Jun 26

Written by: Bret Rachlin
6/26/2009 3:56 PM

Is your school district prepared for a mercury contamination? (Source: The Arizona Republic, June 19, 2009, Teachers sounded mercury alarm 2 years before spill). Unfortunately, this article doesn’t say whether or not Agua Fria High School in Arizona was prepared when “a student stole elemental mercury from a classroom at the Avondale school, closing it for three days, contaminating three classrooms, the boys locker room and two buses. Off-site, two homes were evacuated while the area was decontaminated.”

The article, however, highlights the state of confusion that exists at the school between a couple of science teachers and school administrators. Apparently, science teachers informed administrators about the need to dispose of the mercury up to two years prior to the theft, but obviously the chemicals remained on campus. School administrators have hired a public relations firm to manage media inquiries, so it’s unclear how the clean-up effort fell through the cracks, although the article cites several emails from teachers, which notify administrators of the unsafe chemicals.

While it’s refreshing to know that teachers attempted to take the initiative and raise awareness for the need to dispose of these chemicals properly, it shouldn’t actually be necessary for them to do so. Once again, if the district conducted a thorough safety and security assessment that includes a list of tasks to be completed to mitigate risks on a regular basis, then it would have identified the chemicals, noted their location, and prescribed an action plan to dispose of them. Either the district didn’t do a risk assessment or it did an assessment, but took no action.

Overall, it’s clearly more cost effective to spend a little time and money assessing risks and fixing problems on a regular basis, rather than closing school, conducting an investigation, and worrying about the potential “adverse health effects associated with this event” in the future.

Can your district afford not to be proactive?

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