Work on a brick facade at the MTA’s East New York facility can resume after emergency asbestos abatement, the Daily News has learned.
A lab report ordered by MTA’s office of system safety — and obtained by The News — shows that door and window caulking on the exterior of the facility’s paint shop contained the hazardous material, leading to a stop-work order earlier this month. Sources at the facility told The News that a crew of contractors had already spent at least a week working on the damaged brickwork at the shop leading up the the stop-work order, not knowing the potential carcinogen was present.
The paint shop — which despite its name is primarily used as a workshop for repairing MTA trucks, forklifts, and other support vehicles — sits along Broadway near the eastern end of the massive East New York facility, which houses both an MTA bus depot and a subway yard.
Work on the facade of the paint shop began in mid-July, sources at the facility said.
An MTA spokesman told The News that work was stopped on August 1. The lab report obtained by the news shows the MTA’s bus department requesting a review the worksite on August 8.
According to the testing, conducted by Manhattan-based environmental testing firm Atlas, the bricks and mortar at the shop did not contain any asbestos. The caulking around the windows and doors to the paint shop did, however, test positive for asbestos — though the material is listed as “non-friable,” meaning it is less likely to crumble into fibers and present a serious health hazard.
Sources at the facility tell The News that employees at both the depot and the yard regularly walk alongside the paint shop to exit or enter various parts of the facility.
“There’s a lot of foot traffic through that area,” one transit worker said.
MTA spokesman Michael Cortez told The News Monday that the MTA stopped work at the site on August 1, ahead of the request for asbestos testing.
Cortez said that, after receiving the positive test results last week, MTA contractors began remediation work on Saturday. As of Monday, the paint shop is considered remediated, he added.
The MTA spokesman added that additional abatement will be conducted on the paint shop’s roof membrane — where asbestos has also been found — before any future work is done to the roof.
Asbestos has been a persistent problem at the East New York facility, a massive mid-century brick complex that MTA brass has acknowledged is sorely in need of an overhaul.
Investigators with the state’s Department of Labor cited the MTA back in May for failing to alert employees to asbestos plumbing found during repairs to the depot’s notoriously leaky fire sprinkler system in February 2023.
In total, 3 feet of asbestos piping was removed from beneath a first-floor store room. The asbestos was ultimately determined not to have been a health hazard.