New York Officials Say 18-Story Tower Is Now Safe : Leery Workers Shun Once-Poisoned Building

In the five years since a chemical fire spread deadly dioxins through a landmark 18-story office tower here, the poisoned building has become a virtual laboratory for toxic cleanups. But now that its reopening is nearing, some workers wonder if it will be safe.

Some say they will never re-enter the State Office Building, which has been unoccupied, except by cleanup workers in protective suits, since shortly after the Feb. 5, 1981, blaze.

“I know management people who are worried, but they don’t know where to turn,” said Patricia Zemanek, a former Broome County employee who chairs a reopening protest group.

Final Scrubbing

State officials insist that they are removing the last contaminants and that a final scrubbing of the building is going ahead. If the $35-million job stays on schedule, the state will move in about 750 workers from 33 bureaus on Dec. 1.

The State Office Building was the first U.S. structure of its size to be polluted by dioxin--used in Vietnam as a component of the herbicide Agent Orange--and other toxic byproducts of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

No one knows how the fire began, but it involved an electrical panel and a transformer containing 1,100 gallons of oil laced with PCBs, an omnipresent coolant before 1979, when the federal government outlawed it as cancer-causing.

Officials believe heat from the panel cracked the transformer, spilling PCB-laden oil. As it burned, the PCBs formed dioxins and other deadly byproducts, and the toxic smoke filtered through the ventilation system to every part of the building.

Finishing Touches

Crews are now putting the finishing touches on the top 17 floors, where protective clothing is no longer required, and are swabbing down the first floor, basement and sub-basement, which are still toxic.

Cleanup supervisor David Rings of the state Office of General Services said drapes and other furnishings would be installed in an interior cleaner than street air. The cost of the cleanup, though double the building’s original $17-million price tag, is half the cost of rebuilding, he said.

In the first days after the fire, no one was aware of the danger.

Office managers were allowed inside the building, in street clothes, to pick up papers. Some cleanup workers tracked soot from the State Office Building into downtown businesses.

County Health Commissioner Arnold Schachter called it “a nightmare of industrial hygiene” before he was fired for being too outspoken.

Carey Scoffed at Hazard

Only after 20 days did the state Health Department announce that the fire had produced deadly chemicals. The building was sealed, but then-Gov. Hugh Carey scoffed at the hazard, offering to “swallow an entire glass of PCBs.”

The state took more than a year to analyze blood samples of people exposed to the soot. Some cleanup workers complained of vomiting blood, recurrent headaches and chest pains. However, the blood tests concluded that no one received enough exposure to the toxins to have been harmed.

But will there be a danger of exposure when the building reopens?

“You’ve got to bear in mind that you can never remove every last molecule of a chemical,” said Dr. Christopher Wilkinson, director of Cornell University’s Institute of Comparative and Environmental Toxicology.

‘Is That Clean Enough?’

“This question is a problem that we’re going to face again and again.. . . We have the capability to take care of amazingly small levels of chemicals . . . but is that clean enough?”

Wilkinson said Environmental Protection Agency cleanliness requirements are up to 1,000 times tighter than the standard needed for safety.

The state’s standards are even tougher, said Faith Schottenfeld, a state community relations specialist for the cleanup.

She said the air and interior surfaces combined must contain less than 2 picograms of test chemicals per kilogram of weight for a worker. A picogram is one-trillionth of a gram.

Certain Amount of Fear

“That’s literally just a few molecules,” Wilkinson said. “On the other hand, if I’m a member of the general public who’s going to work in that building . . . I can understand a certain amount of fear there.”

Swiatoslav Kaczmar, a toxicologist with a Syracuse engineering firm, said the incident has had a beneficialeffect in putting New York state scientists in the forefront of toxic cleanups. Firefighters now are better informed about the hazards of a chemical fire, he said.

But he said people are leery because of the errors that followed the accident.

Zemanek, whose skin broke out when she was exposed to soot on her car that was parked outside the building, said a dependable cleanup might be possible, but she believes the state took shortcuts to cut costs.

“The EPA made the statement that, to do this properly, it could cost as much as $100 million,” she said. “I think it’s really ironic that they should want to reopen that building. The taxpayers are being bled to death, and we have concerns that I don’t think will ever be resolved if and when they reopen that building.”