BOISE, Idaho — This Article originally appeared in The Idaho Press.
Jordan Gantt and Oliver Moran said they were doing maintenance on the Cambridge/Dorchester Apartments, cutting holes in the walls of around 20 units to prepare for plumbers. Moran said they had worked since the fall of 2022.
Then a co-worker saw the logo “Kaiser Gypsum” and googled it. What he found was a building materials company that used asbestos in its products, leading to thousands of lawsuits. It is unclear exactly where the logo was. Kaiser Gypsum has filed for bankruptcy.
The Dorchester Apartments are in the same complex as the Cambridge Square Apartments, which made headlines earlier this year for giving tenants three days to move out for good because of a lack of heat.
“We were going into occupied units and just covering everybody’s stuff in asbestos,” Moran said. “That’s the issue.”
In a statement, Commercial Northwest Property Management CEO Natalie Hernandez said the construction was managed by the owner, not the management company. Hernandez said the property management company’s sole role was to share updates with tenants.
“All of the impacted residents have been given contact information for an attorney at the Owner’s request and we strongly encourage everyone to reach out to them to determine what can be done to make this right,” Hernandez said. “Our team is keeping in close touch with the residents and helping those who want to move to try to identify new apartments as quickly as possible.”
A representative with the Environmental Protection Agency said the EPA is expecting to receive notification from the apartment owners “after being contacted by the apartments’ owners about maintenance activities that potentially involved asbestos containing materials.” The building owners representatives reached out in late May.
Written notification is required for renovations of residential buildings with more than four units before work on buildings that could contain asbestos, the EPA representative said.
The typical deadline for submittal is 10 days before starting work and for emergency notifications to be submitted one day after beginning cleanup, a representative said.
Some materials installed before 1981 are presumed to contain asbestos, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Cambridge/Dorchester Apartments were built in 1963.
The EPA has not yet received a written asbestos renovation or demolition notice.
“Our understanding from the phone contact with the building legal representatives is that work started prior to EPA receiving a call and that the project is on hold until safety consultants can complete their review and prepare a work plan,” the EPA representative said.
The property management company said it had no information on what the current state of the apartments are.
Gantt said he and Moran, who were contracted through their employer, initially brought up the issue on May 3, but he did not say who they told.
He said in a May 17 email that he and another had been fired by the building owner but did not specify a date. Attempts to reach Gantt for clarification were unsuccessful. Gantt has been in court over unrelated charges of driving without privileges and attempting to elude an officer, the latter of which is a felony charge.
The owner of the buildings, Karl Klokke, declined to comment. The EPA has no prior history with this apartment building related to asbestos.
Attempts to reach the contractor were unsuccessful.
Moran said they took samples from different units and got them tested by the L&R Group on May 9. Gantt said he showed the results to the owner.
The test results, shared with the Idaho Press, showed three samples tested positive for asbestos: Two with 3% chrysotile and one with 25% chrysotile. One is tile and another is from a kitchen. No amount of asbestos is safe, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. The authenticity of the report was confirmed by the L&R Group.
Chrysotile is the most common type of asbestos and accounts for the majority of cases of mesothelioma and other asbestos diseases, according to the University of Pennsylvania.
ASBESTOS
The material asbestos has a long and distinguished history. The ancient Greeks wove asbestos into cloth and ancient Romans burned asbestos-containing wicks in their ceremonial candles, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.
In the late 1800s, asbestos deposits were discovered in North America and it became a common construction material, according to the South Carolina health department. But in the early 1970s, studies began showing adverse health effects.
“Barbara Blum, the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said asbestos was ‘a dangerous pollutant which has been directly linked to cancers of the membranes lining the chest and abdomen in humans,’” according to a 1978 New York Times article.
Asbestos fibers can be released into the air by “the disturbance of asbestos-containing materials,” during activities like demolition, maintenance, repair and remodeling, according to the EPA.
Moran said the workers cut holes in three to five different areas depending on the unit. He said the group would do their best to clean up.
Moran said they had no personal protective equipment. He said they had two vacuum filters used on several different units.
“Everything we did was wrong,” Gantt said. “We weren’t aware until we actually did the homework.”
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