AIRBORNE ASBESTOS MONITORING TECHNIQUES THAT WORK.

Monitoring of airborne asbestos fiber concentrations is required by OSHA standards. Personal monitoring is the specified OSHA method for determining compliance with the exposure standard. The required method uses a vacuum pump to draw air through a filter at a known flow rate. This article describes fibrous asbestos monitors (FAM-1), which are direct reading and have provided Commonwealth Edison with quantitative information about exposures and work practices that would have been impossible to obtain from conventional personal monitoring. In addition, the immediate feedback of such a monitor under emergency and critical path outage situations has yielded significant cost savings. This type of monitoring has proved to be an essential element of total asbestos control program.