Community advisory board endorses effort
By: Greg Forester
MONTGOMERY The community advisory board for work occurring at the former North Princeton Developmental Center on Thursday gave input, and then endorsed the format in which asbestos monitoring information will be provided to the public and the school district.
Last week school district officials had expressed dismay over the delay in receiving the data, which is being collected by the firm performing the work, Weston Solutions, and a firm overseeing Weston’s work, J.M. Sorge.
"There was actually no delay in providing the data," said Mayor Cecilia Birge. "It was just the kick-off week for the project, and Weston and J.M. Sorge were determining the format and procedure for providing the data."
The firms involved were trying to develop a format that would help both people with experience reading environmental data like the asbestos monitoring and people without experience, said Mayor Birge.
Of the firms, Weston Solutions was selected by Montgomery Township as the contractor to perform environmental remediation on the 250-acre former state institution, and J.M Sorge was selected to oversee the clean-up and remediation.
Both Weston Solutions and J.M. Sorge are placing asbestos monitors around the work sites, which provide both data on the total amount of dust, and more specific data on the total number of asbestos fibers in samples.
Last week, Weston Solutions had verbally assured the firm hired by the school district to oversee work, Emilcott Associates, that there had been no problems with the asbestos monitoring data, according to officials working for Emilcott.
Now that a format and procedure have been established to provide the data, delays such as the one experienced in providing the first week of monitoring data can be avoided, according to township officials.
Mayor Cecilia Birge said from this point on, the data for each week of work will be provided every Monday morning to officials from the school district.
The mayor also said the same data will also be provided to the public each Monday on the township’s Web site.
Data from the first week of work, during the district’s spring break, showed asbestos monitoring levels that never approached the designated site action level.
The site action level is the level of dust, which if approached, would trigger a shutdown of activities at the NPDC site.
Weston Solutions reported it successfully removed 1,016 feet of asbestos-insulated steam piping during the week of spring break, working mainly on the aboveground sections of pipe north of Main Boulevard.
With the end of spring break, Weston has moved west, towards the old NPDC power house, where employees have began removing sections of underground piping.
The data for last week will be provided today, due to communication problems stemming from the Sunday and Monday’s nor’easter.

