Living with Popcorn Ceiling & previous single acute exposure
I'm in my twenties, and I've been living for 3 years in a 1960s apartment with a popcorn ceiling. I've always heard that it's not a problem if you don't disturb the ceiling, but recently I had the horrifying realization that there ARE pieces of it that fall off, actually quite frequently. The apartment has bizarre doors (probably very cool in the sixties) that reach nearly all the way to the ceiling, and you can tell that bits of the ceiling have fallen off from being disturbed by those doors. There are a lot of vibrations from trucks and traffic outside. Furthermore, there is a ceiling fan...how can that not be disturbing the ceiling? I especially find pieces of the ceiling in the closets.
In general, the property is rather poorly maintained, and the landlord is either lazy or dumb. I am concerned that there is asbestos all in the carpet, being kicked up if I so much as walk. The ceiling is at least painted. I am getting a professional to come test the apartment. I am resigned to the fact that the ceiling almost certainly contains asbestos; however, perhaps it is not floating in the air? Has anyone had an asbestos air test done? Most information I find is for directly testing a chunk of the ceiling.
To add to my concern, when I was a teenager, thus slightly younger and dumber, I went urban exploring, probably about 12 or 13 times. I would crawl around in old building shafts and things and was generally careful not to obviously disturb pipe insulation, although I did get fiberglass on myself a few times, and I imagine asbestos was likely present in those spaces. I stopped doing this activity immediately after one incident in which an idiot I was with slid down an insulated pipe and produced a massive cloud of awful dust. I imagine it had to be asbestos, as it was an old building and the texture of that stuff made a horrible "Cttththhhhhhhhh" noise and you could tell the dust was a very special sort of awful dust. Does anyone know if pipe insulation from ~1960s-era buildings tends to be chrysolite asbestos, or the especially-bad type of asbestos? Or is there just really no way to speculate?
How many people know someone who got mesothelioma from non-occupational exposure? Does anyone with known non-occupational asbestos exposure get regular lung x-rays, or know anything about the benefits vs. potential risks of regular x-rays?
Last edited by LungWung; 03-21-2017 at 04:53 PM.
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