{"id":32656,"date":"2010-12-29T13:24:26","date_gmt":"2010-12-29T18:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=32656"},"modified":"2010-12-30T00:08:27","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T05:08:27","slug":"suny-new-paltz-pcb-incident-bliss-capen-gage-scudder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/suny-new-paltz-pcb-incident-bliss-capen-gage-scudder\/","title":{"rendered":"It was 19 years ago today"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.”<\/p>\n

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Car hits utility pole on S Putt Corners Rd, New Paltz, NY, 12561.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.” <\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a>. 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<\/strong><\/a>, which ran on the cover of Sierra<\/em> 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<\/strong><\/a>?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

There was my fantastic lawyer, Allan Sussman, who helped me sue the state in federal court<\/strong><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}