Hospital removes asbestos

This one was a front pager. AND my first to get picked up by the Wyoming AP!
(the top blurb is the AP rendering. the bottom part is what appeared in our paper)


Workers remove asbestos from Rawlins hospital
Eds: APNewsNow.
RAWLINS, Wyo. (AP) — Asbestos is being removed from Memorial Hospital of Carbon County.
Hospital administrators are closing four rooms at a time to perform the work.
The asbestos removal is part of larger renovations that started in November to help the hospital in Rawlins save on utility costs.
Work has included an overhaul of lighting fixtures and the installation of tinted film on windows.
———
Information from: Rawlins Daily Times



• Asbestos abatement is part of the hospital’s energy savings project.

By Janice Kurbjun
Times staff writer

Hunched over her microscope, Susan Annon was in the midst of evaluating whether it would be safe to re-enter the four closed rooms in the east wing of Memorial Hospital of Carbon County’s second floor on Wednesday.

As asbestos is removed, hospital administrators are closing four rooms at a time to perform the precise, dangerous work. The abatement is part of larger renovations that started in November, an endeavor deemed the energy savings project.

The first two stages of the project are complete. One stage included an overhaul of the lighting fixtures that made them more energy efficient. A slightly tinted film was also installed over all the windows to control the temperature in the building. The final stage is to install new heating and air conditioning ductwork, but the project is currently held up in state department offices, awaiting approval. Once approved, the installation should take 20 weeks.

Joe Jones, the consultant overseeing the work, has his hands full with asbestos right now. Several years ago, he did a study on the presence of asbestos in the building and knew it was there. “It’s not harmful unless disturbed,” he said. The ductwork scheduled to take place will go through the asbestos areas, so it needed to be removed.

Jones sought the help of two firms to perform the project. Casper-based Enviro Engineering is doing the actual labor while Annon, an industrial hygienist for Century Environmental Hygiene in Colorado, is checking the progress. By monitoring the air inside and outside the four-room containment areas, she ensures the safety of the hospital’s air.

“We will do nothing to endanger human health and the environment,” Jones said. As the project consultant, he is there as a liaison between the hospital and the contracting companies. His job is to see that everyone’s needs are met, particularly the needs of the hospital in terms of both its business and its patient care.

“The project is extremely clean,” Jones said as he walked into the plastic-shrouded containment area after being informed that the air inside was safe.

“We can’t shut the hospital down,” he said, “so we have to work around it.” Inside the rooms, the walls were covered in thick plastic secured with heavy duty tape. The plastic is pulled inward by a negative air machine. “This machine sucks 99.9 percent of the air out of this room,” Jones said. “No air escapes from these rooms into the hospital.”

The abatement of the four rooms took approximately two days between preparation, removal and cleaning. Even though the plastic was scrubbed clean, Jones said it would be thrown away with the old ceiling tiles that were dressed in paper-like asbestos film to provide fire-proof safety.