What’s the price for potentially exposing people to asbestos? According to the EPA, it’s $5,425.

Imagine sitting in a dental chair, the high-pitched whir of the drill in your ears. You’re focused on the procedure, trusting you’re in a safe, sanitary environment.

Now imagine that just beyond the door, a construction crew is tearing up old flooring, sending clouds of dust into the air. You assume it’s just ordinary dust… But what if it’s not? What if it contains microscopic, needle-like fibers of asbestos, a known carcinogen, and nobody even bothered to check?

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, this is the risk that Merit Construction Company created when it renovated a dental office in Stonecrest, Georgia.

Between November 2024 and March 2025, the construction company ripped old flooring out and performed other alterations at the dentisting facility. When they did their ripping and tearing, they allegedly skipped the single most important first step in any renovation project: conducting a thorough inspection for asbestos before starting the work.

For this critical failure—a breach of a federal law designed to prevent exposure to a deadly substance—the company has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $5,425. They did not, however, have to admit they did anything wrong.

The First Rule of Demolition Is You Check for Asbestos

There’s a very solid reason the Clean Air Act has specific, ironclad rules about asbestos. It’s because the material, once hailed as a miracle insulator and fire retardant, is a silent killer. Fire retardant means that it slows fire down, it has nothing to do with the mental capabilities of a flame. Because fire doesn’t have any brains…..The more you know!

When materials containing asbestos are disturbed—like when you tear up old vinyl floor tiles, scrape away old insulation, or break down walls—they release tiny, sharp fibers into the air.

These dinky little fibers, when inhaled, lodge themselves deep inside human lungs and can stay there for a lifetime. They can cause debilitating diseases like asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma—a particularly aggressive and fatal cancer.

The terrifying part is the latency. The symptoms may not appear for 20, 30, or even 50 years after exposure. A worker could breathe in asbestos dust on a job site in their twenties and not receive a death sentence from their doctor until they’re a grandparent.

To prevent this, the law is simple and unambiguous. Before any renovation or demolition begins in a commercial building, the owner or operator must conduct a thorough inspection for asbestos. It is the absolute first step. It is not optional.

According to the EPA, Merit Construction Company simply didn’t do it. When federal inspectors showed up at the dental office on March 12, 2025, they uncovered the failure. In later communications, the company confirmed it: no asbestos inspection was ever performed before the renovation began.

This single oversight put everyone at risk.

The construction workers on the site were the first line of exposure, potentially breathing in hazardous dust without any of the specialized protective gear or containment procedures required for asbestos abatement.

But the danger doesn’t stop there. Microscopic asbestos fibers can easily travel through HVAC systems, potentially contaminating the entire dental suite and exposing office staff and patients to a hazardous air pollutant without their knowledge.

Like can you imagine dying from lung cancer because of a dentist visit you had 40 years ago?

An Invisible Danger: From Renovation to Violation

A Slap on the Wrist for a Potentially Deadly Mistake

For ignoring a law written to prevent fatal lung disease, Merit Construction will pay a fine of $5,425. For many construction companies, the cost of a proper asbestos survey is often in that same ballpark. In effect, the penalty for breaking the law may be no more than the cost of following it in the first place.

They don’t pay much (if any) additional money for breaking asbestos regulations, and they get to save time. And since time is money I guess it means they’ve also profited from not doing an asbestos check? That’s how it works right?

This is where the system of accountability can feel hollow. The settlement, known as a Consent Agreement and Final Order (CAFO), allows the company to resolve the case without ever acknowledging the danger it may have created. The legal document I used to source this entire article explicitly states that the company “neither admits nor denies the factual allegations”.

This is a common feature of civil enforcement actions, designed to speed up settlements. But what message does it send? A company can gamble with the long-term health of its workers and the public, and if they get caught, the consequence is a modest check and a piece of paper that says they don’t admit to anything. There is no public apology, no admission of responsibility. It’s a transaction, not a reckoning.

The regulations governing asbestos are not bureaucratic red tape. They are a shield, forged from a painful history of corporate negligence and worker suffering. For decades, the asbestos industry knew its product was killing people and covered it up. The laws we have today are a direct response to that betrayal, a promise from our government that workers and the public will be protected from this invisible poison.

The Price of Forgetting

A company is essentially forgetting about the painful history we’ve got with asbestos when it opts to skip a asbestos inspection. It’s treating a potentially life-or-death procedure as an inconvenient and expensive line item which can be cut to save time or money.

The EPA has done its job by enforcing the law. And Merit Construction has certified it is now in compliance with all relevant requirements. But the workers who breathed in that dust, and the patients who sat in that waiting room, are left with a lifetime of uncertainty. Or at least, they would be if any of them ever read this stupid article on their dentist office… We don’t know if asbestos was actually present in that dental office, because the one chance to find out for sure was completely ignored.

The real solution isn’t just about collecting fines after the fact. The deed has been done! The real solution be about ensuring every single construction company understands that the first step of any renovation is not swinging a hammer—it’s protecting the people who will be breathing the air. Anything less is a gamble we can’t afford to take.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the Consent Agreement and Final Order in the matter of Merit Construction Company, Docket No. CAA-04-2025-0004(b), filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 4.

Please fact check me by visiting the EPA’s website for the source document on this settlement: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/D392769F9027BF1C85258CF4006F43EA/$File/Merit%20Construction%20Company%20CAFO%208-28-25%20CAA-04-2025-0004(b)pdf.pdf