Getting Educated in a Superfund Mess

Wetzel County Schools Superintendent Cassandra Porter insists that she had no choice but to close Paden City High School as of today because the building sits atop a toxic vapor plume.

The situation demanded a “proactive” response to ensure that PCHS students and staff face “zero risk” of exposure to potential air pollution, Porter said last month in a letter, follow-up video, newspaper interview and school board meeting. “I cannot leave them down there eight hours a day, sitting on that chemical waste site,” she said.

But three New Jersey schools that are located above a much larger Superfund site are still open, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency touts the cleanup of that site as one of its Superfund success stories. 

The White Swan Laundry and Cleaners and the Paden City Superfund sites are similar in that the EPA added both of them to the national priorities list because of groundwater contamination caused by dry cleaners. Band Box Cleaners was on the same block as Paden City High School, while White Swan Laundry and Cleaners and Sun Cleaners were located near three schools — Brookside School, Old Mill Elementary and Sea Girt Elementary — in Wall Township, New Jersey.

Compared with Paden City, the White Swan site is older (added to the list in 2004) and bigger (a mile long and two miles wide). An EPA official described it as “an astonishing toxic legacy” in 2013, the year the agency proposed a $19 million plan to clean it up.

But unlike Paden City High School, the three New Jersey schools haven’t closed. Government officials regularly monitor air and groundwater quality in various buildings within the Superfund site, and they have taken steps such as extracting and treating soil and installing vapor mitigation systems.

Environmental experts in the federal government first tested the New Jersey schools’ air quality in 2002. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reached similar conclusions at Brookside, Old Mill Elementary and Sea Girt Elementary. The Old Mill report, for example, found that “it is not likely that any exposure has occurred that would result in adverse health effects.”

The agency’s recent health consultation about Paden City High School said something similar. Based on air sampling at the facility, the agency “does not expect exposures at the high school to result in harmful health effects, including increased cancer risk.” 

The presence of a school within a Superfund site, whether in West Virginia or New Jersey, is definitely not ideal. The Superfund program itself was created in 1980 in part because of health problems experienced by students in a New York school that was built on top of hazardous waste at Love Canal.

But contrary to Porter’s argument that PCHS should have been closed once the ground underneath it was declared a Superfund site, history shows that a designation alone does not demand such drastic action. The whole point of the Superfund is to fund solutions, not admit defeat and close everything.

The scientifically reasoned response pursued at the White Swan site in New Jersey is wiser and fairer to the community. It is also consistent with the intent of the law that created the Superfund. The law favors long-term “remedial response actions,” including the one in Paden City, over “short-term removals” for more serious threats.

Another Superfund project, the Triple Site in Sunnyvale, California, has several schools in it, and officials have been mitigating the risk to those facilities since 2015. “EPA has overseen the installation of more than 20 mitigation systems (in 13 residential buildings and 12 school buildings) to prevent unacceptable levels of [tetrachloroethylene] vapors from accumulating indoors,” according to an agency summary.

In New Jersey, the EPA touts the cleanup at White Swan as a model example of Superfund redevelopment. “Continued uses at the site include residential and commercial areas, industrial facilities, schools, public services and parks,” the agency said. “The U.S. National Guard runs a training center on site. The site’s ecological resources include creeks, ponds, wetlands and a beach.”

Those positive developments may help explain why the EPA took the unusual step of issuing a national statement about a local school issue in a small West Virginia town. In a diplomatically worded rebuke of Porter, the EPA reiterated that “there is no unacceptable risk” to anyone inside Paden City High School.

But none of that matters now for PCHS students. Instead of enjoying the summer, they and their parents are scrambling to learn about other public schools or nontraditional education options.