Winter 2000 Environmental Audit - Chemicals on Campus: Tracking Down Western's Hazardous Waste, Part II

Winter 2000 - Environmental Audit

Chemicals On Campus: Tracking Down Western's Hazardous Waste, Part II
by Skye Thompson

In the winter quarter of 1990, Planet editor Sara Olason set out to explore the way Western managed its hazardous wastes. What she discovered was troubling. Instead of finding an educational institution with an unblemished record and a fail-safe method of monitoring and disposing wastes, Olason found a newborn hazardous waste program already weakened by financial malnutrition and poor decision making. Renewing Olason’s search a decade later, I found that while Western’s new stewards of campus safety bear more administrative gravity, they still suffer from financial undernourishment. This aside, there have been drastic improvements in how well Western’s dangerous chemicals are managed.

Producing hazardous waste may be as much an inevitability of operating a university as belching methane is to a pasture-bound cow. Indeed, almost every department on campus generates some hazardous waste—but what is Western’s administration doing to keep students and faculty safe? What and where are the toxins—and what are the risks?

Dennis Fitch supervises the chemistry department’s stockroom. He is responsible for some of the world’s most dangerous chemicals, and he guards them like a mother hen tending her nest. But the maze of glass jars that line his warehouse shelves in Chemistry Building 150 aren’t your average chicken eggs. Fitch stores substances so toxic that other well-known poisons pale in comparison. Describing his most exotic and potent compounds, Fitch leans back in his office chair and lets loose a nervous chuckle. He speaks of osmium tetroxide, a dangerous chemical kept in supply somewhere deep in the labyrinth of the storeroom’s shelves — a chemical that makes cyanide look like watered-down apple juice, a chemical more toxic than any other on campus.

"One drop in the room we are sitting in could possibly do us in," he says.

Fitch explains how we would suffocate — our lungs filling with fluid — if osmium tetroxide were to escape from its protective housing. He puts his hands to his throat and widens his eyes, acting out final mortal poses.

Of course the bottom floor of the chemistry building isn’t the only place on campus where hazards reside. The basement of Bond Hall holds an abandoned nuclear laboratory. Its doors are marked in black miniature type: "Nuclear Lab." Under the tiny typed header, room 10’s label reads: "Chernobyl," the clever graffito of some pencil-toting, physics nerd. The second door, room 08, reads "Kiev." A faded and peeling-away nuclear materials sticker warns passers-by of the room’s once unstable contents. Neither door appears to have been opened recently.

Jim Mullen, a Western science technician, has worked in the electronics shop that shares a wall with the nuclear lab for the past 12 years. Students no longer use the lab anymore, he says, because nuclear physics labs all use computer simulation instead of actual radioactive material.

"I don’t know what’s in there to tell you the truth," Mullen said.

Professor Bill Wilson, an ex-NASA scientist and Western’s Radiation Safety Officer, oversees the nuclear laboratory. Wilson insists that the Bond Hall nuclear labs are harmless now. Five or six years ago everything in the rooms was removed and the walls, floor and ceiling cleaned. The lab’s most contaminated contents, two neutron generators, were also removed and taken to Richland, Wash. for permanent disposal, Wilson said.

The cleanup left rooms 08 and 10 safe according to federal standards, but there is still some cleaning up to be done before the space is reopened. Rooms 10a and 10b, the two closet-like rooms that housed Western’s neutron generators still have what Wilson called "low-grade" radioactivity and need to be decontaminated.

"It’s a question of money," Wilson said. "It’ll probably take another $100,000 to finish cleaning 10a and 10b."

In 1990, when the Planet published Olason’s article on Western’s hazardous waste, a departmental Safety Committee hadn’t even established a satisfactory protocol for dealing with toxic wastes.

"Western had been sending its waste chemicals to the Thermal Reduction Company, a local incinerator not licensed to burn hazardous waste," Olason wrote. In fact, a more responsible alternative wasn’t found until the Department of Ecology stepped in and ordered the old practice stopped.

John Zylstra, then part of the art department’s technical support team, remembers what an awkward position it was to be responsible for the department’s health and safety issues.

"If there was a spill, they would call me," he said. "But I really had limited training and no real authority."

It wasn’t until 1991 that Zylstra received proper training in chemical hygiene. Today, a certificate hangs above Zylstra’s desk showing that he was trained and certified in a two-week chemical hygiene course. A one-day version of the same course is now prerequisite for participation in some of Western’s chemistry lab classes.

EHS, the administrative body in charge of health and safety issues at Western, was established in early 1992. Their creation absorbed the responsibility of the campus safety committee Zylstra had been on.

EHS is the primary responder for releases of hazardous chemicals on campus.

Gayle Shipley has been director since its inception. She keeps a copy of "WAC 173-303 Dangerous Waste Regulations" within arm’s reach on a shelf beside her desk.

"We try very hard to do the right thing: comply," Shipley said.

But she also said there’s more to be done at EHS than people to do it — a sure sign that EHS is underfunded. And the lack of funding shows.

The office in Old Main has the busy feel of an emergency room or wartime command center.

The obvious shortage of people-power and time, however, has compromised their integrity as a public office. Office workers claimed they were too busy or too disorganized to produce records on hazardous waste disposal. It took three attempts before someone agreed to look for the information.

Others on campus have felt similar frustrations with EHS operations.

"I’d like to see things picked up a little quicker," Zylstra said. "I think we tend to store waste too long." Long storage periods are a risk to students and faculty.

But EHS is not responsible for final disposal, only for safely rounding up and storing it. A licensed contractor has been hired to export wastes from campus.

In late January, EHS reported that the contractor hired to pickup photographic chemicals for Western, Hallmark Refinery Corporation, was two weeks late on its pickup. Meanwhile, hazardous waste was accumulating in the basement of the Art Building.

Monte Robinson, EHS safety professional, was frustrated.

"[Hallmark] hasn’t responded for two weeks. I had to go to G[eorgia] P[acific] to get more fifty-five gallon drums. The four drums I got should last half a quarter." The extra drums will be used to store backlogged photographic chemicals until Hallmark finally comes to get them.

However, since the creation of EHS, hazardous waste has , unmistakably, been managed more safely at Western than ever before. Happily, some of the improvements are answers to questions Olason raised in her 1990 article. Unventilated storage facilities, such as the one that had been in Haggard Hall basement before its renovation, have been removed. The day-long chemical hygiene class and other programs are helping to educate those who work with potentially hazardous chemicals. And, according to Fitch, the chemistry stockroom and other storage facilities are much safer than they were before his arrival.

But the 90s did not pass entirely without incident. According to Zylstra, there was a spill in the basement of the Art Building that ended safely, but was potentially very dangerous.

Early in the 1990s the Art Building basement was used as a campus-wide clearinghouse for hazardous materials.

"Nobody really talked to each other back then," Zylstra said.

As a result, hazardous chemicals from at least five different branches of the university were being stored in close proximity. And then, Zylstra said, an old, unmarked container spilled.

Authorities discovered the leak and realized that the campus police were using a room next door to load and store ammunition.

"Seeing all those things stored, that if mixed could have exploded, we decided to make a change," Zylstra said. "That’s what really brought it to a head."

Zylstra said the art basement spill, while potentially very dangerous, had little or no negative impact.

"In fact," he said, "the biggest impact it did have was positive because it scared us into changing the way we do things." After the Art Building spill, EHS operations improved; monitoring, labeling and chemical segregation was better and tracking the life of chemicals has gotten better.

Because of the potential risks to human health, managing a campus-full of toxics can be as precarious as balancing a highwire trapeze act. So why bother?

Professor Wilson, sees it as an issue of morality.

"There's a huge legal responsibility," Wilson said, "but even more, there's a human responsibility."

Back in the chemistry stockroom, one of Western’s main chemical attractions, Dennis Fitch feels that personal pride compels him to manage responsibly.

"We have a really prestigious faculty," Fitch said. "I want our infrastructure to be just as fabulous."

The office of Environmental Health and Safety is a big part of that infrastructure. Indeed the past decade has seen the treatment of hazardous waste on campus ripen to near full administrative maturity. Of course there is still some room for improvement — their administrative transparency, allowing the public to see what work they do, should be better — but EHS has done well to keep its tigers caged. And they have been at the root of every major improvement in hazardous waste treatment on campus in the past eight years. For that, they deserve a lot of credit.

I think Sara Olason, were she to return, would be grateful.

Winter 2000 - Environmental Audit

Chemicals On Campus: Tracking Down Western's Hazardous Waste, Part II by Skye Thompson

Chemicals On Campus: Tracking Down Western's Hazardous Waste, Part II
by Skye Thompson