Is your school one of the thousands of establishments still affected, more than 25 years after the ban?

Asbestos fibers in a cracking slab, in partitions or toilets… More than 26 years after the ban on asbestos, thousands of schools still house this insulation which is dangerous for the body. How many establishments exactly? No one knows precisely, despite the serious public health problems these fibers have posed for decades. The teams of the documentary series Green with ragebroadcast on France 5, therefore wanted to know more, and embarked on a gigantic census of all primary and nursery schools in France.

“It was a long process to contact the 50,000 schools and the 35,000 town halls which are responsible for it”underlines Mathilde Cusin, co-director of Green with rage. Despite these thousands of requests, journalists have often encountered a wall of silence: nothing is known about the presence (or absence) of asbestos in two thirds of schools. Of the 15,804 schools for which the teams of Green with rage obtained information, we learned that 5,505, or more than a third, had traces of asbestos. Conversely, we know that 4,771 schools do not contain them. For the others, we have information concerning the diagnoses carried out, but not their conclusions.

Is your child’s school affected? And those where you studied, or perhaps worked? In collaboration with the teams of Green with rage, franceinfo publishes a new search engine. You can search for the name of your municipality to obtain a list of establishments located there, and their situation regarding asbestos.

Do you wish to request a modification, and have verified information on the presence of asbestos in a school? You can send an email to the Vert de rage teams who carried out this census, to the address [email protected]. The presence of asbestos in a school does not necessarily represent an immediate danger. To find out more about the location and condition of asbestos materials, you are entitled to consult your school’s asbestos diagnosis.

Tens of thousands of asbestos-related deaths between 2009 and 2050

Since many schools present an unknown situation, the real toll of asbestos in primary schools could be much bleaker than that presented here. Until 1997, asbestos was a material widely used in the construction of educational establishments, as well as in construction in general. “Asbestos has been used for everything. It is a good thermal and sound insulator, it is very resistant, lists Maxime Misseri, geologist and asbestos specialist . But as soon as it deteriorates, you can have emissions in the air. Either passively, or via a mechanical action, if you tap on it for example.” Thus, a fiber visible to the naked eye can release millions of smaller fibers.

There is no threshold below which breathing asbestos fibers is not dangerous, and the health consequences are now established. Asbestos would be responsible for the deaths of 70,000 to 100,000 people between 2009 and 2050; causes between 150 and 170 laryngeal and ovarian cancers each year; and, within education, 20 to 60 education personnel report mesothelioma each year, that is to say cancer of the pleura. The consequences on the health of young people remain little known, while diseases generally appear several decades after exposure.

To limit these risks, the various regulations that appeared after 1997 require schools and town halls, on which they depend, to keep an asbestos technical file (DTA) up to date, consisting of one or more diagnoses. A check can reveal the presence of asbestos, without this presenting an imminent danger to users. But if asbestos is found in degraded and fiber-emitting materials, it may also require work and monitoring measures. The conclusions of these diagnoses can in theory be consulted by parents or any staff at the establishment.

A lack of transparency

The last extensive census carried out on this subject dates from 2016. This is why some of the information in our search engine dates back to that time. They come from a survey carried out by the National Observatory for the Safety and Accessibility of Educational Establishments (ONS), an organization attached to National Education having been abolished in 2020. Its conclusions, drawn up from of a sample of approximately a third of the establishments, showed the existence of asbestos “in more than three quarters of middle and high schools built before 1997”, date of ban on asbestos. And 38% of public schools were also affected. In February 2020, the data leading to this report was obtained by Release and published as open data.

It is therefore to complete and update these seven-year-old figures that Green with rage launched its own census. The journalists even insisted for eight months with the services of the 100 largest cities in France. But the subject of asbestos is still sensitive: only seven of them responded. “We faced a lot of refusals, received a lot of languagesays Mathilde Cusin, from Green with rage. We even learned that some schools had been instructed not to respond to us. While some teachers are exasperated by the situation and want to talk about it.”

Among the good students is the municipality of Strasbourg, which agreed to provide the teams with complete details of its schools. “We have every interest in these documents being public,” argues Jérémie Leymarie, school heritage manager for the city of Strasbourg. ” The worst would be if there was a lack of knowledge of the subject and if people carried out work where there was asbestos.”

Funding and prevention that are lacking

If the problem persists so much, it is partly due to lack of funding. “Some mayors called us to tell us that they knew there was asbestos and work to be done, continues Mathilde Cusin. But they don’t have the budget to do it.” Several specialists interviewed by franceinfo also point out the question of the lack of training, sometimes glaring in small municipalities. “Heads of establishments are poorly trained”, deplores Cyril Verlingue, co-founder of the Urgence Amiante Ecoles collective. “Some do not understand the technical issues, or do not have information on the subject, because the DTA cannot be found.”

And when the first diagnoses are made, “it’s the monitoring of potential material degradation that may not be up to the task of ensuring there are no fiber emissions,” estimates Maxime Misseri, asbestos specialist. “What is lacking is the follow-up of these observations“, agrees Jean-Marie Schléret, former president of the ONS. “QWhen things don’t communicate well between school management and town halls, these files lie dormant, or we pass the buck.”

What solutions should we provide? Cyril Verlingue and the Urgence Amiante Ecoles association are calling for a major plan to rehabilitate school buildings. “We are aware of the financial issue. It is not up to the communities, alone, to resolve the problem”, he insists. Like others, he also campaigns for the existence of a transparent database, listing all schools and accessible to all, like the one attempted to build Green with rage.

In a ministerial document on the strategic orientations for the year 2020-2021, it is also planned to create a “digital logbook centralizing all essential information” concerning asbestos in particular. Where is this project? Contacted, the Ministry of National Education indicates that it has not yet reached a conclusion: its “school building” unit, created in 2019 and in charge of these subjects, “was strongly mobilized during the Covid-19 pandemic”. “The ministry will work with the communities”promises rue de Grenelle.

The ministry therefore does not have a census or consolidated and updated figures on the subject. He passes the ball back to the municipalities, insisting that it is up to them to identify, treat and monitor the presence of asbestos in schools. He can only act “in the areas which fall within its competence, namely staff information” and the educational community. Several prevention guides have been published. The last, published in 2022, “presents the main points of the regulations and the good practices to be implemented”.

Waiting for, Green with rage continue his work. In addition to this census, journalists took several samples in schools where asbestos had been detected. Classrooms, dormitories, canteens… The tests were carried out using standardized wipes and laboratory analysis. Out of 14 schools studied, 11 samples revealed the presence of asbestos, including 5 above the alert threshold of 5,000 fibers/cm2 in force in the United States. There is no threshold for this method in France.