It has taken 20 years – in which 23 agents have gone down with various forms of cancer. According to a source from Viana do Castelo PSP, the 300 square metre stretch of asbestos roof over the annexe of the district command post will at last be removed “sometime in the middle of January 2015”. It is an intervention the police have been waiting for since the grim reality of sickness and deaths at the station became all too apparent. Of the 23 officers who have contracted cancer over the years, 12 are now dead.
“We cannot confirm their deaths were caused by asbestos,” Paulo Rodrigues from the PSP police syndicate told Diário de Notícias. “But the coincidences are many and the men made the association between health problems of their colleagues and the material covering the annexe.”
The long-awaited removal of asbestos will cost in the region of €150,000 and will also go a long way to improving the look of the station which the district command told DN had begun to look like it had suffered some form of terrorist attack “in Iraq or Afghanistan”.
Indeed, news of similar situations within forces comes almost every day, with newspapers reporting that even Lisbon’s PJ suffers from institutional dilapidation.
In Correio da Manhã on Monday, reporters ran a story titled “PJ investigate millions while it counts the pennies”, and highlighted a situation with broken down equipment, borrowed computer printers and even the almost comical situation of a suspect lending a detective a hard drive to investigate computer crime.
Cancer-black spot police station finally to be freed from asbestos
