New taskforce to tackle impact of 'killer' silica dust on thousands of Sydney workers

It's a potentially deadly dust that is thick within the sandstone which lies underneath Sydney. The taskforce was announced months after a parliamentary order for papers revealed thousands of workers on Sydney's road and rail tunnel projects had been exposed to "high levels" of the deadly dust for at least seven years, but that information had been kept from the public. He said the road headers used in the tunnelling projects exposed workers to levels of silica dust far greater than engineered stone kitchen benchtops, which are now banned in Australia. "It's entirely foreseeable that if you're tunnelling through sandstone, you're going to get silica in air and it's going to be respirable and it's going to eventually cause silicosis and death," Dr Allen said. "The fact that we are really late in coming to look at active monitoring of dust on site, and that it took six years to see the recommendations of the dust diseases taskforce actually being implemented, I think is a real indictment on companies that should be keeping their workers safe," he said.