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During December 2009, a Cleveland State University official said it may be two years before faculty and staff can return to offices on the 19th floor of Rhodes Tower, where crews have begun cleaning up asbestos. Nearly forty faculty members and staff from the university’s treasury services department who had been working on the 19th floor have been reassigned to offices in other buildings.

A waterproofing project on the roof of Rhodes Tower in September dislodged pieces of ceiling tile, according to a statement issued by the university. The falling tile exposed the asbestos. Jack Boyle, CSU’s vice president for business affairs, estimated it will take “a couple of years” before anyone is able to return to work on the 19th floor.

Although the evacuation occurred in September, news of the extent of the situation didn’t get out until professors sought answers from administrators in a meeting last week. The history and philosophy departments were housed on the 19th floor.

Six employees whose offices were near a spot where a tile fell that “probably had asbestos,” according to Boyle, were sent certified letters by the university recommending that they be tested for asbestos exposure. Other employees who had worked on the 19th floor weren’t recommended for medical testing.

Administrators were aware that Rhodes Tower was built with asbestos and CSU has been gradually renovating individual floors to remove it. The cost is estimated at $400,000 to $700,000 per floor just to abate asbestos in Rhodes, according to Boyle.

For twenty years, Lively Neely went to work at the DuPont power plant in Old Hickory, a section of residential Nashville, Tennessee. Each night, Mr. Neely brought home deadly asbestos dust to his wife, Ruby. Their son, Roger Neely filed a lawsuit against Dupont and twenty others that subcontracted at the plant over the years, alleging that the company’s failure to warn its employees of the danger of wearing work clothes home covered in asbestos, caused the  for death of Mrs. Neely.

“DuPont failed to provide any type of warnings or instructions about the safe use of asbestos,” said, the family’s attorney. “With regard to Mrs. Neely, they were allowing workers to go home with asbestos on their clothing, and didn’t provide change of clothing or showers to prevent that from happening.”

Ruby Neely, who recently passed away, was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure.

According to the lawsuit, information about the dangers of asbestos had been available to the company as early as the 1930s, but they still weren’t informing insulators on the line of the hazards until the 1970s, when many workers had already died of asbestos-related illnesses.

Mr. Lively Neely cut, molded and fitted asbestos containing insulation and cement onto the various lines at DuPont. He also died of asbestos-related disease and had settled a lawsuit with the company in the 1980s.

The Tennessee Supreme Court decided on a similar case last year in which Amanda Satterfield sued Alcoa claiming she was terminally ill from the asbestos dust her father carried home from work. Though the case was initially dismissed, Tennessee’s highest court disagreed and sent the case back for trial.

On October 21, 2009, Wyoming state officials announced that demolition work at the University of Wyoming scattered a material containing asbestos that may have exposed the public to the carcinogen. The project at the Bureau of Mines Building on the main campus in Laramie caused suspect materials to be “scattered all over the outside of the building where the public could be exposed,” according to the violation notice issued September 28 by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.

The notice states the university failed to conduct an asbestos inspection, provide notification, and remove a regulated asbestos-containing material before demolition. Additionally, the university also failed to use trained personnel to remove the material and didn’t adequately wet it down or place it in leak-tight containers ahead of disposal, the notice states.

Asbestos was frequently used as insulation in older buildings. Inhaling airborne asbestos fibers is believed to be a cause of lung cancer and a rare type of cancer called mesothelioma.