The end is written in the beginning.
— Tao Te Ching
Twenty years ago this month, the Hudson Valley experienced one of its most terrifying days ever: the chain-reaction explosions of PCB transformers that contaminated the SUNY New Paltz campus on Dec. 29, 1991. On that day, four dormitories, a theater and a science building were contaminated by some of the most extreme toxins known to science. Today, 1,300 students still live in those dorms, which are as contaminated as they were the days they were re-opened.
Recently I was digging around my old document collection from that story. Among the piles of scientific studies and stacks of notebooks was the recording of a campus news conference from Dec. 31, 1991, the second day after seven transformers exploded and campus buildings were contaminated with PCBs and dioxins. On that day, guys dressed like astronauts were spread out over the campus, filling waste drums in the first days of a long, expensive and controversial cleanup.
The toxins released in the incident are the chemical equivalents of plutonium, measured in concentrations as low as parts-per-trillion. Exposure is associated with immune system damage, hormone disruption, reproductive issues, birth defects and cancer. Ingesting even trace levels can cause lifelong health problems. Of particular concern were four dormitories: Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder halls, what I now call the Dioxin Dorms.
In that news conference, Alice Chandler, then president of the college, took the podium and said that health officials and their contractors were especially concerned about “channels which may have served as conduits for smoke.”
That may have been the last honest assessment she offered the community before the rationalization, posturing and denials set in. Though I didn’t remember her statement till I heard the tape, I spent many years investigating contamination in the heating and ventilation systems, pipe chases and the electrical systems in the four dorms. Though the state and its spokespeople would issue many denials of these specific problems, Chandler had admitted the single most serious issue right up front — then she put students back into the dorms without any investigation or cleanup of the “channels which may have served as conduits for smoke.”