Home › Outside

Fences, sheds, garages and what is in the soil

Back-yard asbestos gets treated casually because it is outdoors and familiar. It is also the material most likely to be broken, weathered and handled without a second thought.

Outdoors is not the same as harmless

('

For a great many Australian households the asbestos on the property is not in the house at all. It is the fence between them and the neighbour, the shed at the back, the garage roof, or fragments of old sheeting that were buried in the yard decades ago and surface whenever someone digs.

Outdoor material gets handled carelessly for understandable reasons: it is in the open air, it has been there forever, and a fence sheet looks like a fence sheet. But outdoor asbestos is also the most weathered asbestos on the property, which means the cement matrix has been degrading in the sun and rain for decades, and broken fence sheets shed material at ground level where children and pets are.

Two specific situations come up constantly. The first is the shared fence, where the material belongs to two households at once and any decision about it is a conversation with a neighbour before it is a job. The second is asbestos in soil, usually fragments from a demolition or renovation that predates everyone involved, which is a different problem to a sheet on a wall because it cannot be sealed, painted or left tidily alone.

Storm damage deserves its own mention. A fence or shed roof that has been broken by wind or hail is no longer intact bonded material, and the correct response is to keep people away from it and get advice — not to start picking up pieces.

', 0)

Outside guides

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.