Cleanup work has started on the charred remains of a shopping center in Nederland that burned down last year. The Caribou Village site went untouched for months while state regulators and the property owner worked out a plan to safely clear debris.
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"The challenge we had was that the building was burned almost entirely to the ground, and left a lot of unstable structures," said Michael Ogletree, the head of air quality programs at the state department of public health and environment.
Ogletree was specifically worried about asbestos - a commonly used fibrous mineral in construction that has been shown to have carcinogenic effects leading to cancer.
"So, when we think about how we demo buildings and how we do those cleanups, we need to make sure that either the building has been shown to be asbestos free, or there's testing done to show that there's no asbestos containing materials in the building," he said.
Efforts to confirm asbestos at the site have slowed down the cleanup. The first tests that property owner Tebo submitted came back negative, but there weren't enough samples to be sure. They worked with state regulators on a site stabilization plan to access more material, but that was scrapped when the company mix debris to the point where sampling efforts couldn't definitively rule out asbestos.
Eventually, the state and Tebo agreed to proceed as if asbestos was present. Workers at the site wear extensive protective clothing and equipment. The area is wetted down to prevent dust and contained with barriers.
Tebo's work was approved at the beginning of the month, almost six months after the shopping center was engulfed in flames. Over a dozen local businesses were destroyed. Caribou Village was an anchor for the town's economy and creative community. Some former tenants - like Wild Bear Nature Center - have persevered. Investigators are still determining the cause of the fire.
Ogletree said they heard a lot from the community about accessing the site to recover lost possessions.
"We did work with the company to ensure that the plan also included ways for residents and previous tenants to be able to participate in the cleanup," he said. "I know it's challenging for them to drive by that site week after week, and we wanted to do as much as we could to help support that community."
As of Tuesday, about 50 truckloads of debris have been removed from the site.
