In a June 22 meeting with community members, Horn suggested that areas in buildings that students were unlikely to have contact with could have toxin levels higher than the state’s cleanup criteria or maximum allowable levels. Those areas might include heaters, ventilation ducts, pipe chases and the interiors of floors and walls.
We agreed to call his theory the “route of exposure theory”—which is to say, if no theory exists for how students might get exposed from a contaminated area such as inside a ventilation duct or radiator, then it’s not considered a public health concern.
Yet state health officials have done no studies on the behavior of students to see what exposure routes might be possible, and students are not given warnings. For example, even if a hot radiator is not emitting PCBs under normal conditions, what happens when a student is keeping a pot of water on the grates to humidify the room, and the water spills? Likewise, nobody knows for certain how many students sleep with their heads close to the radiators and whether that makes a difference.
Likewise, the pipe chases “will be a reservoir [of contamination] and will remain so,” Horn said, but “are not a concern to the students.”
“There’s a million and one ways to get exposed,” Janssen countered. “It all attaches to dust. You can track it around. You just don’t want this stuff in the same building, particularly with students, who are going to have children.” PCBs or dioxins absorbed by a woman in her dormitory will be passed on to her child during gestation or when she is breast feeding. But the effects might be too subtle to notice and would be unlikely to be connected with exposure at New Paltz.
I asked Susan Zimet, a member of the Ulster County Legislature, whether it was acceptable to her to have the dorms reopening in August without additional testing. “We all have different standards of what we think is acceptable and nonacceptable. I go to one extreme, and other people have different standards.”
“I am trying to work with the students to do the best that we can to get to the bottom of this issue,” Zimet said. “And I’ll keep working to get some comfort level on the issue. My basic feeling is, let’s do the tests and let’s put this to bed once and for all. But nothing’s that damned simple when it comes to government.”
The college president, Stephen Poskanzer, declined to comment. Eric Gullickson, a college spokesman, said, “The college, along with the New York State Department of Health and the Ulster County Health Department, is confident that our residence halls are safe. Unfortunately, the author of this article has a history of misrepresenting the facts regarding the PCB contamination and cleanup on campus 16 years ago and continues to employ fear-mongering tactics creating unnecessary alarm among students and their parents.”
In May at a public forum, the campus physician, Dr. Peter Haughton, said that PCBs were not that harmful because they are used in cooking oil. He was mistakenly referring to the Yusho incident, a mass PCB and dioxin contamination involving rice bran oil in Japan in 1968 that poisoned thousands of people and their unborn children. Victims suffered agonizing effects for many years, including liver damage, severe acne, low birth weights, and birth defects in their children.