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I took a geology class at Stanford when I was an undergrad, and we went to that deposit/mine on a field trip. My professor claimed that the type of asbestos pre

I took a geology class at Stanford when I was an undergrad, and we went to that deposit/mine on a field trip. My professor claimed that the type of asbestos present at the mine was harmless since the mineral structure was a large fiber, and it didn't effect our lungs the way smaller fiber-ed asbestos does (different versions of serpentine, essentially). He made the argument that there was safe asbestos and unsafe asbestos. We them proceeded to walk all over it and collect some samples by hand. But I'm not sure who to believe nowadays, especially after reading this article. Makes the whole industry sound pretty scummy and doesn't allude to there being a "safe" version of asbestos. (My professor never told us about how the asbestos industry basically funded all sorts of propaganda in favor of the stuff.)

thrownaway2424 13y ago
That's interesting. I know undergrads from UCSC also use the site. I guess I trust geologists to describe the material, its fiber diameter and length and whether the fibers are straight or curved, soluble or insoluble, and so forth. I don't think I would listen to geologists on matters of disease, though :-) I've been to this area a number of times. I'm comfortable with it because if you do the math, it's pretty darn hard to poison open air. Working with the material in confined spaces may be suicidal. Walking on it under an open sky seems harmless.