The Hole

So after a day of thinking and talking to my wife about the photo I had seen, the photo Dean the Sodexo tradie had taken of the hole a month earlier, plus piecing together all the unwellness in our home I decided to look into the manhole and take a look for myself. What I found was pretty disturbing as you can see. Friable asbestos covering everything, and a large very old hole in the ducting, the flimsy polystyrene foil wrapped 50year old ducting had a hole big enough to fit a child in. I shit myself from what I had seen and the amount of “dust” moving around up there.

Immediately we packed the girls in the car and drove to the Sodexo property managers office where she called Sarah Newland the Rio Tinto housing manager. Of course Sarah was too busy to talk as she was going into a meeting, last we heard from her again for a while, but she will be back for her own chapter soon.

We immediately got vacated from the home and into temporary housing with only the clothes we wore. The temporary house had pretty much nothing also. Sodexo went straight in to test for asbestos and assured us they would be sent to Perth straight away. Well, they took those tests on Sellotape (which we later found out is no good), I’ll say that again, Sellotape. They sent the tapes to their water tester in Perth, who then had to send them to Sydney because they don’t test for asbestos, 10 days of waiting, with nothing......no call from Rio Tinto, nothing. During these 10 days Sodexo took advantage of our empty house to do repairs of the source of the mould (leaking bathroom pipes) and did this with no protective gear, no masks in a danger-taped off house. I was given a cloth COVID mask and told I could use it to go inside if I needed to! Then on day 10 we got a call, all clear the excited voices raged, Synthetic Mineral Fibres on every sample, which we knew nothing of at this stage, but no asbestos, “your clear to move home they said”. We got back to the house, it was a mess from the builders that had been in there fixing leaking pipes, dust everywhere, boot prints throughout, so we called, can you please come and clean.

We asked about whether they had patched the hole in the ducting- they hadn't and had no intention of doing so until we repeatedly argued about how unsafe that choice was. They finally agreed to patch the hole before we moved back in.

At this point, after everything we had witnessed, I decided to get expert advice and called MicroAnalysis in Perth who advised me to never trust Sellotape when testing Asbestos as the adhesive bonds to and hides Asbestos. They suggested I take my own samples to be sure and advised me on exactly how to do this, which I did and sent the samples to them in Perth immediately.

We spent another night in temporary accommodation awaiting a clean and the hole repair which happened on the 3rd November, 13 days after we left 3 Cane st, 13 days with two little girls and nothing else. We arrived home to find the house barely cleaner than before so we gave up with Sodexo and got in and cleaned it ourselves but it just didnt feel right after finding out that Sodexo had tested with a deliberately faulty method. we made the decision to pitch the tent in the backyard even in the 40 degree heat and await the samples we had sent to Microanalysis and SERS, we wanted to be sure for our own piece of mind. The tent seemed like our only option as we were told that the transit house was already booked out for someone else.

While all of this was going on we were doing our best to shield it from our little girls and we kept doing it and still to this day we continue to do so.

We waited for our test results. We were both starting to feel stressed but had to stay strong, we knew something was not right.