Paving work at the future WWM Properties shopping center on Southfield Road, across from McCaffrey’s is underway, as the remediation of the site continues, West Windsor officials are saying.
Construction at the 12-acre shopping center, where a day care center, bank, pharmacy, and several small retail establishments are proposed, was halted a few years ago after the state Department of Environmental Protection found that Ford Motor Co. and its contractor, Edgewood Properties Inc., had shipped recycled concrete from the demolition of Ford’s former Edison Assembly Plant on Route 1 to various construction sites around the state, including West Windsor. Tests later found the cement to contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PCBs are a mixture of individual chemicals that can cause some health implications — PCBs are no longer produced in the U.S.
Officials originally believed the site in West Windsor contained only a small pile of fill of approximately 30 cubic yards (or two dump truck loads). Finally, it was determined that about eight to ten feet of fill was used to bring the site up to grade, and that the fill was more extensively spread throughout the site. A total of between 50,000 and 60,000 cubic yards — or about 5,000 to 5,500 dump truck loads — had been used.
The DEP said that capping the fill and removing only one hot spot was an acceptable course of action for remediating the site, but council tried to get Edgewood Properties to remove all of the contaminated fill. WWM officials agreed in April, 2008, to excavate the 10 hot spots on site and cap off the remainder of the site, which got the go-ahead from the DEP.
West Windsor Community Development Coordinator Pat Ward said that since then, DEP has allowed WWM to cap the site. “They had to remove a certain amount of material,” she said. “They had to put on a cap. The cap is really the roads, sidewalks, and the slabs for the buildings.”
That work is underway now, and contractors on the site are putting in “extra-clean” material for the roadways, curbways, sidewalks, berms, and concrete slabs, she added. When this work is done, WWM Properties will go back to the DEP to make sure the DEP is satisfied with the work on site to satisfy the remediation, Ward says.
Once they receive a “no further action” designation from the DEP, the township will be able to give the WWM officials the permits they need to be able to build the actual buildings on site, Ward added.
The issue prompted township officials to draft an ordinance that would require all soils proposed to be deposited on township land to first be sampled and tested, and requires owners, agents, lessors, lessees, tenants or occupants to get a permit from the township certifying that the testing had been done before depositing the soil on site. Officials said in doing this, they wanted to prevent another incident of contamination from occurring in the future.
