When the Schoolyard is Poisoned (Hamden Middle School)

[Guest guest]

http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=new & db=nac_fea & ref=13911

When the Schoolyard is Poisoned

Hamden Middle School scraps an expansion plan, but keeps its doors open.

By Carole Bass

Published 12/14/00

As kids, Inzero and his buddies used to sled down the hill from

Morse Street toward the old industrial dump off Newhall Street. This was

southern Hamden in the early '50s, and Inzero, whose house backed up to the

dump site, didn't think much about the environmental consequences.

" That was our playground, " he recalls. " In the wintertime, we used to skate

on the swamps. It had to stay cold for about a month before it was solid

enough to skate on, because the chemicals kept it warm. "

When the town started building a school there in 1954, 9-year-old

" saw the steel beams and I could not believe they were building this

structure in the middle of the dump, " he says.

Now, 45 years after the school opened, expansion plans--which had been

zipping along like a downhill run on a Flexible Flyer--have skidded into a

snowbank of public opposition. Recent tests found a toxic, potentially

cancer-causing chemical in soil in front of the Hamden Middle School

building. More tests are pending. The expansion is all but officially dead.

School and town honchos are looking for a spot for a new middle school.

But Inzero--now an alumnus of the school, a former teacher there and current

parent of a seventh-grader--has more questions.

Here's a spot that has been under environmental scrutiny since 1979.

Adjacent athletic fields repeatedly tested high for lead; teachers have a

map of " hot spots " near which it's forbidden to dig; a planned 1993

expansion was killed because soil tests found contamination within 100 feet

of the building. Why has it taken so long to begin looking for problems

inside the school itself? Why would anyone propose breaking ground for an

addition there? And why should people believe official assurances that the

school is safe?

In one way, Hamden Middle School is a story of grassroots victory. Concerned

parents and teachers banded together, packed a meeting room to overflowing,

brought out the TV news crews, asked tough questions and stopped a project

they saw as unsafe.

It's also a kind of mini-history of mid-20th-century school construction.

Young Rich Inzero's common sense notwithstanding, it was more common than

you might think to build a school in the middle of a dump or a swamp. The

land was cheap, and environmental laws didn't exist. Across the state,

students and teachers now complain their buildings are making them sick.

Often, their complaints arise in part from decades-old decisions to put

schools on sites that were contaminated or wet, fostering the growth of

molds and bacteria.

The story of Hamden Middle School is also a bit of a mystery: a puzzling

tale of apparent--though unacknowledged--bureaucratic foul-ups, missing

documents, a toxic history overlooked or ignored or downplayed. That's part

of the reason some teachers and parents are skeptical of everything they

hear from the people in charge.

That said, however, there's no proof that the building or its grounds are

causing any of the long list of health problems--from coughing to asthma to

cancer--of people who work or go to school there.

There rarely is proof. Even where tests have shown certain chemicals to

cause specific harms in laboratory animals, the effects on human health are

often less certain. What's more, it can be hard to separate the damage

caused by exposure to toxic chemicals at work or at home from other factors,

like smoking. And scientists know very little about what happens when

various toxics combine in a person's body.

More than 100 people came out for a standing-room-only meeting last week,

where school administrators, their environmental consultants and state

officials described the results of the latest tests at Hamden Middle School.

In a nutshell, they said the air and water quality were good; that soil in

front of the building was contaminated with a hydrocarbon called

benzo[a]pyrene, even on the surface; that they would test the indoor air for

the same chemical (results were expected early this week); but that it's

safe to keep the school open now and for the next two or three years, until

the district can build a new school.

Hmmm.

" Something is making people sick in our building, " declares a teacher who

asks not to be named. " And I'm not going to rest until I find out what it

is. "

Hamden Middle School faces Newhall Street, just over the New Haven border

near Winchester Avenue. Next to the middle school, at the corner of Newhall

and Morse, is the Newhall Street School, built in 1917. Around the corner on

Morse is the house where Inzero grew up.

All along that stretch of Morse Street, the land slopes down to the middle

school grounds and adjacent, town-owned athletic fields. Gazing out at it on

a cold, sunny December day, Inzero remembers what it looked like in the

early '50s.

The nearby Olin/Winchester chemical factory used the whole area as a dump,

he recalls: " ash, batteries, wood, 40-gallon drums of chemicals. People

picked out copper and brass and sold it " for scrap. The original entrance

was on Newhall Street; as the piles of junk stretched farther back, the

company opened a side entrance on Morse.

The area where the middle school now stands was piled " pretty high " with

dumped materials--15 to 20 feet, he estimates-- " and was constantly

smoldering. You could see the smoke coming from the ground. " A fire hose was

permanently connected to a hydrant on Morse Street and ran down into the

dump, which flared up at least once a month. When it came time to build the

school, as far as Inzero remembers, the construction crews merely leveled

out the dump, covered it with dirt and built on top of it.

Inzero's recollection is important because until this fall, environmental

testing focused on the athletic fields behind the school, farthest from

Newhall Street.

The first tests were done in 1979, prompted by residents who remembered the

dump and contacted the Quinnipiac Valley Health District, according to

Balch, the district's director. The state Department of Environmental

Protection took two soil samples from the playing fields and found elevated

levels of lead and other metals. All are poisonous, and lead is particularly

damaging to children. It's not absorbed through the skin, but kids playing

in lead-laden dirt could inhale the dust or transfer contaminated dirt from

hands to mouth.

Nonetheless, in 1985, DEP reported to the federal Environmental Protection

Agency that " use of athletic fields is permitted. There isn't a potential

from direct contact according to soil analysis " from the 1979 tests.

In 1989, a private contractor did further soil tests and found high levels

of lead and other metals, as well as some solvents, in the playing fields.

Two years later, another lab did yet another round of tests, again turning

up metals and this time recommending removal of the contaminated soil.

Finally, in 1994-96, the town " capped " the playing fields--essentially

burying the contaminated area under 30 inches of " clean " dirt. As long as

the grass stayed intact, the experts said, the fields would be safe.

All this history is laid out in a school district consultant's " Phase I

Environmental Site Assessment. " Dated July 2000 and made available to middle

school teachers on Oct. 30, the Phase I report is a compilation of all the

existing documents the consultant could locate.

All those documents were in the public record in the spring of 1999, when

Hamden applied for state funding to expand the middle school. The town

allocated $19.5 million in state and local money to the project.

Despite the repeated discovery of heavy metals in the athletic fields, the

Phase I report contains no indication that anyone ever looked for

contamination closer to the building--except once.

In October 1993, the town hired a consultant to test the soil on the south

side of the building. The reason: " to investigate the possibility of

excavating the area in order to build an addition, " the Phase I report says.

The samples contained lead and a " black ash-like material with traces of

brick/wood pulp or cinders. "

Benzo[a]pyrene, the toxic chemical recently found in surface soil in front

of the building, is part of a class of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic

hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which form when organic matter--coal, wood,

tobacco--burns. Long-term exposure to PAHs may cause cancer. An official

from the state Department of Public Health insisted at last week's meeting

that it's " extremely unlikely " anyone was exposed to enough PAHs at the

middle school to cause harm.

The Phase I report's discussion of the 1993 tests concludes: " Based on the

high cost associated with disposing of the excavated soil, plans to build

the addition to the Hamden Middle School were suspended. "

Yet Superintendent Alida Begina, who took office in early 1995, said in an

interview last week that she knew nothing about the scrapped 1993 expansion

plans until she read the Phase I report. " I can't find anything to support "

that account, she said. " As far as we can tell, there was no plan to expand

the building in the early '90s. There was a plan to add some portable

classrooms, " which was abandoned for unrelated reasons.

Later that day, Begina called back to say she had just spoken to a former

school board member who remembered some discussion of an expansion and of

soil samples in January 1994. " We're still looking " through files in the

basement for more information, she said.

Begina also acknowledged that over the years, she had heard people say the

middle school property was a former dump. But " common knowledge may be

anecdotal, " she said. " The whole point of doing the studies was to get

verified information. It's very hard to tell from looking at grass and dirt

what's below. "

Based on the Phase I findings, the school district ordered soil, air and

drinking water tests last month and reported on the results at last week's

meeting. In late November or early December, administrators called in state

public health and environmental agencies for the first time. Now they say

the town will undertake a thorough environmental investigation of the entire

site--including testing the groundwater, which was recommended in the '90s

but never done--and eventually will clean it up under the direction of the

state DEP.

Mayor Carl Amento told those gathered at the Dec. 5 meeting that " the

expansion is obviously on hold " and the town and school district would look

for a place to build a new middle school. " I recommend we move in that

direction, " he said.

In the meantime, officials plan to keep the school open where it is. Which

doesn't sit too well with some of the parents and staff.

Cancelling the expansion is " not far enough, " says Inzero, who is on the

executive board of the middle school PTA. " They're sugar-coating " the health

risks. " We're talking about human beings being compromised. I'm going to

recommend to the PTA that we [vote to] vacate the building. We want

immediate action. If not, we will seek other remedies. "