WOULD YOU SEND YOUR CHILD TO THIS SCHOOL?
A £44m campus built on a toxic landfill site. Teachers with cancer. Pupils with sickness and fatigue. While experts say the site is safe, alarm has spread among staff and parents. What IS happening at the school where the water turned blue?
‘We are getting no answers from the council’
FOR Josie Morgan, the gradual deterioration of her teenage son’s previously good eyesight was inexplicable and deeply troubling. There were anxious trips to the family doctor after Tommi woke up one morning with impaired sight. An ulcer was discovered on his cornea.
Blood tests showed no underlying problem, but soon afterwards the 13-year-old lost his vision entirely.
Josie, 41, says the ordeal is ‘destroying’ her autistic son and he leads an increasingly solitary existence, unable to use his computer or play with friends.
But this is a tragedy made all the more unbearable by the mysterious circumstances surrounding Tommi’s sight loss, amid a growing health scare at his secondary school.
Buchanan High School, whose pupils have additional support needs, shares a £44million campus in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, with St Ambrose High. The combined pupil roll is around 1,290, with both built on a former landfill site and opened in 2012.
The alarm was first formally sounded over tap water with a blue tinge in 2014. But tests were only carried out in October last year – and showed high levels of copper, leading to a major pipe replacement programme.
Further tests on Tommi, whose sight loss began after he started at Buchanan High last August, found heightened arsenic levels.
Josie said: ‘The consultant dealing with us says there is a strong link between the high levels of arsenic and Tommi going blind – but we are getting no answers from the council.’
The schools were built on a former landfill site which operated between 1945 and 1972, and was then used by the now-closed Gartsherrie Ironworks for a variety of waste materials including arsenic, nickel, and lead.
It was a controversial development and sparked a backlash from campaigners, who warned about the risk of methane gas leaks.
Ultimately, both North Lanarkshire Council and NHS bosses said measures would be
taken to seal off whatever poisonous materials were left in the ground – and the building project went ahead.
But their efforts to reassure families as the row over ‘blue water’ deepened have failed, and a petition calling for a full independent inspection of the site had gathered 15,000 signatures by yesterday.
Earlier this week, Education Secretary John Swinney announced an independent probe by a former public health chief. But many parents have decided not to accept official reassurances that the schools are safe – and are keeping their children at home.
On Monday, almost a quarter of the school roll at 1,150-pupil St Ambrose was absent – 262 children – with 147 ‘unauthorised’.
Pupils have complained of headaches, stomach upsets, sickness, vomiting and fatigue. At a recent public meeting attended by 400 people, more than 70 per cent of parents present said their children had experienced unexplained health problems.
Lisa McCormick, 41, has kept her son Kian, 14, a pupil at St Ambrose High, at home for the past fortnight. She started the petition because her son was unwell – and because she believed the council was playing ‘Russian roulette’ with the health of pupils and staff.
She said: ‘Parents are distraught and are too scared to put their children back into an environment that is harmful to them.’
Margaret Muldoon, 43, said her daughter Charlie, 14, is also staying away from St Ambrose because she was constantly sleepy, lost her appetite and was getting headaches, meaning she regularly took painkillers at school.
She added: ‘She went to the doctor, who said it was maybe just her age. But I told her about the toxins and she phoned the health board, who advised there was no need for blood tests. But I have made my mind up – she’s not going back.’
Concern rose when it emerged last month four teachers from Buchanan High had been diagnosed with bladder cancer
One, aged 69 and who retired in 2015, said: ‘I decided to speak out because I was so angry after attending the public meeting which was supposed to allay fears and reassure staff and parents.
‘All it did was make everyone very angry because nobody feels we are being told the full truth. We were asked to believe categoric assurances the school was safe; but no convincing evidence was presented to back that up.’
The teacher, diagnosed in May last year, has had a large tumour removed from his bladder and is undergoing chemotherapy.
He said: ‘I was the third teacher diagnosed. Nothing prepares you for the moment you are told you have cancer. It was terrifying.
‘When you hear that word, you think, “That’s it”. You worry you might not make it. But I’m lucky. I’m still here, determined to keep fighting cancer and determined to see the truth getting out.’
He said he felt ‘betrayed and angry’, adding that it was a ‘huge relief’ when the cancer cases were publicly disclosed.
The teacher added: ‘A great weight was taken off our shoulders because finally the truth was out. We no longer felt we were suffering in secret.’
The second teacher to develop bladder cancer thought he was ‘just unlucky’ when diagnosed in 2015. He said: ‘The first teacher got the same diagnosis the year before. When I was diagnosed I thought it was strange, but told myself I was just unlucky. But when the third teacher got bladder cancer, I knew something was very wrong.
‘By the time the fourth teacher was diagnosed, I was convinced there has to be something at that site causing a cancer cluster.’
The 67-year-old said surgeons removed a cancerous area of his bladder and he now requires continuous monitoring.
He added: ‘I’d been looking forward to a long, active retirement. Instead, I’ve had to learn how to live with cancer. I will always have that hanging over me.’
These teachers have spoken out – albeit anonymously – because they have retired, while the other two are still on the payroll.
There are persistent reports
‘He won’t be back until there is an inquiry’
that staff have been gagged and threatened with the sack if they speak out – claims that the council denies.
A group of teachers wrote to Coatbridge Nationalist MSP Fulton MacGregor, saying: ‘We have been told on many occasions that the water was not a concern.
‘We were told to run taps or boil water. We are outraged with how the council has failed to take our concerns seriously.
‘Staff morale is low because we are frightened to say anything in case we implicate ourselves and lose our jobs.’
NHS Lanarkshire claims that the ‘latency period’ – the time it takes from exposure to a substance to someone being affected by it – is 15 to 40 years for bladder cancer and Buchanan High opened in 2012.
Officials argue this means that not enough time has passed for people to develop bladder cancer from being exposed at the school.
But there is debate over latency periods – in Germany, for example, a worker might be compensated for bladder cancer after only a one-year period.
The Educational Institute of Scotland teaching union is considering taking legal action against the council; while the NASUWT, which represents 12 staff at Buchanan High, said its members are planning a strike between June 20 and 28.
This industrial action will go ahead despite the Government inquiry, with the union saying it needs to ‘safeguard the health and welfare of our members’.
The Scottish Daily Mail has also uncovered evidence that early signs of problems on the campus may have been overlooked.
A methane alarm was installed at St Ambrose High to ensure that pupils could be rapidly evacuated if unsafe levels of the gas were detected.
Former janitor Anne Ormond, who worked at St Ambrose for 23 years, said that when she worked there the alarm in her office had gone off – but she claimed that the headteacher said it was a false alarm and the fire service was not called out.
The council admits the sensor has been activated once, but claims it was faulty and had not been activated because of a buildup of ground gases.
Parents are also concerned about sunken ground on the campus and mounds suddenly materialising in the playgrounds.
The council maintains that because the site contains large amounts of peat, some ‘settlement’ – which can cause unevenness in paved areas and on playing fields – is to be expected and is not detrimental to the buildings.
Bottled water was issued to pupils and staff at the schools last November; and the council says the delay in testing tap water happened because until last year it had been attempting to get rid of discoloured water by intermittently ‘flushing’ the system to remove copper.
Full tests on the water supply were ordered last October, when teachers said the ‘blue water’ was coming out of a greater number of taps – previously, its appearance had been sporadic.
Dr David Cromie, a consultant in public health medicine at NHS Lanarkshire, insisted that ‘in relation to copper in the water, we would like to reassure parents, pupils and staff at the schools that copper is not carcinogenic’.
He added: ‘At very high levels it could be a gastric irritant, but no cases of gastrointestinal illness were reported.’
He also claimed the ‘public health assessment is that there is no evidence of arsenic toxicity from the school’.
But public health expert Professor Andrew Watterson of Stirling University said environmental factors may have caused the health problems among pupils and staff.
He said the fears of parents and staff would continue until the council and NHS provided evidence to back up their claim that the schools are not toxic.
Professor Watterson was also damning about the performance of the local authority and the NHS during the health crisis.
He said: ‘This has almost been a classic case study of how not to handle such problems and how not to reassure parents and staff. There are lessons for all bodies in this.’
The question that remains is how many parents will be reassured by the Governmentordered inquiry – and how many children will turn up for classes after the summer break.
Alana Herbert, 35, whose autistic son William, 13, is a pupil at Buchanan High, said she had taken him out of classes because she ‘just couldn’t take the risk any longer’.
She said: ‘He won’t be back until there is an inquiry and all the kids are tested.’
It is also clear that Mr Swinney’s review may not go far enough for parents worried that their child’s school is making them ill.
Mrs McCormick criticised the Government intervention, saying parents ‘want an independent investigation, we don’t want an independent review’.
She added: ‘We’re asking for new evidence, we need testing done on that site as of the state it is today, not looking at old evidence.
‘We also want our children to be tested. There was no mention of that in the announcement about an independent review. We want to know why our children and staff are being sick.’
For Professor Watterson, it is the original decision to educate children on a former toxic dump that remains baffling.
He said it is a ‘simple fact that if the school had not been built on a brownfield [previously developed] site, some if not all of the problems and concerns now being raised would simply not apply’.
It may be impossible to conclude beyond doubt the schools have made their staff and pupils sick. But it is certain the council and health bosses have lost the confidence of scores of parents – and may never win back their trust.