Contractor says asbestos removed before buildings razed
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8/10/2008 - 8/10/08
Merchants across Cerrillos Road from the Santa Fe Indian School say they saw no sign of asbestos abatement in the months before the demolition of more than a dozen old buildings there.
But a contractor for the school insists the asbestos was removed before the razing began.
Like most merchants in the strip of hair salons, tattoo parlors, head shops, loan offices and used-goods retailers, Lynn Cobb of Santa Fe Photo Co-Op was surprised when he returned to work July 28.
Some of the buildings directly across from his shop had been reduced to piles of rubble over the weekend. Others had been demolished just enough to make restoration impossible.
Cobb said he had noticed no activity there in recent months. "I would have thought they would be taking furniture or something out of there," he said. "I was told by a couple of people that those buildings were vacant anyway, that they were not functional."
Neither Summer Dyer of Napi Glass nor Roxie Constable of M&K Motorcycle Accessories had seen anything going on at the old buildings, either. "They just stared pushing the buildings over," Dyer said.
"I'm sorry to see all the old buildings go," added Constable.
Diane Carter, who has run State Beauty Supply for 23 years, calls the demolition a disaster. "It's worse than any devastation that you'd see from a tornado," she said. "What kind of an image is that for tourism? Why would anybody even come here? They just ripped down every bit of charm over there, totally."
When Carter read that the buildings were torn down because they contained asbestos, she got suspicious. "If they were removing asbestos, they'd have had to have a tent and use respirators," she said. "Nothing like that ever happened."
But Scott Taylor, a manager for Flintco, an Oklahoma construction firm building the school's new Wellness Center and managing the demolition, said abatement began June 16 and was completed weeks earlier than anticipated, allowing demolition to begin July 26.
The reason the abatement wasn't apparent, Taylor said, is because it was done inside the buildings. He said the only thing visible from the exterior were the negative-pressure tents that looked like giant balloons over the windows.
Taylor said people might have thought the asbestos abatement was another movie crew using the campus as a staging area, as several have done in recent years.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency office in Dallas was first notified of the Santa Fe Indian School's plans to demolish buildings in late May. The initial two-page, handwritten notice with an illegible signature said 104,746 square feet of asbestos-containing debris from 15 buildings would be removed between June 16 and Aug. 20, with demolition to take place between Aug. 16 and Dec. 4.
Complete Decon Inc. of Phoenix was to transport the waste to the Special Waste Disposal landfill in Mountainair, according to the initial notification.
But Aug. 4, after a conference call with EPA that followed the public outcry over the demolition, a representative of Flintco filed a revised notification.
This time, the waste transporter was changed to Diamond S Trucking of Joseph City, Ariz., and the landfill was changed to Painted Desert landfill, also in Joseph City.
Elvia Evering of the EPA's asbestos program said such changes are routine. "That's why the regulations allow for revisions — because things change for whatever the reason," she said.
Flintco's Taylor said the subcontractors were changed because of financial considerations. "They got a better deal in Arizona," he said. "So believe it or not, it was a better deal to haul it all the way to Arizona than to dump it south of Albuquerque."
The dates of the asbestos removal remained the same in the Aug. 4 revised notification, but the start date of the demolition was moved back three weeks to July 25 — one day before it actually began.
The revised notification also seeks to remove an additional 27,431 square feet of asbestos-containing debris from three additional buildings, totaling 31,000 square feet.
So far, the EPA has sent no one to Santa Fe to inspect the asbestos removal or demolition. "Sometimes, we do, but in this case, we didn't," EPA's Evering said. "If we have an inspector that's available, we generally would ask for them to go down. That's why the start dates for the removal and the demolition dates are important to us, because it allows us to target inspections to go out there and make sure they're actually complying with the regulations."
"EPA's all on board with everything we're doing," added Taylor. "When they found out we had an independent auditor ... they said, 'Well, if y'all did that, we're not coming out.' I was surprised."
Evering said fire-retardant asbestos began being used in various building supplies since the 1920s. Less has been used since the 1970s after it was determined that breathing asbestos can cause cancer. But asbestos continues to be used even today in some floor tile and glues. Taylor said that while many of the older buildings that were torn down at the school were built before asbestos was used, it had been added in remodelings.
Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.
