Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005 A LITTLE while ago I spoke with Dan Shapley, the environmental reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal. It seems that the State University College at New Paltz, in New York State, just released a new round of test results which assert that their dormitories, which were contaminated with PCBs and dioxins in an electrical accident in 1991, are still safe as ever. As the anniversary of the accident is Dec. 29, I was planning an entry on this issue. And the issue is that no building with PCBs and dioxins is ever safe, particularly if you didn't test or clean the ventilation or heating systems. The PCB disaster is a long story to tell, and it includes many sordid side-stories involving Monsanto, General Electric and Westinghouse. But the super short version is that a power surge into the New Paltz campus electrical grid one morning, lasting about an hour, caused some transformers in six buildings to overheat, then explode and burn. The transformers were filled with some highly toxic stuff called PCBs (now banned by Congress), which gets worse when it mixes with oxygen; dioxins are formed. And in summary, the students were put back into their buildings with completely inadequate testing, cleanup or warning. They still live there today -- 1,000 of them, mostly ages 18 and 19, with a new group coming in every year. They are still being lied to today. Case in point: the College sat on even its "everything's okay" test results for more than a month, releasing them after the dorms closed for vacation. Dan Shapley asked me about that, and I said, "If I were them, I would have waited, too. That ensures that no discussion will happen when the buildings are open." At the time of the fires and explosions, I was a dropout grad student running a statewide news service a few blocks from campus, and basically threw all my time, energy and resources into the story for most of the next three years. And no matter how much progress I made proving that the buildings were toxic, the scary part was the students and their parents did not seem to care; they did not want to hear. By the summer of 1994, I had managed to make the issue into a worldwide story, published on the cover of Sierra magazine and reported in two articles about my journalism in The New York Times. I'll say more on the 29th, but if you feel like looking into it, the Sierra link is below, as well as an article called "SUNY Dorm Tests Toxic." About 18 months ago, more than a decade later, I went back into that same dorm and sent my own samples into a lab and once again proved that there was contamination throughout at least two of the buildings. Tonight, 14 years later, the College administration is still telling students it's safe. I guess we'll know as the next 10 or 20 years unfold and we see who gets sick; nothing like using students as lab rats. But the other side of the story is, if they or their parents really cared, they really could do something about it. The information is all available; it would not take much. But the thing is, you really have to care, because it's not an easy fight. The memory of that disaster still haunts me this time of year, the quiet week between Christmas and New Years. I did take some pictures at the time, and they did survive. They tell the story better than anything; this photo gallery is about a 10 minute excursion: http://www.planetwaves.net/NewPaltz.Tour00.html ---------------------- Here is the news link from the College: http://www.newpaltz.edu/healthcenter/pcbupdate.html Here is "Conspiracy of Silence" from Sierra. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200103/conspiracy.asp Here is "SUNY Dorm Tests Toxic" from Woodstock Times. http://planetwaves.net/SUNY.html Here are my test results from Feb. 2004 -- thanks once again to the Planet Waves readers who generously sponsored the lab analysis. http://www.planetwaves.net/mediakit/ Please do me a favor: spread the word in the direction of New York and anyone in the State University. Thanks! Catch you tomorrow with an entry about Steve Bergstein's latest edition of Psychsound -- it's already posted, so have a look if you like.