EPA coming to a school near you

From the Daily News:

The Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines for schools grappling with older light fixtures contaminated by a cancer-causing toxin.

The recommendations announced Thursday are for schools handling and removing lights laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

The action comes on the heels of a Bronx mom's 2009 lawsuit against the city Department of Education over the cleanup of high PCB levels in her children's Co-op City school.

Steve Owens, EPA's assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, said in a statement that as the EPA learned more about PCB risks in older buildings, it would work closely with schools to make sure they were safe.

The EPA wants the city to remove the lights in about 800 schools in an "expedited time frame," but the city says the lights pose no immediate health risks and removing them would cost more than $1 billion.

The EPA is set to begin testing city classrooms for PCB contamination next month.

In 1979, the EPA banned PCBs, which were used in electrical resistors to control lights and have been linked to cancer, birth defects and learning difficulties.

City Education officials declined to comment yesterday, but a letter sent to the EPA by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott last week scolded the agency for singling out the city, when buildings across the country contain PCB-contaminated lights.

City resists cleanup of contaminated schools

From Gotham Gazette:

A little over two years ago, a construction project at P.S. 53 in Staten Island resulted in so much dust that a fresh layer would have to be wiped away each morning. That dust contained toxic PCBs. The chemical was discovered only because the mother of an asthmatic boy attending the school had it privately tested. The city says it also tested there but only found PCBs in the soil outside.

The city has known for over two years that the hazardous chemicals were present in dozens of schools. Hundreds more are thought likely to be contaminated. Now, as the city wraps up preliminary testing and remediation of PCBs in three schools, advocates, parents and elected officials have launched a campaign to put some fire under the heels of an administration that they see as slow to act.

Those concerned want the department to immediately begin studying the problem citywide and speed up the removal of chemicals in schools known to be affected. With the city reportedly estimating cleanup could cost $1 billion, the education department says that it still does not understand the problem fully. It contends that addressing the issue on a citywide level before the pilot program is finished next year would be inefficient and unnecessarily disruptive to students. But some charge that the city really is concerned about the money.