One problem being discussed by state officials and community leaders is that testing and cleanup programs were inconsistent from building to building. For example, after the heat system was discovered to be a pathway of contamination in Bliss Hall, tests were never performed on the similar heat systems in the other three dorms, all of which fogged over with greasy PCB- and dioxin-laden smoke.
In Bliss Hall, contamination was discovered to have moved through what are called pipe chases—spaces and gaps in the building where hot water pipes are routed to student rooms. In the summer of 1992, a simulation test in Bliss Residence Hall using a smoke bomb revealed that fumes moved from the transformer vault directly to radiators. When radiators were tested for contamination, it was found, and the radiators were cleaned using Tide detergent. While that cleaning is unlikely to have addressed the issue thoroughly, the radiators in Capen, Gage, and Scudder Halls were neither tested nor cleaned prior to the buildings being reoccupied.
A decade and a half later, Horn concedes that “it’s a very reasonable hypothesis” that smoke followed the pipe chases in all four dormitories like it did in Bliss Hall. But in recent weeks he has repeatedly said he’s opposed to testing the radiators for contamination. Instead, Horn proposed in at least one meeting with students and my phone call with him that the state’s money would be better spent on merely cleaning the buildings. For instance, instead of remediating the radiators with a testing and cleanup project, conducted with full protective gear (as is customary where PCBs and dioxins are involved), Horn suggested that janitors could simply remove dust from the radiators.
“The way to keep exposure down is to wash the radiator fins,” he said. Currently, the college is vacuuming out the radiators in the dorms, but this is supposedly not related to the PCB cleanup. Horn said state officials had complaints about the heat not working last winter and decided it would help to vacuum out the radiators, which is likely to have disturbed and redistributed contamination hidden there.
For this and other reasons, Ward Stone, a toxicologist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), questioned the wisdom of not conducting tests for toxins prior to cleaning the heat.
“If you’re cleaning up something, what is it you’re cleaning up?” Stone asked in June. “If there was a fire involving PCBs with data on the buildings, including our own data, you have to know what you’re cleaning up.”
Stone, one of the state’s most vocal environmental advocates, assisted in 1993 and 1994 with determining that the ventilation ducts in Gage Hall were indeed a pathway of contamination in that building. That the vents were contaminated was long denied by those involved in the cleanup. With the revelation of one contaminated vent above a kitchen stove, the Ulster County Department of Health conducted an impromptu testing program, in which it confirmed that the entire ventilation system was contaminated. It then ordered an “arm’s-length cleanup” of the vents just days before students returned.
Dean Palen, commissioner of the Ulster County Department of Health, wrote a letter reauthorizing the use of Gage Hall on August 11, 1994 to then-college president Alice Chandler. In his letter, he promised to clean the rest of the vents during the next student break. That additional cleanup was never done.
When I went back a decade later and tested the same vent outlet that led to the Gage Hall cleanup, located in a kitchen lounge above the stove, the PCB level was back up to 80 percent, as high as the original, precleanup level.
Questioned about this last month, Horn proposed that contamination deeper within the vents had spread outward toward the vent entrances, as it will typically do along a smooth, metal surface. But he did not feel this represented a health threat to students.
“If there is a negligible possibility that somebody can be exposed to a chemical, this is not going to be considered a public health concern,” he said, adding, “I could never understand why anybody was concerned about the insides of vents.”