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?