TCE found at Slater School again TCE found at Slater School again (January 30, 2004)

Toxin is present at safe levels, parents told

By Grace Rauh

Slater School parents are growing increasingly concerned about the potential health risks their kids could face now that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found trace amounts of the cancer-causing solvent trichloroethene (TCE) in the air outside the elementary school on three different days.

According to the EPA, the levels of TCE -- the origins of which are still unknown -- detected at the school do not pose a short term or immediate health risk. But for many parents, even the slightest bit of TCE in the air around their child's school is too much.

"Most parents would say 'I don't want my child to be that one in a hundred thousand or one in a million,'" said Lorien French, a parent of a third-grade Slater student who is concerned about the potential cancer risk.

French is one of many parents closely following the air testing and potential health risks at Slater. While some parents are unable to attend the monthly Northeast Mountain View Advisory Council meetings, French acts as their eyes and ears. She goes to the meetings, picks up the minutes when she can't make it and has even called the EPA to get testing results before they are announced at the meeting.

"There is becoming a great community awareness that there is a possibility of problems over here," French said.

Slater parent and NMAC board member Jane Horton agrees.

"When it came up, it was obviously a concern," Horton said of the recent test results. Horton, who has lived on Whisman Road for 25 years, is perplexed by the discovery at Slater.

"This was a control. Slater was not meant to test positive," she said.

Slater was one of nine locations in northeast Mountain View selected by the EPA for air testing. "We didn't know prior to going into our sampling what we would find," said EPA project manager Alana Lee.

As the EPA is quick to point out, the TCE levels found at Slater lie within the agency's protective health range of .017 to 1.7 micrograms per cubic meter. It means that if a person were exposed to TCE levels within this range for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 30 years, he would only increase his risk of getting cancer from the toxin by one in one million or one in ten thousand.

The agency tested the air near the school entrance on Gladys Avenue on seven days in September and October 2003 and discovered .20 micrograms per cubic meter of TCE once. Last spring, the agency did similar tests on six different days and detected TCE levels of .16 and .21 micrograms per cubic meter on two days. On the other days, the pollutant was not detected. The EPA's current technological capabilities prevent them from detecting TCE below .15 micrograms per cubic meter.

That TCE was only detected on three out of the 13 test days makes Lee confident that TCE exposure at Slater School does not pose long-term health risks, but for local environmental advocate Lenny Siegel, it isn't as clear-cut.

"People ask me, 'Should I pull my kids out of Slater School,' and I say no," said Siegel, who directs the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. However, "the fact that there's limited time exposure doesn't mean you're OK."

Some children who attend Slater School also live in a residential area where they could be exposed to TCE, Siegel said. If the toxin were consistently present in the air outside Slater, these students could potentially be exposed to TCE for most, if not all, of the day.

Slater parents French and Horton are urging the EPA to continue testing the air outside Slater, and French is lobbying the agency to also run tests on the school's playing field. The field, where students play during morning and lunch recesses, is closer to a known contaminated site -- the housing development on the former GTE site -- than the current testing location near the school's main parking lot.

"I just think it would give parents a higher degree of confidence if they did that," French said.

Potential health risks at Slater could become a major factor in upcoming months, as the Mountain View-Whisman School District considers closing one of its seven elementary schools to help balance its challenged budget. A special task force of parents and teachers met Jan. 12 and declared that ground water and air pollution, academic performance and ethnic makeup would be the key criteria used to determine which school should close.

Yet even if test results continue to indicate that there is no short-term health risk at Slater, there could be a "perceived" health risk, Siegel said. If people are afraid to send their kids to school there, it won't matter if the playing field is safe to run around on or not.

E-mail Grace Rauh at grauh@mv-voice.com

E-mail a friend a link to this story.