When Charles Thornton ’07 drilled a hole in the door of his Dolan dorm room last month, he had no idea he could be unleashing a potentially dangerous carcinogen into the hallway.
“I just wanted to add a peephole to my door,” he said. “I asked maintenance to do it but they said ‘no,’ so I drilled it myself.”
Afterward, Thornton said his RA warned him that drilling the hole could release asbestos into the air.
“The door was solid wood, I don’t see how it could be an asbestos risk,” Thornton said.
Joe Bouchard, Fairfield University’s fire marshal, does not see any danger as long as the door was just wood.
“While some doors are rated fire doors and use asbestos to delay fire from spreading, this doesn’t appear to be the case here,” he said. “I have no idea how the RA got the idea that there was a health risk from drilling through the door.”
Even though the door did not contain any asbestos, it still exists on campus in dorms and administrative buildings despite a massive effort at removing it by the university in recent years.
“Asbestos was used on campus in a wide variety of applications,” Bouchard said. “It was put in many of the buildings when they were first constructed.”
However, the university made its removal a top priority while during the recent set of renovations in the last 10 years.
“Fairfield University has been proactive in terms of identifying and removing asbestos,” said Dr. Raymond Poincelot, the university’s academic safety advisor.
“We’ve removed thousands of square feet of asbestos in the last eight to 10 years,” said Bouchard. “Even though it’s very expensive, we’ve decided that it’s usually the best course of action to just take it out instead of leaving it for others to run into later.”
Thornton has trouble understanding why his RA found a problem with the possibility of releasing asbestos from the hole in his door since the floor tiles in Dolan contain it.
“A friend of mine had some flooding in his room and the asbestos was coming right out of the tiles,” he said.
Bouchard is confident that this poses no health risk, since asbestos can only become a problem when it’s released into the air.
“Wetting the asbestos actually limits its exposure risk, since it becomes grounded,” he said.
Although the vinyl floor tiles containing asbestos were removed from Campion, they still remain in Dolan and the rest of the quad dorms. The tiles were overlaid with another type of tile to prevent the carcinogen from becoming airborne.
The small amounts of asbestos left around campus do not pose much of a threat to students, said Bouchard.
“Asbestos is only really dangerous over a long period of time,” he said. “By removing it we’re not only looking out for the students, but the construction workers who have to deal with it more often.”
A health risk develops when asbestos fibers are released into the air and inhaled, causing the tiny fibers to lodge into the lungs and inflame the tissue, making it difficult to breathe, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
This condition can then lead to asbestosis, a long-term disease of the lungs which progresses slowly and painfully. Asbestos inhalation can also lead to several types of cancer in the lungs, though they often don’t form until decades after the initial exposure to the material, the agency said.
“Many of the laws regarding the removal of asbestos were made for the workers who were spending 12 hours a day working in natural mines removing the material,” said Bouchard.
The factors that increase the likelihood of illness from asbestos include amount of material exposed to and time exposed to it. On Fairfield’s campus, the chances of inhaling a significant amount of fibers are minimal, but officials are working toward removing it all in an effort to prevent any exposure from occurring.
“Where [asbestos] does exist, it poses no threats to students or anyone else. These few locations will be abated this summer,” said Poincelot.
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