Have the RATP and a subcontractor exposed workers or even users to asbestos?
An investigating judge has been investigating since October after the complaint of a worker who believes he has been in danger for 20 years during night work to repair Paris metro stations.
Since October 12, a judicial investigation at the public health center of the Paris Court of Justice has been open for "
endangering others
" and "
employment of a worker whose activity exposes him to ionizing radiation without a compliant risk assessment
" or "
respect for the rules of prevention
", confirmed the Paris prosecutor's office to AFP.
Pascal (first name changed), hired at ERI in 2001 and on sick leave since 2020, was heard in early December.
At the beginning of February, this 39-year-old worker who became a team leader told AFP about his night work on the electrical network of the emblematic stations: “We
break everything with a sledgehammer and a chisel, we remove everything that is old cables, old equipment, electrical cabinets, then we iron everything to new
”.
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He claims to have worked more or less without respiratory protective equipment for 20 years, and to have been informed of the presence of asbestos in the electrical networks of the metro he was dismantling until the end of 2015. Despite the appearance that year of the "
asbestos risk
" on his job description, complete protective equipment continues to be extremely rare, and no containment measures for the areas under work have been put in place.
“Everything we broke” for years contained asbestos
Recounting being, for once, equipped from head to toe during a construction site at the Réaumur-Sébastopol station at the end of June 2017, Pascal describes his surprise: “We are
lifting a plate.
I ask where is the asbestos.
They point out a hole to me, which I myself had broken with a hammer without any protection
” several years before.
He then said to “
realize
” that “
everything we broke
”, sometimes “
by hand and in a t-shirt
”, for years in “
clouds of dust
”, contained asbestos.
He has since been diagnosed with an anxiety-depressive syndrome.
“
I no longer sleep, I no longer eat, I have become a shadow of myself.
“If he has not developed this condition at this stage, he knows that this insulating fiber, massively used in construction before being banned in France in 1997, is a time bomb, a factor in lung cancer or of the pleura long after exposure.
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In 2014, the French Institute for Health Monitoring mentioned 100,000 possible deaths by 2050. Pascal's main concern, the presence of asbestos fibers on his overalls, "
washed with children's belongings
".
“
I say to myself, I may have killed them indirectly without knowing it
,” he adds, tears in his eyes.
According to him, some of his colleagues “
are not well.
They are afraid.
They know
”.
His lawyer, Me Leila Messaoudi, had filed a first criminal complaint in 2021, mentioned by Le Parisien.
She accuses the RATP and ERI of not having respected their "
extremely precise obligations
" in terms of asbestos, which employers must demonstrate.
"
If it hasn't been done, they won't be able to prove it
, ”she says.
She is also worried about a risk for metro users, noting that the SNCF had closed an RER station for three months in 2018 for work related to the presence of asbestos.
In addition to the criminal proceedings, Pascal asks the Créteil industrial tribunal on Friday afternoon for the judicial termination of his contract and compensation for his damage.
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"Respect" for the labor code
Contacted by AFP, François Lhoutellier, president of ERI, replied that his group based in Val-de-Marne, with a turnover of 145 million euros in 2021, “has always respected the provisions of the
Code work
".
He defended "
appropriate training
", "
monitoring by occupational medicine
" as well as "
appropriate safety equipment
".
The RATP told AFP that it was "
not aware at this stage
" of this procedure, adding that "
maintenance interventions on these materials are carried out in accordance with the regulations concerning the prevention of asbestos risk
".
ERI and RATP mention strict and regular field checks of the second on these points.
Me Messaoudi, she judges that the subcontractors are the "
big forgotten
": they "
do not have access to the intranet base
" of information on asbestos deployed by the RATP "
and do not have the protection
" for their health provided for by a union agreement signed in 2006 by the management.