There are ongoing construction and renovation projects in the Mailman-Hollywood building located on Nova Southeastern University’s main campus. If you’ve passed through the building or have seen crews on the outside, you’ve probably noticed that one of the building’s stairwells is blocked off and has “asbestos removal” signs posted. This has caused both student and staff concerns, but the Office of Facilities Management wanted to reaffirm that this is part of a normal renovation process.
Daniel Alfonso, the vice president of facilities at NSU, explained that the renovations in the Mailman-Hollywood building are to make the building a more welcoming and aesthetically pleasing educational environment. He said that the stairwells are all in the process of receiving upgrades.
“I don’t know if you’ve walked up and down that stairwell, but if you notice there’s a plastic non-slip surface that’s been glued to the stairwell for a long time and it’s been deteriorating. We are replacing that surface, cleaning it up and putting something new in there,” Alfonso said.
He noted that the glue holding that non-slip surface to the floor, referred to as mastic, is where the asbestos is located.
“Like anything that was built before the 1980’s, the glue underneath has some small component of asbestos. I believe in the 2% range,” Alfonso added.
Even though it is a small amount, Alfonso assured that NSU is following all healthy and safety guidelines, conducting testing before, during and after the project is completed to make sure there are no health risks.
Beth Welmaker, the executive director for environmental health and safety, explained that NSU doesn’t dispatch their own teams to work on construction projects like this, but instead hires licensed individuals that have gone through additional training and experiences to perform abatement work.
“Before taking on a project like this, we sampled to make sure we could identify any hazards that may be present before we disturb the area. A total of 72 samples were taken, and a total of only 11 were identified as containing asbestos,” Welmaker said.
Welmaker added that not only does NSU hire licensed professionals to perform the abatement work, but also hired an individual not associated with NSU or the abatement contracting vendor to come perform testing after the construction has happened to ensure that the space is safe to resume activities in and that the construction is of quality.
The project is still ongoing, as all three of the stairwells in Mailman-Hollywood are receiving these abatement processes and construction upgrades.
Seth Mangasarian, the director of Physical Plant, explained that after testing had concluded, construction started on the first stairwell during the second week of April. According to Mangasarian, each stairwell should only take two weeks to complete, but due to fire safety regulations they are only working on one stairwell at a time.
Randall Seneff, the executive director of facilities management, explained that in addition to the construction happening in the stairwells, what was formerly known as the data center is being constructed into a classroom. He said that there was a small area in that room that also contained asbestos but noted that since the surface area was much smaller than the stairwells and the construction in that room would be finished in the span of a weekend, especially since the asbestos found was non-friable, meaning that it was encased so that it would not as easily be released into the air.
“Right now, the abatement contractor is in the cleanup process. They couldn’t take down the barriers until all the results that were in the space came back negative [for asbestos], but they have now received those post-removal samples and they are negative,” Mangasarian said. “We don’t want to interfere with student learning from a noisy standpoint, so construction should be finishing sometime in mid-to-late May.”
