Toxic time bomb
As PCBs endanger schools, EPA, lawmakers fail to act
At first, teachers at Sky Valley Education Center simply evacuated students and used fans to clear the air when the fluorescent lights caught fire or smoked with noxious fumes. When black oil dripped onto desks and floors, they caught leaks with a bucket and duct-taped oil-stained carpets.
Then came the tests that confirmed their suspicions about the light ballasts.
“Sure enough … it was PCB oil,” said Cynthia Yost, who was among teachers who sent pieces of carpet and classroom air filters to a lab. Tests found elevated levels of the toxic chemicals, used as coolant in the decades-old ballasts that regulated electrical current to the lamps.
Millions of fluorescent light ballasts containing PCBs probably remain in schools and day care centers across the U.S. four decades after the chemicals were banned over concerns that they could cause cancer and other illnesses. Many older buildings also have caulk, ceiling tiles, floor adhesives and paint made with PCBs, which sometimes have been found at levels far higher than allowed by law.
Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has not attempted to determine the scope of PCB contamination or assess potential health risks, in large part because of lack of funding, political pressure and pushback from industry and education groups, according to dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents examined by the Associated Press.
Members of Congress who promised three years ago to find money to help address PCBs and other environmental problems in the nation’s schools never introduced legislation.
And an EPA rule that would have required schools and day cares to remove PCB-containing ballasts moved slowly under the Obama administration, then was quashed by President Donald Trump within days of his inauguration.
That was the final straw for Tom Simons, a former EPA regulator who worked for years on the rule and said getting rid of ballasts was the least the EPA could do to protect children.
“We thought it was a no-brainer: There are millions out there. These things are smoking and dripping, so let’s put this through,” said Simons, who retired shortly after Trump took office.
PCBs under the radar
For decades, the presence of PCBs in schools flew under the radar.
States, cities and environmental agencies focused on removing them from lakes, rivers and toxic waste sites because most exposure to PCBs is believed to come from people’s diet, including fish from contaminated waterways, and because PCBs do not break down easily. Studies have linked them to increased long-term risk of cancer, immune and reproductive system impairment and learning problems.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are mixtures of compounds manufactured by Monsanto Co. and widely used as coolants and lubricants in electrical equipment until they were banned in 1979. By then they were in transformers, air conditioners, adhesives, carbonless copy paper and billions of fluorescent light ballasts in schools, hospitals, homes, offices and commercial and industrial buildings. They also were ubiquitous in the environment and building up in human bodies.
Then a 2004 study by Harvard health professor Robert Herrick identified the widespread use of PCBs as a plasticizer in caulk in schools built before 1980, estimating that as many as 14 million students and 26,000 schools could be affected. The EPA had not been aware of its use in caulk before then, Simons said.
The EPA later found that the chemicals can move from building materials into the air and dust, where they can be inhaled or ingested. They also can be absorbed by walls and other surfaces as an ongoing source of exposure.
Regulators also discovered that old fluorescent light ballasts remained a potentially widespread source of PCB contamination. The EPA had allowed the ballasts to remain in use because chemicals were in enclosed capacitors that experts thought would last only about 12 years. But it turns out they can last a halfcentury or longer, said Simons.
The older they are, the more likely ballasts will leak, catch fire or smoke. And that has happened repeatedly in schools, office buildings, restaurants and factories in recent years, according to reports reviewed by the AP.
But the EPA has mostly voluntary guidelines, including recommended indoor air limits for PCBs that it says should protect children from health problems. The agency does not require — or encourage — schools to test for PCBs, so few do. If they are found in materials such as caulk, schools could be forced to undertake expensive cleanups when many are struggling to keep basic infrastructure intact and meet educational needs.
PCBs are illegal in building materials in concentrations exceeding 50 parts per million — a threshold set by the EPA decades ago based on how much contaminated material could affordably be removed rather than health risks.
ZIP code determinations
Whether PCBs are addressed often is determined by ZIP code.
In California’s wealthy Santa Monica-Malibu School District, parents, including model Cindy Crawford, sued to force the district to address PCBs after tests of caulk found levels up to 11,000 times the 50 ppm threshold. The district ultimately agreed to get rid of PCBs. It has torn down a middle school and continues to remove them from other buildings.
In Hartford, Conn., the ending was far different. John C. Clark Elementary and Middle School, in a largely low-income African American neighborhood, was permanently closed in 2015 after PCBs were found and the city could not afford to remove them. The city has sued Monsanto and a company that manufactured caulk to recover the costs.
“It was the crown jewel of the neighborhood,” Steven Harris, a former city council member and grandfather, said as he walked the deserted school grounds. “Our school board is doing the best they can. The reality is we don’t have a lot of money. And it’s going to take money to fix this problem.”
Monsanto, now owned by Bayer Crop Sciences, has denied responsibility in lawsuits involving several school districts, saying it did not manufacture the building materials or components that contained PCBs.
Concerns over schools like Hartford’s are one of the issues that ultimately kept the EPA from taking stronger steps to address PCBs.
The agency, which originally recommended that schools test for the chemicals, was warned by the Association of California School Administrators that forcing schools to remove PCBs could create “a civil rights issue” if low-income minority schools could not afford it. What’s more, many of those schools have other environmental problems — including lead, asbestos and mold — that could be higher priorities.
So instead, the EPA developed guidance that promotes vigilant cleaning and better ventilation and suggests schools could cover materials suspected of containing PCBs until the buildings are renovated or razed.
But the recommendations were released quietly on the agency website to avoid publicity that might frighten the public, according to former EPA officials who said the agency was hamstrung by a problem that could cost billions of dollars. There are no rules requiring school officials to tell parents if they find or suspect their buildings have PCBs.
It was clear that PCBs were so widespread that cleanup would overwhelm schools without a huge financial commitment from Congress, said Tom Huetteman, the former assistant director of the PCBs program at EPA Region 9, based in San Francisco.
Current EPA officials said in written responses that the agency’s recommended precautions are usually effective, but the steps might not adequately reduce exposure in every school. It also said the agency is “actively identifying” money for a program targeting school environmental hazards.
EPA effort falls short
The EPA decided that dealing with old PCBcontaining light ballasts was easier and hurried to adopt the rule that would have required schools and day cares to remove them before Obama’s second term ended, only to fall short. It was killed as part of a wider regulatory rollback under Trump.
The agency had advised schools to get rid of ballasts in 2001 — two years after a ballast failure sparked a fire at a Southern California high school and improper cleanup of a ballast leak exposed people to PCBs at an Oregon school. The agency made the same recommendation again in 2010, when it was clear ballasts remained a problem.
But the EPA in 2015 estimated that there still were 2.6 million PCB-containing ballasts in schools and a half-million in day cares, with up to 70 percent of them likely leaking. Almost 40 million more were in buildings such as hospitals, public housing and offices.
New York City public schools replaced hundreds of thousands of ballasts in almost 900 schools between 2013 and 2016, after being sued by parents who had become alarmed when failing ballasts were found throughout the district, even leaking oil onto a student.
In Los Angeles, officials last year finished removing 14,220 PCB-containing ballasts from about 750 schools, officials said.
Many school districts now have replaced fluorescent light ballasts through energy-savings partnerships with utilities. And the Department of Energy phased out production of the light tubes used in the ballasts that used PCBs.
But a surprising number of suspect ballasts still are in use, especially in urban, rural and lowincome districts with older buildings, and in the Midwest and South, experts said.
Meanwhile, proving PCBs caused specific illnesses is likely impossible because problems can take years to develop, people are affected differently, and not everyone who’s exposed will get sick, experts say.
Herrick, the Harvard professor, said neither Congress nor the EPA have stepped up to create a “coherent national policy” on PCBs, as they did to a greater extent for asbestos and lead contamination.
“They intentionally dodged their responsibility to put some sort of framework around the problem,” said Herrick, who retired last year. “I think it’s because they don’t want the answer.”