I woke up early this morning with the thought percolating into my awareness that today is the 19th anniversary of the electrical incident at SUNY New Paltz that contaminated six campus buildings with high levels of PCBs and dioxins. If those two words don’t mean anything to you, please look them up. They are the environmental elephant in the room — the one that rarely gets mentioned, because, well, nobody really knows how to talk about it. Or nobody wants to; or the issue has been “forgotten.”
Speaking on a personal level, New Paltz was the fulfillment of a premonition that I had in 1986 (as a university senior, with Chernobyl spewing radiation in the Ukraine) that my journalism career would take me in the direction of environmental issues. I had no idea how, or when — but on a Sunday morning in 1991 I woke up to the sound of sirens going past my girlfriend Sabine’s bedroom, where we were sleeping, and I went into my office later that day and there was a note on my desk: “PCB accident on the campus. Three transformers exploded.”
Actually it was seven that had malfunctioned or exploded and 15 more that were found to have leaked out some of their contents, at some point in the past. In fact by the time I picked up that note, the campus was an occupation zone, with hundreds of firefighters, ambulance crews, the Salvation Army and the haz-mat team from IBM in Fishkill, swarming buildings and walkways in Level A protection — that is, full-on moonsuits. The buildings that were affected by the electrical malfunction were Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder dormitories, as well as Parker Theater and the Coykendall Sciences Building (now home of the well-gagged, don’t worry, we never look into this kind of thing Journalism Department).
If you consider yourself a patient reader and would like to read a primary source document, here is one that would qualify as a hot one. It is long — and none of the questions have been properly answered by Mr. Cahill — who is still in office, and who I still see from time to time. We don’t have much to say to one another. Somewhere, someone tonight who went to SUNY New Paltz is wondering why they got cancer so young. This document, or any in the New Paltz collection, may provide some help in sorting that out.
The rest of the story is best told in my articles, which are archived in a website that the Planet Waves crew built for me called Dioxin Dorms. We haven’t updated the site in a few years, but the basics are there. The two best articles I can offer you today are one that sums up the whole history of the PCB issue — the only one of its kind, and my actual place in journalism history — called Conspiracy of Silence, which ran on the cover of Sierra in the summer of 1994. The other brings the issue more or less up to date, which published in Planet Waves in 2007, called Where’s Your Data?
When all was done and nearly everything said, the best things that I took with me from my years of work on this issue were the people I met and came to love. They include Carol van Strum, a fabulous genius of a sophisticated hillbilly (allegedly born in New York) who lives in the mountains of Oregon and is now a Planet Waves contributing editor; her ex-husband, Paul Merrell, an attorney who offered hours and hours of his time explaining the issue, and tort law; Dr. Ward Stone, the “toxic avenger” environmental hero of New York State; Monona Rossol, of Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety (ACTS), who has taught me tons about why you don’t want toxins inside your house, and that Citrasolve is not good for you; Lois Gibbs, who provoked the evacuation of the Love Canal neighborhood back in the 1970s and went on to be an effective environmental activist and one of my beloved teachers.
There was my fantastic lawyer, Allan Sussman, who helped me sue the state in federal court for kicking me off the campus in the middle of my work covering the incident. There’s my Pisces brother Steve Sandberg, a former cleanup worker who took on GE in California, as well as Standard Chlorine and Monsanto, and kicked their ass. There’s David McCrea, one of the most amazing lawyers I’ve ever met, who took on Westinghouse in Indiana and clobbered them — on behalf of brain cancer victims James DeHass and Bill Sluder, who worked at W.’s PCB factories there.
There was Peter Shipley, my partner in many conspiracies, who just happened to have warned the state over and over about why they needed to get those transformers out of campus buildings. He told them, in writing, that the transformers were “ticking like time bombs.” Peter was one of the best activists I ever worked with — the kind that government officials f*cking hate. We always had fun. We always walked away from every fight laughing, perhaps with the exception of the campus transformer explosions. But he was incredibly proud of how much I accomplished, that I know. And there were Chris McGregor and Jerry Montano, who paid my phone bills and my rent, and took me out to dinner night after night at the Wildflower Cafe as i worked on the issue. There was Ian McGowan, the city editor of Student Leader News Service, who now agrees that it was a good idea not to go into Bliss Hall that day.
I cannot tell you how much fun I had working with and learning from these people. It made it ALL worth it and still does today.
Though I learned a lot from them as well, there’s no love lost between me and the state and county officials who covered up the incident and put students into dangerous buildings (and continue to do so), telling them how safe it is.
One of them, former Ulster Country Health Commissioner Dean N. Palen, PE, MBA (not a doctor, an engineer and a business dude) was recently run out of his job as an accused criminal, narrowly escaping prosecution, along with is wife, who was employed as his confidential secretary. A buddy of mine used to have him as a boss; yes, he’s a criminal. Clean Harbors, Inc., the lead contractor, cooked the financial books and the safety tests and ripped the taxpayers off for millions; lots of kickbacks were paid and project administrators worked in a contaminated trailer. In effect, the New York State Office of General Services, which bought the cleanup, was being run by organized crime. By the end of my work on the issue, very few parents of students moving into the dorms heeded the warning they got from me and my colleagues and the many people who considered the situation and commented in my articles.
So be it. They have their karma, and I have mine, and it’s taken me nearly two decades to make that statement and mean it.
As of this day, the situation is where it stood in 2007, which was approximately where it stood on the day the dorms first opened after the incident, Feb. 1, 1992, just a month after the incident and with little meaningful cleanup. If you know someone who attends SUNY New Paltz, please pass this post along. In retrospect, I am a better person for having taken on this challenge: I learned so much, and then decided to become an astrologer.
For you astrology freaks, here is a chart for you to look at. It’s for the car accident that set off the chain reaction that Sunday morning. As you can see, this tale is not over. The Uranus-Pluto square is all over this chart.
From an astrology bloggers discussion board:
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Hi Eric, having looked at the chart, Might that mutual reception suggest that some members of the student body came from families involved in the hushing of the event? There’s a bit of “the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children,” though that phrase came to me intuitively, not through the astrology per se. (Except that astrology is a pathway to the intuitive nature, but I digress.)
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Eric Francis Coppolino Thanks for responding Michelle. This is starting to make more sense. Yes I think it may be something like that. Taking your theory one step beyond, the essence of the story became: why aren’t these people who are so affected by this doing anything, or leaving? In essence the people who were the most affected became their own wardens, refusing to exit or evacuate the buildings even when they had more than adequate reason to do so. One would imagine that there would have been some movement to leave. But there was a ‘Kassandra Complex’ with my articles — the more respected by the media and scientific establishment, the less currency they seemed to have with the affected parties.
So there was an apparent conflict between the students and those who would harm them (the square) then an ongoing role reversal (the mutual reception). Further, the parents did not intervene and protect their kids. So in essence the family of each student took on the role of the administration.
Wow…what a chart image…
As a journalist this was maddening and led to a persistent sense of failure that in some ways I still carry, despite the story itself being a rather stunning success against all odds. But this particular mentality, I could not fathom. If Mercuryhas anything to do with me as a journalist, that square to Jupiter represents the counter-intuitive sensation; the push-pull between “success” and “failure,” and my getting caught up in the codependent drama between the administration and the students/parents.
On the first night Capen Hall was open, the college president slept over in one of the buildings with her husband and brought her grandchild’s teddy bear (I just forget that till now). On one occasion a college vice president put his daughter in one building (for two years) to show how safe it was.
The phrase you reference about the sins of the father being visited upon the son *even unto the seventh generation* was adapted by the company Seventh Generation. It is a direct reference to dioxin, which can travel seven generations.
What the F8CK is with that mutual reception between Jupiter and Mercury — rulers of the ascendant and descendant…that is mutual reception by the book: in one another’s signs, in aspect; and they rule the angles. Who exactly switches places? The contaminator and the contaminatees, voluntarily strolling into the situation like lemmings??
Eric,
How i came up with Athens. Pallas in the 12th house and my fuzzy thinking process. That’s the short answer.
Good call on Athens, Len. This was a chemical disaster on a hick town campus in NY. How the heck did you come up with Athens?
Eric:
Thank you for the Greek / Athens connection information. Sorry for the wrong impression. Was not thinking past life, actually more future life and “observatory” was just a guess (looking ahead). Money makes more sense. Pallas 12th house and all that. And you did “observe” the “campus” in Athens.
Please forgive fuzzy thinking, my dubious style.
Yes, Mars and Mercury in Sadge as now (albeit not the same degree). Venus in Scorpio, likewise (sextile BML). All the personal planets back in the same sign. More fuzz but coherently resonant somehow with the lunar cycle. Still trying to figure that out.
The Eris interpretation is well taken but if one would allow a rather wide orbit to consider it also opposing Moon-Nessus conjunction… If one considers Eris an outsider… well it’s still processing
I knew a girl from Oklahoma.
This is not a country song 🙂
She used to work in the beef factories there and said that McDonald’s gets the “cancer cows.”
And to think it all started with kosher beef.
My gosh. I just read an article today about the fast food ‘beef’ that goes into the hamburgers. It is all processed with ammonia to kill the germs, and approved by FDA. All parts of the cow go into the hamburger, including the hooves. Sounds like an invitation to germy food right? The ammonia is so effective, beef sold to the public in restaurants is exempt from inspection!
This is from a New York times article on December 30, 2009 – night before the eclipse in Cancer. That eclipse coincided with a big issue I worked through, and am still working through at my work that involved shoddy work and a cover-up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html
Talk about a chart with a lot of everything — Galactic Center rising; Mars rising; Mercury on the Great Attractor; an eclipse coming on the Aries Point; the Moon conjunct a centaur planet that so eloquently sums up the chlorine issue — Nessus. And how about that big shout out from Eris on the IC/4th cusp to the degree. I mean really. Talk about “chaos at home” — toxic explosions in the private residences of 990 students.
All of these things describe the event in question, particularly because — though I could not properly shut down the dorms — it became the basis for the truth being revealed about the PCB and dioxin issue. That to me looks like Mercury on the Great Attractor, talking about the far-reaching effects of the incident itself and my writing about the incident. It was my way of saying, “Hi you slick little piece of work, thanks for all the good times and I know about the Greek money,” but in a subversive way.
Now, as for an observatory in Athens, no, but there is an Athens connection. I don’t know it all, but SUNY New Paltz has an Athens branch, or it had one. At some point a bag of drachmas turns up on the campus, which nobody could explain; I don’t know the details but Peter Shipley told me about this. It became a joke between us, and when the college president who presided over the PCB disaster retired, I included a drachma in the envelope that a friend gave to her at the honors breakfast the morning of graduation.
Then on a trip to Athens in the late 1990s, I was in a cab from the airport and the cap went past the SUNY New Paltz “campus” in Athens — basically a storefront with the name of the college on it. I practically yelled, “Stop! Wait!” and not knowing whether to crack up in hysterical laughter or just be amazed, I took a photo of the thing (which I no longer have) but…there it was…I was looking right at it.
As for an observatory, I have no prior past life or present life memory of that, Len.
Back atcha. Dig.
Lunar eclipse on 12-21-1991 (Saros 115), decending node.
Lunar Eclipse on 12-21-2010 (Saros 125) decending node.
more:
June 27, 1991 lunar eclipse (Saros 110) ascending node
June 26, 2010 lunar eclipse (Sarod 115) ascending node
Nose going back to ground but first: do you have any recollection of an observatory in Athens (seriously)?
Need to check something else.
(1) Sending you a hug, Eric. Wish to heck i could do it in person.
(2) The chart. Holy cow. It may not be over but some things have come full circle. Need to check something.