A breath of fresh styrene butadiene for sick schools

[Guest guest]

http://www.bangornews.com/cgi-bin/article.cfm?storynumber=18207

Thursday, July 20, 2000

Opinion/Editorials

A breath of fresh styrene butadiene for sick schools

Bruce , NEWS Columnist

It was the type of story you've read a hundred times. More likely, it was

the type of story you've read twice and skipped over the other 98 as too

depressing. This newspaper, May 24, the headline: " Machias mulls $572,400

loan to repair school.''

One more small town struggling to mend a sick school building. One more

leaky roof. One more fetid mass of moldy, mildewed carpet to yank out. One

more batch of achy, wheezing, sneezing students and teachers on the losing

end of a tussle with mishandled asbestos and rampaging dust mites. One more

enormous expense - $1.2 million total - not to advance education, but just

to make it remotely possible. Unless you live, learn or pay taxes in

Machias, one more story to ignore.

Not quite. The other day we received a letter, an entire information packet

actually, from the Carpet and Rug Institute. At its headquarters in Dalton,

Ga., the institute dedicated to the proposition that carpet " just feels

better'' has been tracking events Down East closely and offers this advice:

Mull away, Machias, but leave your carpet alone. Carpets don't make people

sick; people who don't take proper care of their carpets make people sick.

The institute makes a good argument. It represents 93 percent of U.S. carpet

and rug manufacturers and has worked diligently to remove harmful chemicals

from the manufacturing process. It provides valuable information on carpet

and rug care, it rates vacuum cleaners and provides a CRI certificate of

approval to the machines that do the best job of ingesting crud and keeping

it down. It even led the industry to eliminate the use of natural latex as

an adhesive - a lot of people are allergic to natural latex. In the absence

of scientific proof to the contrary, I'm willing to believe that styrene

butadiene - the active ingredient in synthetic latex - is as safe as mother'

s milk. And that new carpet odor? It's just 4-phenylcyclohexene. Like the

cherished new car odor, it should be enjoyed while it lasts.

Don't get me wrong - I love carpets and rugs. They are among my favorite

floor coverings, right up there with oak and marble, way ahead of broken

glass and gravel. Still, all this chem lab talk makes me wonder whatever

happened to good old wool carpets and those nasty tack-laden strips - known

to do-it-yourselfers as Death by a Thousand Cuts - that held them down.

If you've read a story about unhealthful Maine schools any time during the

last few years, you've seen the name Wintle. He runs Facilities

Management Group, an Augusta engineering company that does assessments and

remedial planning. I ask him why, after roughly 20 years of being in an

uproar over sick building syndrome, society still seems to the in the mode

of throwing large sums of money at an elusive problem and just hoping some

of it sticks.

Mr. Wintle says much of the mystery has been removed from sick building

syndrome. Dust and dirt are the main culprits, inadequate ventilation and

filthy ventilation systems their accomplices. The oil embargo of 1973 forced

many school districts to seal up windows, leaving no money for leaking roofs

and seeping groundwater and creating the perfect environment for growing

mushrooms. Improperly stored and misused cleaning agents add to this vile

stew. Despite irrefutably valid health complaints, there's an entire

public-relations industry out there devoted to the proposition that

chemically sensitive students and teachers just might be faking it.

In one of its more lucid moments, the Maine Legislature several years ago

created the Revolving Renovation Fund for school repairs. Harvey Boatman of

the Department of Education tells me there's $72 million in it now, $40

million has been committed, there are 391 applications, of the 93 approved

so far, at least half have to do with air-quality problems and leaky roofs.

Do the math - there's not enough money to plug the leaks.

The common perception is that sick buildings are old buildings, that Maine

and the nation (the General Accounting Office says fully two-thirds of

America's public schools are sick) are merely paying the price for not

building new schools. Would that it were so.

Several years ago, I covered a sick-school story in Eastport. That city's

elementary school, barely a decade old, had a roof that thought it was a

gutter - the contractor used steel trusses that, instead of expanding and

contracting with the temperature, twisted and buckled. Every classroom and

hallway had buckets, the old Cold War duck-and-cover technique was practiced

to avoid incoming waterlogged ceiling tiles. In one room, the runoff fed

directly into the spaces between the double-pane windows. Soggy but cheerful

students decorated their unintended aquariums with fish stickers. At great

expense and inconvenience, the school was rebuilt. It cost everyone dearly -

everyone but the contractor.

In fact, beyond the realm of schools, the entire notion that sick buildings

are old buildings falls apart. Elsewhere, it is new office buildings that

are uninhabitable. One of the most celebrated examples of this occurred in

1995 when the brand-new Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in

Washington opened and promptly made all within violently ill.

Sick-building stories in small daily doses - read, skimmed or ignored -

create the impression that this is a nagging problem gradually but steadily

being addressed. Devote a couple of days to the subject and you can only

conclude that the greatest nation on earth can't make a roof that doesn't

leak. The world's only superpower doesn't have the sense, 27 years after the

embargo, to crack a window once in a while or to stop swapping the airborne

chemicals it knows for ones it doesn't. The country that put a man on the

moon can't construct a new building that isn't a hothouse for respiratory

infection. And I can't wait to hear from the Asbestos and Dust Mite

Institute.

Bruce is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.