asbestos company that was making the filters, Hollingsworth & Vose, eventually told Lorillard they had to figure out some way to get rid of the asbestos dust. After they got wind of people claiming blue asbestos was dangerous because the cigarettes with it in them were giving people cancer – and not because blue asbestos is dangerous all by itself – Hollingsworth & Vose told Lorillard they needed to invent a new filter without their products in it. It took them over a year to come up with a cigarette that’ll only kill you one way, and they kept selling the ones that kill you two different ways until they ran out. Hollingsworth & Vose is still in business, although they stopped trading asbestos decades ago.
2) An Elixir Sulfanilamide article should be a lot of fun, and maybe also a Lash Lure piece. Elixir Sulfanilamide was a liquid antibiotic made out of antifreeze that killed everyone who took it, and Lash Lure was a mascara that could dissolve your eyeballs. Great shit, Maynard.
Elixir Sulfanilamide was already on the list. Adding Lash Lure now!
I’d not use a glowing cat, when one could mention a Japanese dancing cat.
For those unfamiliar, Google “dancing cat Japan” for a horror story about mercury pollution, chicanery and a very real conspiracy.
As for chrysotile, it’s not all that carcinogenic in non-smokers, overall rand well, what pad shields delicate crucibles and glassware in a chemistry lab from shattering or melting heat again?
An N95 filter and full body PPE would more than suffice in working it or mining it, although robots would be cheaper… 😉
Given that I am a smoker, I’ll not be within the distance of a former US national executive’s chain of lies and a deposit.
The other bestest use of asbestos was its placement as filters for, wait for this… hair dryers… This was discovered in the 1970s’….. https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/1980/Additional-Hair-Dryers-Made-With-Asbestos-To-Be-Repaired-By-Their-Two-Manufacturers