July 16, 2025, Planning Board Special Meeting Transcript - WEHI

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 21 through the topsoils that are there using what's called a split spoon sampler and that's hammered down into the ground with standard using AST standards to basically drive a spoon to collect soil samples. Once you get down to the point of bedrock you then switch over to what's called a corer, a rock corer. And the corer is, basically it's a diamond cutting edge to it, an industrial diamond edge to it and they core through five foot segments through bedrock to collect the samples so that they can then open up the samples on-site and look and characterize the rock. One of the big things we're going to talk about in regard to the adequacy of this slope, is what's called rock quality designation. Rock quality designation, I explain it in the report that I have. Rock quality designation is a method to determine the competency of rock. What you do is you, once you retrieve a sample you look at all the samples that are greater than hundred millimeters and then you basically count those up and add them up and divide that by the total length of the core. So for example, if the ones you can measure that are greater than that, that width or thickness, so to speak, that length of core, you then add the length of all those up. So if you're only finding 50 percent of the core has the length of

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 22 material that can be counted you basically have what's called 50 percent RQD. Now, 100 percent RQD for example, you got a piece of solid rock that was -- basically there was 100 percent recovery, meaning when they did the corer they were able to, of the five feet, they were able to take the five feet out and there was almost no breaks in the rock. So basically a solid piece of rock. As you get lower and lower the quality goes down, meaning the rock is more fractured, more weathered and so for example one of the borings that they had found they actually got what's called a zero percent rock quality. Zero percent means they couldn't find enough of a length of the material of corer rock to actually utilize in that calculation. Meaning it was highly fractured piece of rock. Now, that RQD is very important because what it does is it goes into what's called the Geological Strength Index and -- or the GSI, and that is input into the model, the slope stability model. Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes, but I wanted to kind of go through the order of the report that I prepared. One of the things that I looked at is obviously you're trying to keep the building, when you're developing near a rock face or a rock slope or any kind of steep slope area, is trying to keep the building as

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 23 far away from that slope as possible so that you're not imparting the roads or doing excavation for example, that would impact the stability of that slope. One of the things that I did find is that in the settlement of litigation agreement signed by Mark Hoffman on April 23, 2020 it states that "The application before the Planning Board must be built consistent with the West Essex Highland Concept." 16 for West Essex Highlands. And part of that there's a conceptual layout of the building on the site which relatively, fits relatively in the locations of the proposed buildings as they are proposed today. However, the one thing I noticed about Building D, when you compare the concept to the current plan, they moved the building on the southern side of the building, southern side most building. Well, now it has a jog as opposed to being straight. It used to have one jog in the building and now it has two. But they also moved that side of the building 50 feet closer to the edge of the top of the slope. On the, on the northern side they ended up moving it about 30 plus feet closer to the top of the slope on the side. What I think happened, when you review the plans, in the concept they had a parking lot to the south, a sole parking lot to the south of the building and now the plans show parking along the entire

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 24 length of the building and also entrances to the parking garage which required them to move the building to the east in order to get between the wetland transition area and the building structure itself. And so that's a pretty significant difference. It's actually putting the building right -- if you look at the plans or been out at the site, there's like a knob on the top of the property as, based on the topography and basically the building used to be behind that knob and now it's on top of that. MR. AFRAN: May I interrupt for a moment. Mr. Goll asked if we could get the report on screen, it is now available apparently, so if you need to refer to any pages on the screen. THE WITNESS: Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. A. So that's just one thing I wanted to understand is actually, usually instead of getting less conservative they moved it toward the slope. The steep slope for this project site. So one of big the things, the big things that I found in the report is that the slope stability, the parameters that were used do not match the actual conditions. They actually used a RQD of 67 percent throughout the document, throughout the analysis. They

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 25 basically assumed that the bedrock on this site going down the site was a solid mass of, of the Preakness Formation, which is basalt on this site. And we went all the way down the hill and there was no change to that bedrock quality or anything. But when you look at the table, if you go to Page 2 of this document, you can go there. No, wrong page. Right there. So -- MR. AFRAN: Can we zoom in more. Or enlarge it. MR. FAGAN: I cannot. A. So highlighted in red is boring LB-3. LB-3 is identified as cross section B on the plans. If you review the Langan report, they took it basically above the top of the slope and so they took these bores and they got these rock quality designations, as you see on the right, 67 and 77. And they ended up choosing the, it looks like they ended up choosing the 67 in order to determine the overall quality of this material which then translated to the competency of the rock. But when you look down, if you go to, for example cross section C NLB-1 shows, which is at the, basically down slope in the middle of the slope, their rock quality designation is zero. Meaning they didn't get any material that was long enough to count toward that rock quality designation which illustrates that this material is

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 highly fractured. And if you recall from looking at the plans on the, the northeastern side of the property, or the northern part of that building is where the steepest slope is and that is adjacent to the, there's a property on Howell Drive right downhill of that building. It's one of the steepest areas and in my opinion probably one of the worst areas of the slopes. So they basically took that information and they applied it broadly. They took the higher competency material and applied it broadly to the analysis. What that does is all of a sudden takes all that information they did, they might as well have done just one boring on the top slope and ignored all the rest of the information. So, and that's where I talk about Unida 1 on Page 2. So they basically talked about that they did an unconfined compressive test were performed on two rock boring samples in borings LB-3 and LB-4. Or, no. From LB-3. And the reason they did that is those were likely, frankly, the most competent pieces of rock of the test and the other rocks probably were fractured. Couldn't get a test. Well, one of things they did find is when they did their compression test, this is going to get technical, so I'll just kind of explain what the results mean. It ended up the strength test of the materials

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 27 did not reflect basalt type of material. It reflected more of a like a less strength strong type of material like a sandstone or as they call it in our, if you go to the chart on the second -- on the third page. When you look, when you're looking at specimens for the strength of the material, if you have a basalt it's up about a 100 to 250 Megapascals. It's a very dense, strong material. However, the strength test that they provided actually came in with between this five and 25 Megapascals and it describes more of like a chalk, rocksalt, or potash. Now, do I believe that the rock is that weak or that, you know, such as that type of material. No. But it does show that in that location bedrock is significantly weathered from basalt's ultimate ability to resist the compressive strengths when they were doing the tests. So it's not quite as strong. Now, they did include the lower compressive test in their slope stability analysis. So one of the big things that it does affect is the factor -- is the, as I was talking about before, the geological strength index, which is another input parameter and when you do that, they ended up, and you use a higher strength material, the GSI is also a higher level of, a hire strength within the slope stability program. But what would

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 28 happen if they actually would use something more realistic, let's say using an average of all RQD's down slope that were found and just as a function two of the borings by the way, the rock was so weathered they went down 50 feet in one and 45 feet in another and they didn't hit anything that could be core. In other words, they were able to grind through but the material was so broken up and weathered they were able to grind all the way down. They couldn't do a split spoon sample because there was too much rock there, but they also couldn't do a core sample because it was highly fractured that it was not collectible by a rock corer device. What does this mean. What it means is the slope stability analysis they provided is not showing an analysis based on what's actually out there. Another thing that they did, and one of the things they did do, which I do agree with, is they used a disturbance factor in the slope stability, it's another factor. A disturbance factor describes the potential impact of construction or disturbance on the slope. They did use one which is highest. However, what would have been the adequate thing to do was use that disturbance factor of one, because they are going to blow the top of this mountain in order to get down to 25 feet, they need to get to the bottom of this garage.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 29 They also should have used the quality, the actual quality or at least an average of the quality of material that was at the lower end of the slope. Because that's really, the lower end of the slope, the toe of a slope is what really is supporting everything above. And they should have broken out the cross section to be -- to reflect that. When you average that out, because several, they couldn't even collect samples, we made the assumption that the RQD is zero. And so you get an average RQD on these lower areas of rock cores of basically 23 or less, it's actually about 20 when I created the average which would then drive down that GSI which would then in combination with that disturbance factor, significantly reduce the factor, the factor safety of resistance to failure on the site. While Langan also stated that they used a uniform loading of a thousand PSF for the model -- for the building, basically across the whole building, they considered it far enough away from the top of the slope to have a surcharge impact. However, the proposed building sits right on top of the slope of this area and so there would be an impact of loading on the slope. They also didn't discuss or provide in the modeling, I mean they talked about an excavation of 25

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 30 feet, but they didn't run a model that shows now there's a 25-foot section that's been excavated out and what does that do now. If you think about it, you got a rock slope, your going to dig down 25 feet, you're going to end up with basically separating that rock slope from the upland or the top of slope and beyond from that bedrock. How stable is the material when they do that? And they're going to basically cutoff that connection to the upper -- the areas above the top of that slope. The model also omitted the presence of the Feltville Formation. If you're not familiar with that, the site at those locations, the basalt picks up the Watchung in this location, it's called the Preakness Formation and it's identified in their report. But just down at the post near the toe of the slope the formation changes to what's called a Feltville. And the Feltville is basically more of a, like a siltstone or a sandstone, siltstone, mud stone type of material, which has a much lower strength. The important thing, the reason I'm bringing this up is, did some of those RQD's of zero and 23 maybe they actually reflected more of that sedimentary formation that is not as strong as the basalt formation of that rock, but it was not modeled and they did not separate out whether it was basalt or the Feltville. They basically -- they modeled it all as