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Concern Ikea asbestos in Hook air


A group of Red Hook community members, divided over whether plans for
an Ikea furniture megastore would help or hurt the transit-isolated neighborhood,
are mending their rift over a problem caused by the project — the
possible airborne release of asbestos.

At the center of the concern is Added Value, a produce farm that, along
with its Saturday farmer’s market, has become a Red Hook meeting
ground in the four years it’s been operating.

The farm and market have sprouted from a little-known planting project
to a site that supports a major agricultural program with children ages
8 to 18 working in the garden and farming throughout the year to grow
vegetables and herbs for local restaurants and other consumers.

Problem is, the Added Value farm sits at Halleck and Columbia streets,
just down the block from the Ikea demolition site, which was slapped with
18 violations and issued a stop-work order in January due to alleged under-reporting
of asbestos contained in a group of Civil War-era warehouses being razed
to make way for the Swedish home-furnishings giant.

The demolition started in December, but on Jan. 7, the city Department
of Environmental Protection (DEP) halted the demolition when an investigator
found large amounts of asbestos in the rubble.

According to the city, contractors hired by the U.S. Dredging Corporation,
which is clearing the land for sale to Ikea, did not follow safety procedures
for asbestos removal, and may have released filaments of friable, or readily
crumbled, asbestos into the air. Additionally, the DEP charges, a site
investigator hired to examine the site before the demolition, grossly
understated the amount and type of asbestos on the site. [See related
story
.]

Now, community members on both sides of the debate are raising issue with
the honesty of the process by which the Ikea construction is taking place.

At a recent Community Board 6 public safety committee meeting, Judith
Dailey, a CB6 member who lives in the Red Hook Houses and works at PS
27 — a school on Huntington Street that does programming at the Added
Value farm — asked a DEP spokeswoman about the impact of the Ikea
site asbestos on the farm.

“I just brought it up at the board only because it is a fact,”
said Dailey, who has been a supporter of the Ikea project. “Added
Value doesn’t only serve the community, it serves the children from
all the Brooklyn schools.”

Ian Marvy, co-founder of the farm and after-school program, said that
in the four years the farm’s been up and running, they’ve grown
from an operation of 15 teenage farmers to 65. Volunteers at the farm
now number 1,000, and throughout the week as many as 1,300 after-school
students come to the farm.

Though the patch of green in Red Hook isn’t as big as their quarter-acre
farm in Far Rockaway, Queens, where much of the harvesting is done, Marvy
said there is a significant issue of students being exposed to any toxins.

“I think the concern is about the appropriate removal as well as
the inappropriate removal,” said Marvy. “There are commonly
held norms about how asbestos is supposed to be treated. It’s a well-known
carcinogen.”

Though asbestos mitigation information made available by the city Department
of Health suggests washing any produce that may have come in contact with
asbestos dust, and replacing the soil, Marvy said it’s not the plants
he’s worried about so much as the general health of the public around
the site.

“[The demolition] should be happening in accordance with common standards
that maintain the health of the entire community, whether they’re
people living across the street from the site, people working in the parks,
or whether it’s people living on the route of the trucks that are
carting the material out,” he said.

“Over the last two weeks to a month there’s obviously been growing
concern throughout the community about the project,” Marvy said when
asked if any of the farm’s restaurant clientele seemed apprehensive
about buying goods after the demolition began.

“The foods, adequately washed, aren’t the problem,” said
Marvy. “The problem is inhalation. It’s the problem of touching
the lungs.”

Lou Sones, a neighborhood activist and founder of Red Hook GAGS, or Groups
Against Garbage Sites, has been one of Ikea’s staunchest foes. He
said the community was concerned mainly with the proximity of the possibly
released asbestos.

“It’s across from the playing field, where all the soccer people
play, where I’m a little league coach. It’s across from a school
bus lot,” where the big yellow buses are stored at night and on weekends
for schools throughout the borough.

“There’s a lot of vulnerable targets near this site, and airborne
asbestos doesn’t have to travel far to do a lot of damage,”
Sones said.
Since the closing of the neighborhood’s last full-service supermarket
in 2001, the farmer’s market run two days a week by Added Value has
thrived. It also supplies local restaurants, although Marvy was hesitant
to name specific clients.

Sones said the farmer’s market was well-frequented, though.

“Our whole family gets our produce down there. When they’re
open we buy as much produce down there as we possibly can,” he said.

Ikea did not return calls seeking comment.

Support for Ikea’s big-box store plan — which passed the city’s
Uniform Land Use Review Procedure last summer — has been based largely
on one factor: the promise of much-needed jobs for residents of the neighborhood’s
public housing projects, where estimates have put the unemployment rate
at nearly 20 percent.

Dailey said the illegal demolition and the high asthma rate she already
sees among neighborhood children, has compromised her support of Ikea
coming to Red Hook.

“We’re all breathing here!” Dailey said. “The numbers
are horrible when it comes to young people with asthma in the Red Hook
community — we certainly don’t need this stuff in the air.

“Those of us who support it get updates in the mail, and we even
get calls, but no one is saying this happened,” she added.

She said a mailing from Ikea came to her home last week, noting that amid
the newsletter’s explanation of how development was proceeding, she
didn’t see any mention of the demolition.

“We also want to know when something isn’t right. We want to
be open and honest about what’s going on. Keep us informed,”
Dailey said. “The same way they send out a newsletter giving us information
about the progress, also let us know what’s going on.”