An asbestos contamination crisis in Sydney has forced the cancellation of a major Mardi Gras party and the closure of popular parks and schools, as authorities scramble to get on top of the ballooning public health emergency.
The New South Wales government and environmental watchdog have set up a taskforce to coordinate a major investigation after a child took home a piece of bonded asbestos from a playground at Rozelle parklands, in the city’s inner west.
Since the discovery in early January, mulch from more than 20 sites across Australia’s most populous city has returned positive results for asbestos, including a supermarket and a hospital. Hundreds more sites are yet to be tested.
Most of the asbestos found so far is classified as bonded, which is a less dangerous form of the material. One piece of the more concerning friable asbestos was found at a public park in the inner city suburb of Surry Hills.
This week, the City of Sydney council announced it had told organisers of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to cancel its Fair Day event after bonded asbestos was found in the park where it was to be held on Sunday.
“This cancellation is a setback, however it presents us with an opportunity to unite and support one another more strongly,” Mardi Gras chief executive Gil Beckwith said.
The event, at Victoria Park in Camperdown, was expected to attract a crowd of more than 70,000 people ahead of the parade on 2 March.
Lord mayor Clover Moore said it was “incredibly disappointing” to cancel the event that was a pivotal part of the Mardi Gras calendar, but that safety needed to come first.
The council has since announced parts of more than 50 parks and garden beds across the inner city would be cordoned off after contact tracing found they also contained mulch that could be contaminated.
Surry Hills resident Peta, who only gave her first name, said she was particularly concerned about the friable asbestos found at Harmony Park where she often takes her dog and grandchild.
“That was concerning because it’s a very popular park,” she said. “It’s a dog-friendly park. There are always dogs digging around in the mulch. Mothers and babies use it.”
The investigation by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) is its biggest ever, with more than 130 investigators working to uncover how the asbestos got into the mulch and to trace it through the supply chain.
The EPA chief executive, Tony Chappel, said it was a “complex, large supply chain” and while multiple suppliers were being looked at, so far only mulch from Greenlife Resource Recovery had been found to contain asbestos.
“To date, all of our positive detections are connected through a common thread of this supplier,” he said this week.
Greenlife has insisted it is not responsible for the contamination and that multiple rounds of testing by independent laboratories showed their mulch was free from asbestos before it was distributed to customers.
While most of the mulch has been traced to public parks and projects including landscaping around train stations, it has also been discovered at schools and in a number of private homes. One primary school has been closed, and its 700 students relocated.
Asbestos was used extensively over the past century to make cement sheeting, roofing and drainage pipes. In the 1960s and 1970s loose fibre asbestos was used in parts of home roof insulations across NSW.
Researchers then discovered that if asbestos was inhaled into the lungs over a long period of time, it could lead to a form of cancer called mesothelioma – or the chronic lung disease known as asbestosis. It has since been banned in Australia.
