Saturday, June 10, 2006 | Tour de Bliss I MANAGED to stay off the SUNY New Paltz campus for more than two weeks visiting here. I've had plenty else to do, plenty of people to visit, more than enough work and a few trees to visit. Usually the better trips to this area have less (i.e., no) involvement with the campus, where I've been documenting and prodding action on four PCB- and dioxin-contaminated dormitories since 1991. That was until yesterday, when a meeting was arranged with several local elected officials, and I gave a tour of the site. One of them has considerably strong standing in the student community. It was an interesting -- even exciting -- two hours, as I explained the issue from the ground up, with physical and visual aids: particularly the buildings themselves. This was my most recent officialish toxic canpus tour; my first was taking New York Times reporter Mike Winerip around in late 1992, which resulted in the first piece the Times did about my work. We did not go inside, but there was plenty to see outside, as I began the tour with a brief look at the Coykendall Science Building (one of the most expensive indoor PCB cleanups in history); then moved on to the four dorms, starting with Capen Hall, the one least damaged by the remediation, thus the basis for comparison. We then looked at Scudder Hall, Cage Hall and Bliss Hall, all of which were contaminated by dioxin-like compounds in a December 1991 electrical incident. Bliss Hall? Yes, it was an all-women's dorm that was the most seriously contaminated. As I stood outside Bliss with this little cadre of public officials, we had the, "So how toxic is it?" moment that happens every time. At that moment, we were standing in some muddy grass outside the Bliss transformer area, a few yards from where students live most of the year. The repairs from the cleanup, excavation and reconstruction were plainly evident. At peak, contamination had reached 1 million times the "safe" limit pretty close to where we were standing. I looked down. "Well, I wouldn't say we're in a 'throw away your shoes' zone, but you might want to wash the mud off your shoes before you go back in the house." I began the project of digging up and reporting the truth of what happened on the second day after the disaster. The process went on nearly full-time through late 1994, when I'd finally had enough and took the winter to transition into my current projects. But over the years I've managed to do at least one thing every year to further the cause -- write one or more articles on the Net and in Chronogram (a local magazine I write for here), meet with students, and in an extraordinary year, enter the buildings like a burglar with a respirator, and take seven samples (generously sponsored by Planet Waves readers). I've done this with the faith that it'll keep the issue in Google, keep the rumor mill hot, and maybe, maybe, maybe, one year, my small efforts will encounter people on campus or in the community who have the power to do something. To find out more, use the search term New Paltz PCBs (without quotes) and you'll learn plenty. I'll get some photos into the gallery later in the weekend. == It's now about 10 am local time and in about the minutes, the Eros area launches. This is a new Planet Waves project that gets us into audio, community involvement and offers the first well-evolved and detailed forum for my Book of Blue photography project. The excitement is buzzing around the Planet Waves neighborhood like the Full Moon. We have all worked very hard on this. As I've said, before, it began in the early fall of 2004 (ancient history, by current standards) with the creation of the horoscope database project. The idea was to find every single horoscope electronically available and get it into a searchable database that readers could use. Over time, that project grew up, and became what you see presented here, and you are invited to get involved, enjoy our creation, and support our work at Planet Waves. http://eros.planetwaves.net/