There’s a specter of fear that lives over the Pomonok Housing project in Queens, New York. The apartment complexes are over 60 years old and have fallen into disrepair. Now residents are worried that they may have been, and continue to be, exposed to asbestos and live in fear of a mesothelioma diagnosis.
The complex, located in East Flushing, was the subject of an exposé by reporters with the Queens Tribune. The scary article detailed conditions that would have any sane person worried about their health and hinted at a conspiracy – that the building managers have known about the asbestos threat for years and have withheld information from the residents about the very real danger.
The asbestos, located in the floor tiles of most of the apartment units, was installed when the buildings were constructed – before the EPA and other agencies restricted the use of asbestos containing materials in the 1980s. While the official stance of the EPA is that intact asbestos materials don’t generally pose a threat, these same materials become dangerous over time as they degrade or are disturbed. And, judging from the conditions of the apartments at the Pomonok Houses, there’s a real reason to be worried that the in-place asbestos is no longer manageable and may have become an airborne health threat.
The real danger of airborne asbestos is that it can easily be inhaled or ingested without the individual even knowing. However, once inside the body, asbestos fibers can cause a wide variety of diseases including a deadly form of cancer called mesothelioma.
One terrified tenant, Judi Lolloway, said the she never suspected that her apartment (where she lives with her children and her father) could contain asbestos until an exterminator she called in approached building management about it. The management team did, allegedly, test for the presence of asbestos but, to date, those results haven’t been made public.
Hearing no response from the buildings managers, Lolloway approached New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The call went unanswered. Lolloway then shelled $300 out of her own pocket for a third-party testing agency to come in and verify or deny the presence of asbestos.
Air samples revealed dangerous levels of airborne asbestos in two bedrooms within Lolloway’s apartment. The official report from the testing lab confirmed that chrysotile asbestos was present in the air and in one of the rooms the percentage was 8.7 – that’s nearly nine times the allowable limit by law.
That led investigators at the Tribune to ask: “if this one apartment is unsafe, how many of the other units are as well?”
The main issue holding up cleanup progress seems to be the extremely high cost of asbestos remediation. Mike Furda, a field officer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development said “it seems like the property manager or landlord is playing this low and not making a big fuss [because] it’s going to take a lot of time, money, and energy to replace the asbestos-containing materials.”
Unfortunately, this story is all too common in public housing all across the country – especially that of low income families. These landlords do what they can to keep overhead low, including letting buildings fall into disrepair. With the country’s aging structures continuing to degrade and the current economic crisis, it doesn’t appear that there will be significant attempts to remedy these dangerous situations. This means that thousands upon thousands of individuals will continue to live in housing that may very well end up causing asbestos cancer and diseases decades later.
If you suspect the presence of asbestos materials in your home or apartment, experts recommend immediate testing. If you have been diagnosed with an asbestos related disease, please contact one of our expert mesothelioma attorneys today for a free case evaluation and to explore what your legal rights may be.