Schools Near Toxic Land Not Limited To Hanes/Lowrance

As the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education prepares to address the issues at Hanes and Lowrance Middle Schools at a meeting Tuesday, questions remain about what the impact of exposure to pollutants could be for students and teachers there.

The concern has been not over the drinking water, which comes from the city, but rather the vapor that is released from the chemicals and whether or not it has been leaching into the buildings. 

These are vapors in the soil or groundwater that transport and enter into air spaces. It can enter through cracks in the foundations, a basement or crawl space, and it also comes from pipes and other airways. 

Kelly Pennell specializes in vapor intrusion at the University of Kentucky. She says that it's not uncommon for schools to sit near toxic waste sites across the country. 

"In urbanized areas, you're going to have hazardous waste sites where you're going to have some sort of legacy contamination. So, unfortunately when schools are built on properties or adjacent to or atop a site that's contaminated, you have the potential for vapor intrusion." says Pennell.

"There's probably hundreds of thousands of hazardous waste sites. It does impact a lot of communities across the country." 

Parents and students crowded the auditorium last week, angry that school officials failed to disclose the information about the contaminated site. This was after the Winston-Salem Journal's report that showed the school had tested the air quality six times since it learned of the problem. In one test, the result showed  chemical, PCE, at 11,000 times the healthy standard. 

Pennell says analyzing the impact of vapor intrusion is complicated and made more so by the fact that some consumer products, like cleaning agents, can contain the same chemicals. 

"Trying to tease out what's responsible is a real challenge," says Pennell. "We don't just want to take a snapshot and get an idea of what the concentrations are  at a given point of time. We want to evaluate how likely it is that this building  has elevated indoor air concentrations and then make a decision to  mitigate it based on that."

"The good news is there are solutions for this. Many schools have put on mitigation systems to address this and it just comes down properly designing, operating and maintain them." 

The WS/FC school board is holding a special meeting tonight to give an update to parents on Hanes and Lowrance. It's also expected to address the new site to replace Lowrance, which is proposed to be built on the same spot. Earlier this week, superintendent Beverly Emory says she no longer fully supports the project.