Asbestos Ghost Towns and their Lethal Legacies
The existence of abandoned mining towns is a reality in many parts of the world where hordes of adventurers had once sought riches from wealth-giving gold, silver and other minerals. Two such communities, built on asbestos hopes and fueled by asbestos profits, were Cassiar, Canada and Wittenoom, Australia. Once the seams of asbestos no longer proved viable, the towns built around them were redundant. Both Cassiar and Wittenoom were dismantled, with the West Australia authorities going as far removing the name from road signs and maps to deter visits from urban explorers.
Earlier this year, a well-researched two-part series by Journalist Amanda F. Hosgood examined the experiences of former Cassiar residents who described their home town in north central British Columbia, near the Yukon border, as “a close-knit community,” “a town where everyone knew your name,” and “an idyllic place to grow up.”1 From the accounts given by people Hosgood interviewed, the community which grew up around this open-pit chrysotile (white) asbestos mining town in northwest British Columbia was an ideal place to bring up a family. Living in a company town brought a sense of “central purpose,” said Margery Taku Loverin who told Canadian journalist Maryse Zeidler: “It was like one big family… People got along and shared. People grew together, people built together.”2
 Cassiar Mill, Rock Storage, & Tailings 1961. Photograph courtesy of the Northern BC Archives, UNBC Accession No. 2000.1.1.3.19.019. |
Such was also the case in Wittenoom, an isolated town in the Pilbara region hundreds of miles from the West Australian capital, Perth. Many people moved there in the 1940-1960s attracted by the offer of high wages at the underground crocidolite (blue) asbestos mine.
 Wittenoom Asbestos Mine 1979. Photo courtesy of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia. |
There was a school with three teachers, a small hospital and a thriving social life for families. The landscape and gorges were spectacular and residents fondly remembered having idyllic, adventurous childhoods. According to Valma Mlodawski: “We made our own fun, mostly parties, mostly at private houses until the power went off at midnight and then you went home. There were a lot of families there.”3 Former Wittenoom teacher Helen Osborne remembered her years in the town as “a happy time”; work was busy with 100 students to teach and the bustling community providing a busy social life: “There were dances held quite frequently for various reasons. The Wittenoom races were very big.”
 Children’s sack race on Wittenoom racetrack. The blue tinge of the surface comes from the use of asbestos tailings on the track. 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia. |
Naturally, there were differences between the two company towns:
Cassiar Asbestos Mine: Salient Facts
Description: Canadian chrysotile (white) asbestos open pit mine in British Columbia (BC).
Owner: Cassiar Asbestos Corporation established in 1951 by parent company Conwest Exploration Company Limited.
Traditional Owners: The mine is on the traditional territory of the Kaska Dena First Nation.
Climate: lowest temperature -40° C (-40°F).
Operational: from the 1950s to 1992.
Production: maximum output of 100,000 tonnes/year of high-grade chrysotile asbestos.
Population: total number of residents, including workers and families, 50,000 people.
Historic Contamination: In May 1975, the Legislative Assembly of BC was told that “the amount of asbestos fibres in the air at Cassiar Asbestos Corporation [mine] was 125 times the legal limit.”4
Current Contamination: According to “the B.C. Mining Law Reform Network … it [the Cassiar Mine] remains among the most polluted mine sites in the province;”5 20 million tonnes of asbestos tailings.
Mortality: Unquantified.
Compensation: Few claims for asbestos-related occupational diseases succeed at WorkSafeBC – an independent provincial agency tasked with providing workers’ occupational compensation, ensuring compliance with mandatory safeguards and insuring British Columbia employers – and there is no legal recourse for injured mine workers; there is no source of compensation for injured residents.
Wittenoom Asbestos Mine: Salient Facts
Description: Australian crocidolite (blue) asbestos underground mine.
Owner/operator: discovered by Lang Hancock6 in the 1930s and sold in 1943 to CSR; from 1943-1966, owned by the CSR Ltd. subsidiary Australian Blue Asbestos, renamed Midalco.
Traditional Owners: Banjima Tribe.
Climate: highest temperature – high 40°s C (104° F).
Operational: 1943-1966.
Production: total production 150,000+ tonnes of crocidolite (blue) asbestos.
Population: total number of Wittenoom residents, including workers and families, 20,000.
Historic Contamination: According to a 2025 research paper: the cohort of Wittenoom residents was “unique in that it comprises a population with a relatively intense exposure (median 3.4ζf/mLζyear) exclusively to crocidolite over a median period of approximately 18 months…;7 workers in the mine and mill reported dangerous and extremely dusty conditions.8
Current Contamination: Categorized as the “largest contaminated site in the southern hemisphere” and “one of the most significant industrial disasters, quite frankly, in Western Australia;” 3+ million tonnes of asbestos mining waste remain scattered in and around the town.9
Mortality: The estimated death toll from asbestos-related diseases amongst the Wittenoom cohort numbers 2,000+.10
Compensation: For workers, compensation can be accessed via West Australian statutory workers’ compensation schemes and lawsuits; compensation for residents is available from legal actions.
It was fortuitous that many Wittenoom exiles wound up in Perth and the surrounding area. The congregation of so many people with first-hand experience of asbestos life and death provided the critical mass needed for the founding of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia (ADSA), one of the world’s most effective and comprehensive grassroots asbestos victims’ groups. The work of the Society revolutionized the plight of asbestos victims by providing access to a multitude of services required by the injured and their families. Decades of hostility to claims brought by people injured as a result of toxic exposures at Wittenoom were eventually overcome after protracted legal battles led by the ADSA, its trade union partners and legal representatives. After nearly fifty years’ service to the community, the Society is still going strong having just opened its own medical clinic to provide care to the community.
At a 2016 Perth church service held by the ADSA to remember those who had died, many of whom had been exposed to asbestos in Wittenoom, keynote speaker Hayden Stephens spoke of a painting created by his father-in-law Jan Senbergs:
“The Blue Angel of Wittenoom – the angel of death. I find it an incredibly moving portrait and I sense that many in this congregation have been visited by this blue angel of death – in some way.”11
 Jan Senbergs. The Blue Angel of Wittenoom (1988). Picture courtesy of the ADSA. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia.12 |
In the consecrated surroundings of North Perth’s Redemptorist Monastery, amidst the solemn music and flickering candles, Hayden said:
“Wittenoom represents a place where a company said: ‘My way, my interests, my hip pocket is more important than your life.’ And now – why is all of this so important to remember?
We live in a world where increasingly the gap between the most powerful and those with the least influence is widening; where a man can place the interests of the individual so far above the interests of the collective – and still be voted into one of the most powerful positions on the planet. In a world where the thrill of making a dollar may well trample the welfare and rights and health of others…
This time marks the 50th Anniversary of the closure of the Wittenoom mine. Now, more than ever, we cannot afford to forget what created this heartbreak. These thousands of heartbreaks. And as for that Blue Angel. Well, listen carefully and you might just hear it whisper “It’s all meaningless if we don’t remember’.”13
One can but wonder if things would have been different if the Cassiar émigrés had also migrated to the same region once the town closed down. From our research it seems that very few of the injured Cassiar workers receive government benefits or compensation and that little medical outreach work has been done to support the injured. No compensation or government benefits are available for non-occupational asbestos exposures such as were experienced by the town’s residents. To an outside observer it seems that whilst the local authorities and Government of British Columbia were happy to reap the tax dollars generated by the mine’s operations, once those evaporated their inclination was to walk away from inconvenient problems such as the suffering of the injured and the contamination of the environment.
Feedback was received this week from a colleague in Toronto with information about the bureaucratic realities and political obstructions faced by Canadian medical researchers and grassroots campaigners. In the face of these obstacles, efforts to quantify the country’s asbestos legacy and mobilize support for the injured have, in many locales, been frustrated.
As the world’s leading asbestos supplier throughout most of the 20th century, Canada had a vested interest in the preservation and cultivation of asbestos markets. Millions of federal dollars were allocated to support the industry and grow demand for a mineral once called “white gold.” The number of workers, family members and local people who died prematurely from contamination caused by asbestos mining in Quebec, Newfoundland, Ontario and British Columbia and the Yukon is unknown. The environmental contamination caused is widespread and, on the whole, remains unaddressed. There is a debt to be paid.
February 16, 2026
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1 Hosgood, A.F. The Town That Asbestos Built. The Cancer It Left Behind. January 12, 2026.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/01/12/Town-Asbestos-Built-Cancer-Left-Behind/
Hosgood, A.F. A Mining Town Scattered Residents, and Asbestos, to the Wind. January 14, 2026.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/01/14/Mining-Town-Scattered-Residents-Asbestos/
2 Zeidler, M. ‘It was like one big family’: 25 years later, a B.C. ghost town's former residents still miss their home. September 17, 2017.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/it-was-like-one-big-family-25-years-later-a-b-c-ghost-town-s-former-residents-still-miss-their-home-1.4293596
3 Robinson, T., Tyndell, A., Loney, G. Memories of Wittenoom, a once-thriving but asbestos-riddled town that led to more than 1,000 deaths. September 14, 2022.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-15/asbestos-riddled-wittenoom-empty-but-memories-live-on/101433166
4 Official Report of DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY (Hansard). FRIDAY, JULY 29, 1977
https://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard-content/Debates/31st2nd/31p_02s_770729a.htm
The environmental fallout from the asbestos mining and milling operations at the Cassiar Asbestos Mine was described in detail in a July 31, 1986 deposition by Cassiar’s former Environmental Control Engineer Marek Jarecki: “…the average dust concentration levels from the mill, dryers building and the dry rock storage are very high, probably much higher than even the outdated MAC level of 5 million particles per cubic foot. Judging from the old dust inspection reports and the present observations, this situation has deteriorated during the last few years.” (Page 41). Jarecki later went on to say: “From the years 1967 to 1969, the results of the dust studies at Cassiar had gotten worse. In 1967 there were 12 locations that exceeded five million particles and in 1969 there were 21 locations that exceeded five million particles.”
5 Pilkington, C. Cassiar asbestos mine, near Yukon-B.C. border, one of province's most contaminated: mining watchdog. June 9, 2025.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/b-c-mining-watchdog-lists-asbestos-mine-among-the-most-contaminated-in-the-province-1.7553895
6 Barrett, J. The family legacy Gina Rinehart would like to forget. July 7, 2015.
https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/the-family-legacy-gina-rinehart-would-like-to-forget-20150707-gi6orz
7 Carey, R.N. et al. Mortality and Cancer Incidence After Exposure to Blue Asbestos in Childhood: A Further 10 Years of FollowζUp. July 6, 2025.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12337629/
8 In a prescient and scathing letter dated June 6, 1948 about his visit to the Wittenom asbestos mine, Dr Eric Saint informed the head of the Department of Public Health (Perth, Australia) that: “I’ve an eye to the future of the asbestos mill at Wittenoom… (it) operates without any sort of dust extractor whatsoever; and since the ‘incubation period’ of asbestos is so much less than (silica), in a year or two ABA (Australian Blue Asbestos) will produce the richest and most lethal crop of asbestosis in the world’s literature.”
Kazan-Allen, L. The Dollars and The Doctors. Text of a paper presented at a medical conference in Slovenia: “Ethics in White,” June 8, 2007.
https://ibasecretariat.org/lka_doctors_and_dollars_jun07.pdf
Layman, L. The Blue Asbestos Industry at Wittenoom in Western Australia: A Short History.
https://cdn.toxicdocs.org/8O/8OK9OQOJaEB3d6dMrzKyZLQd/8OK9OQOJaEB3d6dMrzKyZLQd.pdf
9 Towie, N. ‘I’m so angry, I’m wild’: the never-ending wait to clean up asbestos town Wittenoom. May 29, 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/30/im-so-angry-im-wild-the-never-ending-wait-to-clean-up-asbestos-town-wittenoom
10 Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia. Wittenoom Overview. Accessed January 26, 2026.
https://asbestosdiseases.org.au/information/wittenoom-overview/
The figure of 2,000 only included deaths that had occurred by the year 2000; according to an ADSA spokesperson the updated figure is more likely to be 4,000. Many of the asbestos deaths due to Wittenoom exposures were of people who had been children in the mining town; this included the children of civil servants such as police, teachers and medical staff as well as the children of miners and mill workers.
11 Kazan-Allen, L. November 2016: Asbestos Action and Reaction. December 9, 2016.
https://www.ibasecretariat.org/lka-november-2016-asbestos-action-and-reaction.php
12 The Blue Angel of Wittenoom commemorates a visit to the notorious asbestos mining town in Western Australia. It is believed that this expressionist painting depicts the asbestos processing plant at the entrance to Wittenoom Gorge. The artist Jan Senbergs, who was born in Latvia in 1939 and arrived in Australia aged 11, died in Melbourne in 2024.
13 Text of 2016 speech by Hayden Stephens reproduced with permission from the author.
https://ibasecretariat.org/hayden-stephens-wittenoom-speech-2016.pdf
