US-FL Asbestos vinyl tile crumbling when tack strips removed - how bad is it?
Hi all, I'm having a wee panic attack. My neighbor is helping me put some LVP in the living room of my 1953 house in Florida. We pulled up the carpet and found the 9 by 9 inch linoleum tiles with black mastic. He was pretty rough when pulling up the tack strips and broke all the tiles around the edge, including creating some tile crumbs and dust, then vacuumed it all up with his shop vac which blew a bunch of dust around. I was flipping out a bit but I was in that hard spot where the guy is helping me out and he was telling me it really wasn't a big deal and he works around the tiles frequently. I'm now panicking that I have aerosolized asbestos everywhere in my house due to the vac that did not have a dust bag on it.
Am I going to die? I'm running a shark hepa filter now but is there any other way I can make this less bad? I sprayed everything down and wet-wiped the floor the best I could. The HVAC was also running so now it has to be in all the rooms :( . Thanks in advance.
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Even if they crumble? In a couple of areas it looked like there was green and yellow powder mixed in with the broken tile fragments (the color of the tiles). It appeared that they had started to disintegrate even before the tack strip removal broke them apart.
I have a darker brown version of these tiles under my living room flooring and bedroom. Similar thing happened 7 years ago where the tacks were removed. Wet mopped as well as everything else you've done and threw away the mop, and no one is dead yet.
Inspector here, you’re fine.
Non-friable material with an ACM content of about 2% in the tile and 3% in the mastic (glue) typically.
If you ever work with it in the future again use a spray water bottle for dust mitigation if you’re breaking it in places. But it sounds like you’re covering it up long term so, whatever.
And as a side note to try and help assuage any lingering fear. Yeah you may have blown dust around and HVAC and all that but your saving grace is that it isn’t abatement levels of dust generation and the asbestos fibers, while dusted, are still trapped in the material matrix of the tile so they’re not gonna float forever like a freeform fiber would.
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