School’s operators called police
when chemical smell filled building
By sherry conohan
Staff Writer

Something about soil being excavated from a dirt crawlspace under a Main Street building in Eatontown didn’t smell right, both literally and metaphorically.

The dirt, which is believed to be contaminated with chemicals from a dry-cleaning operation that was once run on the site, gave off an odor that caused the operators of the Bright Beginnings Pre-School, which is housed in the building at 23 Main St., to call the borough Police Department at 10:45 a.m. Jan. 14.

In addition to unearthing potential toxins, it was discovered that the men digging were doing the excavation without the proper permit. Also, removal of the dirt left the building structurally unstable.

As a result, the Bright Beginnings Pre-School on the first floor of the building and an insurance office on the second floor had to be evacuated, and the buildings on either side, housing the Tatciro Tailor Shop on the north and Eatontown Smoke Shop on the south, also had to be closed.

All three buildings were still closed as of press time Tuesday.

The owner of the 23 Main St. building, Dogan Uygur, who has an office on Route 36 in West Long Branch, was fined $500 for undertaking the work without a permit, according to Wallace J. Englehart, who is both the construction and fire official for the borough. Uygur also faces the additional cost of having to remediate the site and bring in a structural engineer to make sure necessary repairs are carried out to ensure the building does not collapse.

In addition to the police, the episode brought out the borough Fire Department, the Fort Monmouth Fire Department, the Monmouth County Hazmat team and officials from the Monmouth Regional Health Commission.

Police Capt. George S. Jackson said that when officers responded, they found the workers in the crawl space.

"They had taken it down about 4 or 5 feet," he said. "The owner of the building wanted to make that a storage area. They were taking the soil out in five-gallon pails and putting it into Dumpsters and taking it away."

Jackson explained there is a partial basement on the back side of the building facing the municipal parking lot, and the intention was to break through the interior concrete wall of that basement to open it up to the crawl space so as to extend the storage space in the basement.

He said the digging released the contamination that was contained in the soil.

In addition to exposing hazardous material on the site, digging the soil away from the walls of the crawl space took away the support for the building, according to Jackson. He said that without the soil in place, the building was in danger of collapsing inward.

Uygur, the building owner, said he has hired — at considerable cost — Seashore Associates, which has a structural engineer who was assessing the situation and would recommend what to do and then see to it that the recommendation is carried out.

"They are taking care of everything for me," Uygur said.

He noted that the fire department already had built up the walls to stabilize them.

"There is no danger at all," he maintained.

Uygur said the work was undertaken because he wanted to "reorganize things" on the lower level and then found it didn’t have a foundation.

"After that, it gets excited," he said. "Everybody’s frenzied."

Englehart said he and his staff would not go down into the crawl space on the advice of a structural engineer because it is "a hazardous atmosphere."

Englehart said he was awaiting the report from the structural engineer as to what to do to brace the building on either side.

Sidney Johnson, head of the Monmouth Regional Health Commission, said his staff went into the building with a meter to detect what the odor was in the preschool and found perchloroethylene, which is used by dry cleaners.

"At this point, I don’t think it presents any threat to anybody," he said. "The levels in the preschool were relatively low. But the standards are for middle-age adults. Even through they were below the OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standard, we can’t take a chance with young children."

Johnson said the owner now has to hire an environmental firm to do an assessment and devise a cleanup plan that has to be approved by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

"I have no idea of the time that will take," he said. "I don’t know what we have."

If it’s a small amount of contamination, it may only take a short time to clean it up, he said. "But if it has migrated under the walls to adjacent buildings, it will take longer."

"At this point," he said, "it’s going to be closed until it opens."

Jerze Chojnacki, from the county Hazmat team that responded to the emergency, said his group’s air monitoring found levels of volatile organic compounds on the first floor and in the basement. He said while the monitoring meters weren’t specific, he suspected tetrachloroethylene, or "terk," because he could smell it. He said soil samples were taken and sent off for testing, and he expected the report back by the end of January.

"We suspect these were from the dry cleaning operation that was run in the building several years ago," he said.

Like Johnson, he said the levels on the first floor were not dangerous, but the preschool was closed down immediately because of the presence of children.