Armley asbestos disaster
On 20 July 1982, Yorkshire Television broadcast the documentary "Alice - A Fight For Life", predominantly the story of Alice Jefferson, who had worked at the Acre Mill asbestos factory in Hebden Bridge for just nine months when she was 17 years old. Thirty years later she was diagnosed with mesothelioma and given only six months to live. The documentary was also an "exposé on the workings of the asbestos industry." Its broadcast resulted in £60 million being knocked off T&N's share price overnight, headlines in the national newspapers, and the setting up of a government enquiry. Within ten days the government had halved the legal limit for asbestos dust in the workplace. In 1988 Yorkshire Television picked up the "Yorkshire Evening Post" story and produced a second critical investigation focusing on the pattern of deaths in Armley, and contradicting the government's reasons for refusing an inquiry. Called "Too Close to Home", it was broadcast as part of the "First Tuesday" documentary series on 6 December 1988.
Health impact of asbestos
Asbestos was also used in the first forty floors of the World Trade Center north tower causing an airborne contamination among lower Manhattan after the towers collapsed in the September 11 attacks, causing Steven Milloy of the libertarian Cato Institute to suggest that the World Trade Center towers could still be standing or at least would have stood longer had a 1971 ban not stopped the completion of the asbestos coating above the 64th floor. This was not considered in the National Institute of Standards and Technology's report on the towers' collapse, on the basis that all fireproofing materials, regardless of their construction, are required to obtain a fire-resistance rating prior to installation, and all fiber-based lightweight commercial spray fireproofing materials are vulnerable to the dispersive effects of high speed/high energy impacts, as these are outside the fire testing upon which all ratings are based. Therefore, asbestos would have made little or no difference in preventing the towers' collapse, if used as fireproofing, and upon collapse any asbestos, however used, would still have been largely dispersed into the air within the massive dust cloud.