Set among the gum trees and grass at Moorebank, the Australian Defence Force's massive main storage facility in Sydney's south-west, Shed 34 appears like any other.
Low-slung and long, the corrugated iron warehouse sits near the boundary of the sprawling site, unmarked save for a painted black number, and unremarkable.
Inside stand row upon row of dusty prefab storage units, 20 bays deep and seven high, hundreds of metres of dark grey shelves labelled by number and lit under harsh fluorescent lights.
But Shed 34 is not like others at Moorebank.
It has become the epicentre of defence's bungling efforts to rid itself of asbestos.
On its shelves sit thousands of items - gaskets, hoses, sheeting, packing material - which contain the deadly carcinogen, tagged with orange warning labels and wrapped in plastic.
Shed 34 is where asbestos-contaminated material, items that have been prohibited in Australia for nearly seven years, are finally being quarantined, as defence, and the navy in particular, finally begins to uncover the extent of its problems, the health risk its inaction has exposed its members to, and the legal liability it has created for itself.
It started innocuously, even innocently, enough.
In 2007, a gasket marked "Danger-Asbestos" was found in a "shit-hot locker" on board a navy warship.
A shit-hot locker, in the slang of naval engineers, is a collection of odd spare parts for the countless repair jobs which emerge on board any working ship. The parts tend to be odds and ends, gaskets, seals, and washers, suitable for scores of purposes. Shit-hot lockers are not strictly "accounted" and parts in them can often languish for years.
It was not a major issue. The part was not used, it was not decayed. But it should not have been there, because the use of asbestos-containing materials was outlawed in Australia in 2001, with their outright prohibition coming into effect in 2004.
Given its widespread use of asbestos parts, the ADF was granted a three-year exemption to 2007 to phase them out.
That exemption was controversially extended last year to 2010, but Comcare's safety, rehabilitation and compensation commission permitted the use of only 318 items, since reduced to 209.
So the navy, realising the sensitivity of a non-exempt asbestos item on board a ship, commissioned an audit, ostensibly to check similar oversights had not, or could not, occur elsewhere, and to confirm its asbestos eradication program had found all the asbestos parts and removed them from circulation.
Defence handed the contract for the audit to a trusted contractor, SYPAQ Systems, which last year ran scores of outsourced projects for defence. But even SYPAQ's initial cursory examination of the navy's stores records uncovered a serious, and potentially lethal, problem.
The navy has two primary databases for its stores, the Standard Defence Supply System, SDSS, and the Central Catalogue of Inventory, CENCAT.
A perfunctory examination of these - as simple as typing "asbestos" into the database search engine - uncovered 1699 items which did, or were strongly suspected of, containing asbestos.
Many of them were still on the shelves at naval stores around the country; many were still being issued to ships.
Worse still, many of them were "mixed stock". The navy had ordered in non-asbestos replacements for an asbestos part, for example a gasket, but then simply thrown the old and new in together.
For those, there was no way, short of an expensive and time-consuming test on each item, to know which were asbestos and which were not.
The navy's own knowledge of its asbestos holdings is dangerously shambolic. Files obtained by the Herald include briefings from naval chiefs claiming the service was free of asbestos, which are then directly contradicted, by the same officer, just days later.
These problems are confirmed by the LSA-N asbestos register, the navy's own effort to keep tabs on its asbestos parts, which is, at best, out-of-date, at worst, hopelessly compromised.
The navy is still struggling to define the size of its problem.
SYPAQ found 235,725 items in naval stores catalogues were suspected of containing asbestos. None has been classified as "mission-critical", that is, their withdrawal would ground equipment and jeopardise a mission being undertaken.
As each of SYPAQ's regular progress reports was sent to defence, it came with the warning that the task, and defence's problem, was far greater than originally anticipated.
Emails marked high priority flew around the ADF, meetings were hastily arranged and held, but instead of the scope of the project being expanded, its goals were contracted. SYPAQ Systems would provide defence with three lists: one, of items which contain asbestos; two, of items which do not contain asbestos; and three, of items suspected of containing asbestos.
And all discovered asbestos items were to be sent to Shed 34 at Moorebank, the navy conceding more items were likely to be found as investigations progressed.
The final risk assessment report by SYPAQ Systems, issued to defence chiefs in May, is a damning indictment of the navy's efforts to rid itself of asbestos since its universal prohibition was first announced in 2001.
It found several thousand asbestos parts "still active in inventory and on the shelf ready for issue".
"Since the full ban came into effect on 31 December, 2003, several hundred confirmed asbestos items have been issued to operational units in direct contravention of state and federal laws.
"Potentially thousands of defence personnel and defence contractors have been exposed to asbestos without their knowledge as a result of asbestos-containing items remaining in inventory."
SYPAQ Systems found that even when asbestos items were identified by the navy, they were left in circulation.
"The activity undertaken to remove asbestos items from inventory has been running for over six years and many of the same items identified in the early reviews have still not been removed."
The report said thousands of personnel had probably been exposed to asbestos, and that the navy's legal liability could run above $100 million.
"Whilst the risk to the safety of personnel posed by hazards going forward is significant and must be addressed, the cost risk to the organisation posed by the legal repercussions of actions to date requires significant and immediate attention. The likelihood that they will occur is almost certain and the consequences are potentially catastrophic from a financial perspective."
A defence spokesman rejected the report's most critical findings, saying: "Defence considers the [asbestos] parts were handled safely by a relatively small number of personnel.
"Defence has been working to eradicate asbestos-containing items from its extensive inventory prior to prohibition to the present day. Defence has comprehensive incident reporting and health management arrangements for anyone who thinks they may have been exposed."
But the Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, who first accused the Defence Force of lethargy in its efforts to remove asbestos in 2007 when he was in opposition, said despite the massive cost of ridding the ADF of asbestos, its continued use was unacceptable.
"I do not accept the position that was put to me by defence upon coming to Government that the total removal of asbestos from defence equipment could take several decades," he said.
Mr Fitzgibbon has told defence no further asbestos exemptions would be supported and has ordered a survey of all equipment and buildings.
"The continued exposure of people to asbestos is something that is no longer accepted by the Australian community, nor this Government, and I expect defence to change its culture of endless exemptions and waivers."