There is a city in the Ural Mountains named Asbest — the Russian word for asbestos — where the municipal anthem is "Asbestos, my city and my fate," the welcome sign reads "Asbest is my town and destiny," and the memorial to dead residents is carved from a block of asbestos ore. Its youth hockey club is named Chrysotile. Episode 44 visits the two cities on earth named for the mineral: Asbest, Russia, where the mine is still open and the pit runs seven miles long — and Asbestos, Quebec, the town the Jeffrey Mine built, which looked at the same mineral and voted the name off the welcome sign.
In Asbest, the denial is civic pride. Uralasbest employs roughly one resident in ten; the town's flag is asbestos fibers passing through a ring of flame; the company billboard reads "Asbestos is our Future." And the science is now local: a peer-reviewed comparison found cancer mortality eighteen percent higher for men and twenty-one percent higher for women in Asbest than in the surrounding Sverdlovsk region (1997–2010), and in January 2024 the World Health Organization's cancer agency published a cohort study of more than thirty thousand Asbest workers confirming dose-dependent risk — more fiber, more mesothelioma; more dust, more lung-cancer death. The official response is the "safe use" doctrine, and Russia exports it: chrysotile has been blocked from the Rotterdam Convention's hazard-disclosure list at every Conference of the Parties for twenty years, most recently in May 2025. Russian domestic use has collapsed eighty-three percent since 1995 — what's left is mined to sell to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
The other city made the opposite choice. Asbestos, Quebec grew up around the Jeffrey Mine — mining from 1881, run by Johns-Manville from the First World War to 1983, once the largest open-pit asbestos mine in the world. In 1949, five thousand miners struck for nearly five months in a conflict that helped set the road to Quebec's Quiet Revolution. In 2012, the province cancelled a fifty-eight-million-dollar loan and the mine closed for good. And in October 2020 — voting from their cars in a pandemic parking-lot referendum, ages fourteen and up — residents chose a new name: Val-des-Sources, the Valley of the Springs, fifty-one and a half percent on the third round of a ranked ballot, official December 15, 2020. Plus the detail that belongs to Arc 9 alone: in 2018, Uralasbest stamped its export pallets with a seal reading "Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States" and posted "Donald is on our side" — the cover-up that began as private letters now runs on a shipping label.
What This Episode Covers
Key Statistics
Who This Episode Is For
If you or someone in your family worked in a town or a trade where the product was also the paycheck — a mine, a mill, a shipyard, a factory floor — this episode is about the trap you were in, and about the fact that it was a trap, not a failure. The workers of Asbest were never given a version of the truth that came with another way to eat; the workers of Quebec's asbestos towns got that choice only after fifty years of fighting for it. Wherever you were exposed, the record of what companies knew is what wins claims — and documenting an exposure now, while records and memory are fresh, matters more than waiting for certainty.
About the Firm Featured in This Episode
Danziger & De Llano, LLP is a national mesothelioma law firm founded in 1995 by Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano — over 30 years of experience and nearly two billion dollars recovered for more than a thousand families, with cases in all fifty states. This episode features client advocate Yvette Abrego — her father was a welder who breathed asbestos every shift and came home with it on his clothes, because that job was how the family lived. For nearly twenty years, Yvette has helped working families understand that what happened to them wasn't their fault and wasn't their failure. The firm's approach: find the paper trail that proves what was known, and file every claim and every trust a family qualifies for on day one, together — so the answer comes in months, not years.
Free consultation, seven days a week: dandell.com/contact-us/
Every case is different and past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Eligibility for trust claims and lawsuits varies by individual circumstances.
Resources
Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — 52 episodes tracing asbestos from ancient pottery to the 2024 EPA ban. Produced by Danziger & De Llano.
Episode 44: A Tale of Two Cities Called Asbestos. Arc 9: The Ongoing Cover-Up (Episode 2).
Next — Episode 45: The Chrysotile Lie.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is sponsored by Danziger & De Llano Mesothelioma Law Firm, a nationwide practice with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, the exposure happened somewhere—and Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano know how to trace it back. For a free consultation, visit https://dandell.com.
Resources:
→ Mesothelioma legal rights: https://dandell.com/mesothelioma/
→ Asbestos exposure sources: https://dandell.com/asbestos-exposure/
→ Asbestos trust funds ($30B+ available): https://dandell.com/asbestos-trust-funds/
→ Free case evaluation: https://dandell.com/contact/
Sister Podcast - MESO: The Mesothelioma Podcast:
http://mesotheliomapodcast.com/
