Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Now to an alarming legacy of the Queensland floods: asbestos still sitting in Brisbane streets. It takes a relatively small amount of exposure to the dangerous building material to get into a person's lungs to cause the fatal disease mesothelioma.* 7.30 has found broken pieces of asbestos openly lying in piles of debris in Brisbane suburbs, almost two months after devastating floods. From Brisbane, here's Peter McCutcheon.

PETER MCCUTCHEON, REPORTER: Weeks after the water has receded, the clean-up in the Brisbane suburb of Goodna is far from over. The large piles of debris may have gone, but there's still danger lurking amidst the fragments left behind.

So this is where there was lots of debris dumped?

THOMAS GRENATO, ASBESTOS REMOVALIST: Oh, there was lots of debris all over the streets in Goodna and all over the flood regions.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Asbestos removalist Thomas Grenato has shown 7.30 some of the sites he's worried about.

THOMAS GRENATO: This one is definitely asbestos. This is definitely asbestos. As you can see, there's broken panels all the way along.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Is this dangerous at the moment?

THOMAS GRENATO: Yes, it is. Asbestos is dangerous and it only takes one fibre to get into your lungs to create the problem, which turns into mesothelioma.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: We're obviously OK here at the moment, but you wouldn't be handling this without a mask?

THOMAS GRENATO: Well, no, I would not handle it without a mask, and no, I don't think we're 100 per cent safe where we are.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: So after donning the appropriate safety gear, Thomas Grenato took some samples. The owner of the adjacent property was surprised to hear that her nature strip was covered in chips of suspected asbestos.

JEANETTE HEWLETT: The council got somebody to come down and they were going to clean it up, but all that actually happened was - all they did was put on that little bit of top soil which have been washed away. That's why the asbestos, you can see it now.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: A short drive away we came across even more suspected asbestos. This time it was scattered over the road, crushed and split apart from passing traffic. And six kilometres to the north in the suburb of Chelmer, we discovered a pile of building materials containing what appeared to be some older broken sheets of the hazardous building material.

THOMAS GRENATO: They've covered it, which is basically the bare minimum you can do. They haven't even covered the outsides or the edges.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: And this is six weeks after the floods.

THOMAS GRENATO: This is six weeks after the floods. And even sitting here on the footpath, the council should come and do something about this, 'cause this is a serious health issue.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Now the only way to be 100 per cent sure this debris is asbestos is to take it to a laboratory for testing, and according to an accredited asbestos assessor, all seven of our samples came back positive.

MICHAEL SHEPHERD, GEOCHEMIST: In the samples that you submitted, there was a range of asbestos. So we had white asbestos, or chrysotile, which is the technical name, and we also had brown asbestos - amosite is the technical name.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Geochemist Michael Shepherd is also head of the Asbestos Industry Association. He says fragments of asbestos should be removed from public places as soon as possible. They may not pose an immediate danger, but it's better to be sure than sorry.

MICHAEL SHEPHERD: Highly unlikely from a single exposure or multiple small exposures over a short period of time that you will suffer some adverse health reaction. Having said that, if you were genetically predisposed and you were one of those unfortunate people, then, you know, you might be unlucky enough to actually contract an asbestos-related disease from this particular event.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: One of those unfortunate people to contract asbestosis is Ray Colbert, who was exposed to the hazardous material while working as a marine engineer in the Royal Australian Navy. Today, he's secretary of Queensland's Asbestos-Related Disease Society.

What are the dangers of having bits of asbestos lying about on roads and nature strips?

RAY COLBERT, QARDS: If it's on roads, it's probably more dangerous, if there's any quantity of it, 'cause cars would break it up and make it a much finer dust and therefore easily breathed in and therefore more dangerous. If it's on a nature strip, it's probably not as hazardous unless we get someone with their mowers and that starts chopping it up and having problems.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: And indeed, council workers were mowing lawns within 300 metres of where 7.30 found asbestos on a nature strip in Chelmer.

After 7.30 notified the Ipswich and Brisbane City councils, at least one of the at-risk sites was all cleared. Both councils say they're continuing the clean up.

PAUL PISASALE, IPSWICH MAYOR: We had 50,000 tonnes of rubbish on our street. We knew there could have been asbestos problems because the volunteers, God bless 'em, came in and dumped everything on the footpath. Our job at council was to keep it wet and make sure that we got - removed it as fast as possible. Now we've got a process in place where every street has been addressed and taken care of. And I can tell ya, what's utmost important is the welfare and the safety of our residents.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: There were extraordinary scenes across Brisbane and Ipswich in mid-January as thousands of volunteers took to the streets. It was important for health reasons to clean up as soon as possible. But this operation was perhaps the largest uncontrolled removal of asbestos in Australia's history.

RAY COLBERT: The clean up was done by some very well-meaning and energetic volunteers, but they are exactly that; they're not qualified asbestos product removalists. And therefore, what they've left behind they wouldn't necessarily know even had asbestos in it.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: This is the controlled and authorised way of removing the hazardous material from a home. No-one really expected these procedures to be followed in an emergency. But the emergency is now over and questions remain about an unwanted and dangerous legacy.

MICHAEL SHEPHERD: There needs to be a process to actually clean this material up from public spaces. It's not a favourable condition to actually have this material lying in parks or roads.

LEIGH SALES: Peter McCutcheon reporting from Brisbane.