Jersey City owner of broken, contaminated wall faces bureaucratic mess

December 27, 2011, 1:40 PM
By Terrence T. McDonald/The Jersey Journal

A Halladay Street warehouse owner is caught up in a bureaucratic mess as he attempts to repair a chromium-contaminated wall that was nearly destroyed last month in a truck accident.

Jersey City officials initially demanded that the wall be repaired by the end of this month.

The wall, on the southeastern side of Richard Bass' 42,000-square-foot warehouse, was damaged over Thanksgiving weekend when a truck backed into it, threatening the wall's integrity.

But wall isn't just unstable -- it's also contaminated by a dangerous, cancer-causing chemical thanks to the building's proximity to a polluted plot of land.

So while the city's building officials want a new wall constructed as soon as possible, the state Department of Environmental Protection has put the brakes on the project.

"It's inconveniencing everyone's lives," said Bass, who has owned the building for 30 years.

The wall is adjacent to a chromium site on Garfield Avenue, where for decades PPG Industries operated a manufacturing complex that polluted the air and soil with cancer-causing hexavalent chromium.

Mike McCabe, the court-appointed site administrator for the Garfield Avenue chromium cleanup, said PPG will pay for the removal of the chromium from Bass' warehouse so that the wall replacement can continue.

Samples were taken from the wall to determine where the chromium is. Results from those tests should be completed after Christmas, McCabe said last week. The wall cannot simply be torn down and replaced, he added.

"There may be some exposure to people in the building resulting from the damage," McCabe said.

The city has agreed to let the DEP and McCabe handle Bass' problem and will not penalize him if the wall isn't replaced by the end of December, said Deputy Mayor Kabili Tayari.

Meanwhile, DEP spokesman Lawrence Hajda said Bass' warehouse is not allowed to be occupied -- a tough break for Bass and the half-dozen tenants who rent space in the building.