Dioxin Dorms Blog :: SUNY New Paltz

SUNDAY afternoon, a group of us met at the Plaza Diner to figure out what to say to parents and students today, and how to say it. I recognized that the central issue here is psychological: students have long anticipated their time in New Paltz. It is looking like a positively spectacular day today, cool and clear with a hint of autumn, and hey, I’m biased: I think this is one of the most gorgeous parts of North America. If I were coming to SUNY New Paltz, I would be very excited.

So imagine all that anticipation, and a family drives up from Long Island, only to meet me or one of my “greeters” and to find out that there is a dioxin problem in their dorm. It is a problem with a very limited set of solutions. One, you leave your kid there and decide the issue is nonsense (or alternately, you worry yourself sick for the rest of the school year); two, you insist on being moved, which will work great for the first few students, until the extra dorms run out; three, you withdraw from the college and go home without having started the academic year, or your college career.

Huge disappointment, a disruption to one’s life and life plans, and in general a bad day.

Looked at another way, there is nothing like a case of acute myelogenous leukemia to screw up your plans. Or type-2 diabetes, or infertility, or endometriosis. There is nothing like your child being born with a developmental disability to change the course of your life.

I have made a conscious decision to not feel sorry for anyone I am handing information to, but rather, to appreciate — even if they cannot, at this point — the fact that they were warned in time.

Here are the three issues that the greeters will raise:

1. A cleanup criteria was used to establish the safety of the buildings. They are not cleaned to “non detect” (no chemicals found) but rather to beat a score that state scientists and number-crunchers have said is mostly harmless. Mostly means they grant themselves the right to kill one student in a million, based on a grossly outdated risk assessment (conducted in 1985, for another building). The risk assessment does not take into account many factors, such as other sources of exposure outside the SUNY dorms that could amplify the effects of the chemicals inside the buildings.

2. There are many untested areas: vents, heating units, electrical conduits, and so on. You cannot say that a building even meets the cleanup criteria, much less that it is safe, when numerous areas have been left untested and when, moreover, the state refuses to do the testing. I pray that anyone who is confronted by this issue sees the common sense of it. The state, of course, claims to have tested everything — including ventilation ducts, but as you may have read below, they told me they don’t have that data.

3. The risks are not distributed evenly. Someone who comes to one of the toxic dorms having previous exposure (lived near a waste incinerator, took care of the lawn for a while, smokes cigarettes, drinks Nutrasweet, has a high-fat diet, or one of many other possibilities) is at an increasd risk. There are also genetic factors, and immune system factors. The risks are also not distributed evenly in the buildings. Nobody has studied the buildings property to determine which rooms are hot-spots — for example, the ones that have higher concentrations of dioxins and PCBs in the radiators.

Based on these three factors, I feel that any reasonable person has the ability to make an informed choice. But it’s still not an easy choice, for example, if you are in conflict because you really want to be starting college today. Given that, we are going to do our best to handle the situation with kid gloves.

I will let you know how it goes.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.