Sitting on a roof in a ghost town in the middle of the Australian outback, Mario Hartmann waited for the bulldozers to come.
He climbed up every day because it was the only spot to get an internet signal. With the nearest town an hour and a half away, he knew he must be careful. "I go, you can only have 15 beers,” he said. "More than 15 beers, you don’t come up here.”
But far worse risks haunt this town. In the yard below, Hartmann’s Australian sheepdog scampered after a ball, kicking up dust clouds laced with an invisible threat: blue asbestos. Just one breath can send the fibers coursing into someone’s lungs, triggering an aggressive, incurable cancer. That is why the government is about to wipe this town, Wittenoom, off the face of the earth.