Fluffy demolition will reverberate for years

Workers demolish a Mr Fluffy home. Photo: Rohan Thomson

The expected demolition of up to 1000 Mr Fluffy homes across Canberra will reverberate around the city for years, not only as a massively expensive exercise but one with enormous complications and anguish writ large.

The homes are spread across the city, with Mr Fluffy's fingers reaching into the most prestigious and expensive streets and suburbs, including Forrest, Yarralumla and Reid, and touching not only the city's ordinary homes, but also homes worth millions of dollars and homes in heritage areas. It will take nerve, and not just financial, to demolish and rebuild such homes.

Single-brick homes, like the one demolished recently in the Woden Valley, can be taken down quite simply. It's a matter of removing internal walls, cleaning remaining asbestos fibres and sealing the interior, before pushing down the brick exterior. Once the cleaning and sealing is done, the demolition is very fast.

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But double-brick homes are more difficult because the load-bearing wall is on the inside. The team is looking at whether there is a way to demolish them without having to "bubble-wrap" them, effectively enclosing them in a tent. This would allow the outside wall to be removed first, the asbestos cleaned and the surfaces sealed, before the load-bearing wall can be pushed over, but is clearly much more expensive.

Whichever way the homes come down, trucks laden with asbestos-contaminated building materials will be rumbling through the city to a dumping ground chosen to receive this ignominious legacy of the asbestos era.

An analysis of the homes shows the demolition will leave some streets scarred, with seven or more homes in some streets containing remnants of the loose-fill insulation.

The Canberra Times knows of one street with nine Mr Fluffy homes. Two streets have seven houses each; four streets have six houses each; four streets have five. It is clear Dirk Jansen,whose company installed the asbestos in the 1970s, went from door to door with the product, a pattern that has created pockets of contaminated homes.

The government must also decide what to do about the possibility of contaminated soil on properties where Mr Fluffy homes have been demolished (or burned in the 2003 bushfires) and rebuilt in the meantime.

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Fluffy demolition will reverberate for years