The federal government spent millions to clean it up. Now it's planning to spend millions to tear it down.

Stubborn radioactive contamination has led the federal government to recommend demolishing Building 14, a Manhattan Project-era building, on the former Linde Air Products property in the Town of Tonawanda.

The proposal comes after the government spent millions of dollars in recent years remediating the 210-by-220-foot building, which currently houses offices and research laboratories for Praxair.

"They tried to decontaminate where there are areas of known contamination, and there are areas that are inaccessible," said Ray Pilon, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the project.

"For the difference in cost (to continue remediation) and the level of certainty, we feel the removal of the building is the best long-term solution for the problem," he said.

Unlike four other Manhattan Project buildings on the site, which were built by the government on Union Carbide land, Building 14 was built by the company itself in the mid-1930s.

The building was used by the federal government for laboratory and pilot plant studies for uranium separation in the country's early steps to develop an atomic bomb during World War II.

Army Corps officials identified five possible alternatives for the building, ranging from no action to complete removal, in a detailed plan that is available for public review.

Comments are being accepted by the Corps through Nov. 29, and a public meeting is scheduled on the issue at 7 p.m. Nov. 19 in the auditorium of Holmes Elementary School, 365 Dupont Ave.

According to Corps estimates, the removal of the building, which is considered to be the most protective measure, will cost $9.8 million. The next alternative, to continue remediation work in an effort to leave the structure up, would cost about $8.6 million.

That option, however, does not provide certainty that all contamination would be remediated, Pilon said.

"We took it to a point where most of the material was removed that was easy to get at," Pilon said. "It has taken us this long to come up with a thorough analysis."

In 1996, a year before the cleanup project at Linde was inherited by the Corps from the federal Department of Energy, efforts began to rid Building 14 of contamination. The Corps continued to oversee the work until the new areas of contamination came to light.

In all, about $5.8 million in federal money was paid to contractors, in addition to several million dollars in additional administrative costs for the remediation work.

Pilon said despite previous federal investment, the most effective and permanent solution is to take the building down. That became necessary after crews discovered that certain areas of the building could not be fully remediated to government environmental standards.

"One of our main concerns is to ensure there is no risk to the people in the building," Pilon said.

He said Praxair employees who do work in Building 14 are not at risk because the contaminated areas are confined beneath the concrete foundation, some structural high beams and in a major utility tunnel under the building.

The former Linde site was one of several locations nationwide where the federal government conducted secret activities in the 1940s in an effort to develop an atomic bomb. The work, known as the Manhattan Project, resulted in elevated radiation levels on the site.

In the past decade, the government has undertaken a multimillion remediation project that has included demolition of some buildings and the cleanup of others.

Building 14 would be the third building taken down at the East Park Drive property. Buildings 38 and 30 were demolished and disposed of in 1996 and 1999, respectively. Building 31 was decontaminated in 1997.

More than 110,000 tons of contaminated materials have been shipped to disposal facilities out of state, according to Corps estimates.

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