This happened over my toilet in my bullshit apartment. Twice. It started as a giant blister of paint that we had to lance with a barbecue skewer, then about a meter x 0.5 meter oval fell out of the ceiling. Then it was “repaired” and fell out again about 2 weeks later.
When I was a kid, this also happened in my dad’s old-ass house. The entire ceiling of my bedroom fell on my bed. Luckily I was at my mom’s house at the time (divorce, it not only means double Christmas, sometimes it can save your life! Although, my dad wouldn’t have been living in a too-large un-managable house all by his disorganized self had it not been for the divorce…so…whew, this parenthetic aside is turning out to be a real bummer…)
Yeah, if you can just leave asbestos undisturbed, it’s not a big deal.
Sometimes you don’t have a choice to leave it alone though - if your attic insulation is asbestos-contaminated vermiculite, and your ceiling just collapsed the way this lady’s did, the asbestos has disturbed itself.
(As @WalterStabosz mentioned - vermiculite insulation from about the 60s to the early 90s is likely from the Libby Colorado mine, where there was a bit of asbestos in the vermiculite deposit. We recently did not buy a house precisely because of that stuff being found on inspection. Their oven fan didn’t work, and once we knew what was in the attic, it made sense why they hadn’t gotten around to repairing it)
We were renting a 90-year-old house, and an upstairs radiator leaked pretty bad. So we called the RE agent, who called the owner, and nothing happened. We put down towels and called a few more times and tried to explain a stitch in time saves nine.
Easter Sunday we came home to find the dining room ceiling on the dining room table.
While true, that lead must be ingested to be toxic, the common misconception is that this only happens, for children, with visible chips.
Lead dust, which you get from opening old windows, can also be a culprit. The dust settles on things, and becomes ingested repeatedly over time. Another big source is contaminated soil. If someone simply pressure washes a bunch of paint off an old house, that lead isn’t going anywhere for a while, even if you can’t see it anymore. Pets or humans can track the soil in, which, again, can find it’s way onto surfaces children play on.
