City in Russia Unable to Kick Asbestos Habit
Olga Kravets for The New York Times
Every weekday afternoon in
Asbest, Russia, miners set explosions in an asbestos strip mine, sending
out clouds of carcinogenic dust.
ASBEST, Russia — This city of about 70,000 people on the eastern slopes
of the Ural Mountains is a pleasant enough place to live except for one
big drawback: when the wind picks up, clouds of carcinogenic dust blow
through.
Olga Kravets for The New York Times
Retirees living in Asbest, including Tamara A. Biserova, center, and Nina A. Zubkova, right.
Asbest means asbestos in Russian, and it is everywhere here. Residents
describe layers of it collecting on living room floors. Before they take
in the laundry from backyard lines, they first shake out the asbestos.
“When I work in the garden, I notice asbestos dust on my raspberries,”
said Tamara A. Biserova, a retiree. So much dust blows against her
windows, she said, that “before I leave in the morning, I have to sweep
it out.”
The town is one center of Russia’s asbestos industry, which is
stubbornly resistant to shutting asbestos companies and phasing in
substitutes for the cancer-causing fireproofing product.
In the United States and most developed economies, asbestos is handled
with extraordinary care. Until the 1970s, the fibrous, silicate mineral
was used extensively in fireproofing and insulating buildings in
America, among other uses, but growing evidence of respiratory ailments
due to asbestos exposure led to limits. Laws proscribe its use and its
disposal and workers who get near it wear ventilators and protective
clothes. The European Union and Japan have also banned asbestos. (A town
called Asbestos in Quebec, Canada, has stopped mining asbestos, though
it hasn’t changed its name.)
But not here, where every weekday afternoon miners set explosions in a strip mine owned by the Russian mining company Uralasbest.
The blasts send huge plumes of asbestos fiber and dust into the air.
Asbest is one of the more extreme examples of the environmental costs of
modern Russia’s deep reliance on mining.
“Every normal person is trying to get out of here,” Boris Balobanov, a
former factory employee, now a taxi driver, explained. “People who value
their lives leave. But I was born here and have no place else to go.”
Of the half-dozen people interviewed who worked at the factory or mine,
all had a persistent cough, a symptom of exposure to what residents call
“the white needles.” Residents also describe strange skin ailments.
Doctors interviewed at a dermatology ward say the welts arise from
inflammation caused by asbestos.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is a branch of
the World Health Organization, is in the midst of a multiyear study of
asbestos workers in Asbest. Because of the large number of people
exposed in the city, the researchers are using the location to determine
whether the asbestos causes ailments other than lung cancer, including
ovarian cancer. “All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic to humans,” the
group said.
Standing on the rim of the world’s largest open pit asbestos mine
provides a panoramic scene. Opened in the late 1800s, it is about half
the size of the island of Manhattan and the source of untold tons of
asbestos. The pit descends about 1,000 feet down slopes created by
terraced access roads. Big mining trucks haul out fibrous, gray, raw
asbestos.
The Uralasbest mine is so close by that a few years ago the mayor’s
office and the company relocated residents from one outlying area to
expand its gaping pit.
So entwined is the life of the town with this pit that many newlyweds
pose on a viewing platform on the rim to have their pictures taken. The
city has a municipal anthem called “Asbestos, my city and my fate.” In
2002, the City Council adopted a new flag: white lines, symbolizing
asbestos fibers, passing through a ring of flame. A billboard put up by
Uralasbest in Asbest proclaims “Asbestos is our Future.”
The class-action lawsuits that demolished asbestos companies in the
United States are not possible in Russia’s weak judicial system, which
favors powerful producers. Russia, which has the world’s largest
geological reserves of asbestos, mines about a million tons of asbestos a
year and exports about 60 percent of it. Demand is still strong for
asbestos in China and India, where it is used in insulation and building
materials. The Russian Chrysotile Association, an asbestos industry
trade group, reports that annual sales total about 18 billion rubles, or
$540 million. And the business is growing, mostly because other
countries are getting out of the business.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 18, 2013
An article on Sunday about Asbest, a Russian city that remains dependent on the mining of asbestos despite the health perils, misstated Russia’s asbestos output in one reference. It is about a million tons a year, as the article noted at one point, not “about 850,000 tons,” the figure used in another reference. (The lower figure was from the Russian trade association’s Web site; the higher one from a more detailed year-by-year breakdown from the United States Geological Survey.)
Correction: July 18, 2013
An article on Sunday about Asbest, a Russian city that remains dependent on the mining of asbestos despite the health perils, misstated Russia’s asbestos output in one reference. It is about a million tons a year, as the article noted at one point, not “about 850,000 tons,” the figure used in another reference. (The lower figure was from the Russian trade association’s Web site; the higher one from a more detailed year-by-year breakdown from the United States Geological Survey.)
