Grand Junction Steel has asbestos remediated from offices – The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

This week, workers wearing double layered suits and respirators, inside a bubble of plastic are scraping tiles from the floor and removing drywall from the main office building at the former Grand Junction Steel building to remove asbestos, as the property prepares for the future.

When a building in Colorado is undergoing a renovation, testing is done to determine if there is asbestos present that would be disturbed by the construction work. In the case of the Grand Junction Steel building, the main building did not have any asbestos. However, about 5,500 square feet of the office building, which sits at the entrance of the site off Third Street, was found to have asbestos.

Regional Asbestos, located in Grand Junction and Aurora, was brought in to mitigate the asbestos, which was found in the tile floor, mastic and drywall texture. The floor tile and mastic were both found to be greater than the 1% asbestos threshold requiring a full-regulated abatement, according to Regional Asbestos.

Regional Asbestos President Shaun Witkamp said there are many layers of protections put in place for both the workers and the general public to ensure the mitigation work is safe. The area the workers are in is contained by plastic sheeting and is kept at negative pressure to keep air from escaping.

With our negative air machine, we hold a certain negative pressure, which makes sure we are constantly pulling negative air in and cycling it out, Witkamp said. As were breaking up this asbestos, if fibers are released, theyre working their way into machines and being filtered and not back out into the public.

With the material that is removed, Witkamp said, they use a system to keep the material wet and reduce the amount of asbestos fiber that is released. The material is double bagged, with each bag being cleaned as it is moved out to specialized trucks that will take it to the landfill.

The tile remediation will take five days, Witkamp said, with the drywall mitigation taking another 20 days. A crew of seven full-time workers will be used to complete the project. Witkamp said this is a medium-sized project for his company, which works on everything from a single pipefitting to commercial properties requiring up to 40 workers.

The owner of the Grand Junction Steel property, Jim McConnell, said the remediation was part of an effort to get the building into a usable condition for a future tenant. He said the mitigation work has to be completed first.

Once we get this done, get the asbestos out of here then well start, McConnell said. Ive got some good people working on some plans.

Grand Junction Steel was founded in 1947 and McConnell bought it in the 1980s. The business provided heavy steel plate fabrication for highway and railway structural bridge projects across the country.

I bought it in 1985, McConnell said. After that we went out looking for business. We had a total of maybe 200-plus employees here for a while.

The steel from the business was used to construct bridges in projects around Denver and in Glenwood Canyon. It was used coast-to-coast from bridge construction, from earthquake repair in California to the Big Dig in Boston.

Grand Junction Steel closed in 2009 and was empty for several years. Its most recent tenant was EcoGen, a hemp and CBD producer. However, after EcoGen was sold in mid-2020, the business moved its offices off the property.

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Grand Junction Steel has asbestos remediated from offices - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel