Background
Edwards Air Force Base, located outside Lancaster, California consists of 950 buildings and over 8 million square feet of building space. The base includes office buildings, maintenance facilities, hangars, laboratories, warehouses, and a variety of housing types.
Two thirds of the buildings had been previously surveyed for asbestos and have hard-copy asbestos survey reports. The base identified the need for a system that would enable them to easily determine and manage the locations of asbestos and communicate this information to appropriate personnel performing work in the buildings.
The Problem
Organizing and storing documents and updating survey records as materials have been abated and providing proper notification of staff was a monumental task. The base needed to provide access to the information to maintenance, civil engineering, public health, and bio-environmental personnel so information regarding the locations of asbestos can be reviewed prior to performing maintenance and construction related activities, which could create potential exposure to asbestos.
The Solution
The base purchased the ADAM Asbestos Management System in 2003 and hired ACC Environmental Consultants (ACC) to enter pre-existing hard copy survey data into the system, re-survey 175 buildings throughout the base and enter the data into the system.
ADAM Field Companion: ACC used Tablet PC’s in the field running the ADAM Field Companion software to accurately and efficiently collect the data on a room by room basis. During the survey, each room was entered into the system and materials observed in that room were assigned. The tablets also enabled digital photographs to be easily collected at the base and embedded in the database. It also enabled the inspectors to enter the coordinates of sample and material locations for preparation of required floor plans.
ADAM Multi-user System: ACC used the ADAM System running on a multi-user network at ACC’s offices to combine data from the multiple tablet PCs, import electronic lab data, and generate printed reports. The reports and database provide sample results, list of materials in each space or room, quantity of material, removal cost, assessment based upon the Air Force grading system, photographs of each material, and drawings indicating sample and material locations.
ADAM Drafting Companion: The ADAM Drafting Companion was used by ACC to automatically place room tags, sample tags and keyed material location notes on the AutoCAD building drawings. The system saved ACC hundreds of hours of drafting time for preparation of the drawings since the Drafting Companion can place hundreds of space tags and sample locations on a drawing in a matter of minutes.
The ADAM System enabled ACC to perform a very detailed survey with tens of thousands of pieces of data very efficiently and cost effectively for the base.
