Danger in the classroom

By JASON ARMSTRONG

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Improper chemical storage has caused safety and health threats at Big Island schools, say local hazardous waste experts seeking to increase awareness of the dangers.

Chemicals used in school science experiments can become flammable, explosive or emit carcinogenic fumes if stored wrong or for too long, said John Bowen, a nationally recognized hazardous materials expert and author.

Solvents and other cleaning materials can pose similar risks, he said.

Having spent 35 years training emergency responders to handle HazMat incidents locally and on the mainland, Bowen said he’s inspected several Big Island schools’ laboratories for safety compliance.

“It’s not unusual to find them that are literally decades old,” Bowen said of chemicals, often bought in bulk to lower costs, that he’s seen get pushed to the back of high school storage cabinets and left there.

Not all of East Hawaii’s public schools conduct required chemical inventories, said Henry Silva, a retired Hawaii County HazMat captain, who has been meeting with complex superintendents to discuss the issue.

“I’m trying to push the idea that if you haven’t used it in five years, get rid of it,” he said. “I just feel the potential hazards of having it on-site, it doesn’t warrant keeping it.”

Once a chemical is identified as being hazardous, schools have 120 days to have it removed properly, which often involves sealing the material in a 55-gallon drum and shipping it to the mainland, Bowen said.

“That’s where the major expense comes in,” he said, noting only flammable chemicals may be disposed of in Hawaii.

Certain chemicals cannot be combined in the same drum, which typically cost about $1,500 apiece for shipping and disposal, Bowen said.

That cost should not be a deterrent for providing safe classrooms, Silva said.

“To me, the money is not an issue any more,” he said. “It’s a safety issue.”

As chairman of the Hawaii County Local Emergency Planning Committee, which oversees chemical storage in Hawaii County, Silva has been pressing state education and health administrators to address the issue of chemicals on school campuses. He’s been joined by Bowen, a former chairman and current member of the all-volunteer LEPC.

The renewed outreach effort comes more than a decade after the University of Hawaii paid $1.7 million to settle hazardous waste violations on three islands.

“This is a concern that is not new,” said Gary Gill, a state Department of Health deputy director in charge of the department’s Environmental Health Administration.

In 1997, DOH and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency investigators started finding improperly stored and labeled flammable, corrosive and poisonous chemicals on the Manoa campus. A wider investigation then revealed similar violations at the university’s Waiakea Agricultural Experiment Station in Hilo and at the Kauai Agricultural Center.

To settle the violations, the university in February 2001 agreed to pay a $505,000 cash penalty and spend $1.2 million on safety-mitigation measures. Converting to digital printing to eliminate the use of silver-based developers, buying smaller quantities of science lab chemicals and using fewer solvents for automotive classes were some of the settlement terms.

Another provision required the university to spend $47,000 to remove and replace equipment containing mercury.

While mercury thermometers were once the staple of high school science classes, they’ve long been replaced first with alcohol and then more recently with safe digital versions.

The EPA believes mercury is a possible human carcinogen, while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says breathing it can cause “severe” lung damage and other problems.

“Everybody knows there should be no mercury thermometers in schools,” said Mark Behrens, acting director of the Department of Education’s Safety, Security and Emergency Preparedness Branch.

Well, not exactly everyone.

Last June, a Keaau Middle School teacher brought a mercury-filled thermometer to class to conduct an experiment, Behrens said.

The thermometer slipped from the teacher’s hand, causing it to break and the mercury to spill, he said.

The classroom had to be evacuated, sealed and then cleaned by a Honolulu-based company under contract with the DOE to remove hazardous materials, he said.

Because the spill occurred at the start of a three-day holiday weekend and required specialized workers to be flown in from Oahu, taxpayers were charged $8,000 for the cleanup, he said.

Just two days later, on June 3, mercury was removed from Waiakea High School by EnviroServcies and Training Center. The company also disposed of “flammable liquids, flammable/corrosive liquids, water-reactive material, toxic substances (and) corrosive materials,” an employee wrote in a recent email to Behrens.

Behrens said he didn’t know the origin of the mercury found on the Waiakea High School campus and suggested the other items were old chemicals.

Those two incidents were the only chemical cleanups involving the DOE’s Big Island schools during 2011, he said.

“So, things are a lot better than they were many years ago,” Behrens said.

The DOE now budgets for chemical cleanups, while subjecting all of its 256 schools, including 42 on Hawaii Island, to annual inspections for chemical storage, sanitation and overall safety, Behrens said.

Bowen, who has seen local schools storing everything from more than a pound of mercury to dried-out petric acid with the explosive potential of dynamite, said the DOE’s efforts haven’t produced noticeable safety improvements.

“I don’t think it’s getting any worse,” he said.

Sometimes, the solutions are simple.

“A really common thing is to store the chemicals in alphabetical order, and this tends to put chemicals together that would be really dangerous should they mix,” Bowen said.

To help raise awareness, he and Silva have been lobbying the DOH for help.

Ten years after notifying all public and private schools of the dangerous of storing chemicals improperly, Gill said he’s sending out another similar letter to “flag this concern again” due to the Hawaii County LEPC’s insistence.

Although the DOH has no money for chemical cleanups on school campuses, the letter is “basically a reminder to school leaders and (an) offer of assistance,” Gill said.

The department is actively dealing with school storage closets where chemicals are kept, he said.

“These chemicals were just stored there, and in some cases no one takes responsibility for it,” Gill said of the problem.

(Disclosure: Jason Armstrong is a voting member of the Hawaii County LEPC, having served as the mandated media representative continuously since 2001.)

Email Jason Armstrong at jarmstrong@hawaiitribune-herald.com.