Dioxin Dorms Blog :: SUNY New Paltz

TODAY I paid a visit to the SUNY New Paltz campus with Danielle Voirin, our photo editor at Planet Waves. We needed pictures to illustrate what happened and is happening at New Paltz. Outside Bliss Residence hall, probably the worst of the four dormitories because of the amount of dioxins created, I stopped to speak with some students.

For a few days I’ve been content that we approached 100% saturation with the message of a potential problem. However, the four students we met outside the building had heard nothing. They were curious, so I told the story from the beginning — the car accident on 12/19/91, and the earlier corproate scandal involving the PCB manufacturers — and answered many questions.

I listened to their tone of voice and watched their faces for signs of genuine concern. I saw them. This is not an easy topic for anyone to discuss, and when a person is not being entirely defensive, they are usually honestly distressed.

At the end of the discussion, one of the students invited us in to take pictures of the building. This was only my second visit to Bliss Hall since the place re-opened in 1993; I have steadfastly avoided the place, but if students have to live their for months or years (I met one last week who had lived there five years), I can go in for a little while and take some photos. Danielle came in with me.

The place looks friendly and normal inside. Many of the double rooms have three students living in them, so the population of the building is between 250 and 275, I would estimate. It was designed to house 190.

When we got to the basement, our host informed us that there are no resident advisors down there. In other words, students live unsupervised, without the presence of a student who is the administration’s representative. This is pretty odd: New Paltz is a very parochial campus, tending to micromanage every aspect of student life. Why no RAs in the basement? Maybe because the transformer exploded down there?

Then we saw something that I found truly disturbing — a hole in the ceiling, depicted above. Even without a dioxin release on the campus, this is something that a maintenance crew would normally need to be on fairly quickly; you don’t want students living in a delapidated building.

But Bliss Hall is different. Based on years of researching what happened in these buildings, spaces like those above the ceiling tiles are precisely where I would expect to find the highest levels of contamination.

Over the summer, a guy named Ed Horn, who runs the risk assessment division of the New York State Department of Health (interviewed in this article) said that the levels of toxins in places that students don’t normally go can be higher than the allowable levels — which are themselves suspect.

This is a new policy: at the beginning of the cleanup, the entire building had to be in line with the state’s “safe” levels. Ed Horn had moved the goal posts significantly with this assertion, that the crevices, the radiators, the vents and other places could contain higher levels, as long as students don’t normally go in those spaces.

Were I on a sampling mission, this would be one of the first places I would check, along with taking some of the thick dust out of the radiators, and samples inside the shower vents.

When Dani and I left, we were both a little queazy and had headaches. Is it psychosomatic, is it dioxin, or is the place just disgusting?

I would love for students to not have to endure this, and then potentially worry what they have done to themselves — or rather, what has been done to them — for the rest of their lives.

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