Dioxin Dorms

Why I Can’t Give Up on New Paltz

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, July 30, 2009

Joe Ramos, interim dean of fine and performing arts at SUNY New Paltz, hung up on me—terminated the call, as he politely put it—just before replacing the handset.

A relatively new arrival, he had never heard that Parker Theater, where his students study and perform, was contaminated with PCBs and dioxins after a transformer explosion in December 1991. This gives an idea of how quiet it’s kept on campus, how taboo a subject it is. So, I explained to him the history of the incident. I described the theater, wrapped in plastic sheeting for weeks after the explosion so that rainwater would not spread the toxins further into the environment. I described the pipes freezing and bursting in January 1992 during the early phase of the cleanup, and the hundreds of toxic waste barrels that were used to collect the contaminated water.

I told him I didn’t know whether the theater’s costume collection had been thrown out after the building fogged over with dioxin- and furan-laced smoke, or whether students were still performing in clothing that could never be cleaned and only be tested by being destroyed. I explained how PCB smoke works its way into crawl spaces, above hung ceilings and into pipe chases, and how, once the contamination has seeped in everywhere, it verges on impossible to get a building clean.

I assured the dean that his bosses and their bosses would give him a very different story: a blanket reassurance of safety and the usual line that I am the one who has a problem.

He was angry. I was not surprised.

I was nervous, and angry, and emotional, which did surprise me. After covering dioxins for nearly two decades I thought nothing could shake me, but recently the issue had become personal. Now I was friends with someone who was about to enter the theater department; a talented, fragile young woman who would be one of the vulnerable.

SUNY New Paltz excels in one area, the arts. Getting into this program was an achievement for her. She deserved this, and she deserved a lot better. Given the choice, I told her, it’s better to delay school by one year than get leukemia or endometriosis. After she left, I picked up the phone.