closed 16 schools and six preschools, and partially closed eight other schools, on Friday <\/a>after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) issued a recall notice for coloured sand products when testing detected traces of asbestos.<\/p>\nKmart and Target have since issued a product safety recall for four additional products, and the ACT Education Directorate has decided to close 69 schools on Monday in response.<\/p>\n
ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry said unfortunately the latest recalled products were used even more widely in Canberra schools than the initially identified products.<\/p>\n
“That means that while we would have been able to re-open many schools from Friday, we are now in a position that we need to close additional schools tomorrow,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ms Berry said 23 public schools that “have had no sand” or have been cleared to reopen would be fully open tomorrow, three of which would be relocating some classes within the schools.<\/p>\n
She said families and staff would be updated via email.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Visual inspections are being conducted in every school that might have the products,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We’ve had SES volunteers, as well as school staff, doing those visual inspections today.<\/p>\n
“This means people [have been] walking through classrooms, corridors and store rooms looking for coloured sand, and mapping what they see.”<\/p>\n
Licensed asbestos contractors would then be called in, Ms Berry said, to “test, remediate and clear the spaces for use again”.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, this could take days,” she said.Loading<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 70 Canberra schools will be closed on Monday due to asbestos contamination concerns after additional coloured sand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2666,165940,40659,64,63,99,2667,164880,60587,7971,22351,20637,159853,13441],"class_list":["post-287751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-act","tag-act-education-directorate","tag-asbestos","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-canberra","tag-coloured-sand","tag-contamination","tag-kmart","tag-recall","tag-school","tag-school-closures","tag-target"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}