Carpet Fumes Suspected in a Rash of Illnesses : Environment: Complaints of health problems have come from homes, schools, offices and factories, but no hard evidence exists. A federal hearing is set for this week.
In 1985, the Sands family got sick. Very sick.
Linda and Stephen Sands and their five children suffered from headaches, dizziness, burning noses and throats, body tremors, double vision and shortness of breath. Eight years later, they are still battling various ailments.
The Sandses do not blame viruses or any other contagion; the cause of their illnesses, they say, is the carpet that had been installed in their home.
Linda Sands said she and her family had been healthy, that she had “never experienced anything like this in my life, ever. This whole thing is bizarre. I mean, it is the most horrible thing I have ever been through.”
They are not alone. Complaints of health problems linked to carpets have come from homes, schools and offices where they have been installed, from the factories where they are made and even from workers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Washington headquarters.
Now those complaints are beginning to be heard in the halls of Congress. A Senate hearing was held last October and one is set for Friday before the House subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources, to air carpet concerns and the responses of the industry and government regulators.
Worries about the health effects of some carpets have been around for years. But many of those who have raised alarms say that until recently, those worries in large part have been swept under the rug.
Between 1987 and 1990 there were more than 500 such complaints to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. But spokesmen for the $8.5-billion carpet industry say concerns about their product are not based on firm evidence.
“It’s all anecdotal,” said Ronald Van Gelderen, president of the Carpet & Rug Institute of Dalton, Ga.
He said he hoped the EPA would “take a look at all the anecdotal information and see what scientific conclusions can be made,” and said the industry would “make the necessary adjustments.”
There is agreement on all sides that not all carpet is bad; industry critics say it appears that only certain batches appear to cause problems.
But the effort to determine whether some carpet does cause problems, and which of the dozens of chemicals used in carpets might be at fault, has been maddeningly slow.
In its literature, the industry says that “indoor air pollution is a serious issue. . . . Carpets are a part of this issue, but a very small part.”
An industry pamphlet recommends thorough ventilation during installation and for the next 48 to 72 hours, and says people “may wish to leave during the installation of the new carpet.”
The Sandses were given no such warning when their new carpet was installed in 1985. It was March in Vermont and they didn’t open windows. And they didn’t immediately leave the house. They’ve regretted it ever since.
“As soon as the roll of carpeting was brought into our house, there was a very strong chemical odor just penetrating everything,” Linda Sands says.
Then came the symptoms, and a unending odyssey in which the Sands family was forced to give up its home and travel to California for detoxification treatments, only to see son Kyle, 17, become ill again when new carpet was installed at Montpelier High School.
The problems persist, Linda Sands said. Daughter Kalika, now 10, has a weakened immune system and has had “at least 30 respiratory infections” in recent years. “I’ve lost count of the sinus and ear infections,” she added.
On a larger scale, the same thing happened to the EPA. In 1987 and 1988, the EPA installed 27,000 yards of new carpet during renovations at its Waterside Mall offices in Washington. Soon, nearly 20% of the work force--880 of 5,000 employees at the complex--complained of illness.
J. William Hirzy, president of the union representing EPA professional employees, said senior agency officials dragged their feet in investigating employee health complaints. Later, at the urging of industry officials, the agency sought to suppress information about a health study of EPA workers, he said.
But in 1989, the agency ripped out the carpet. It issued an internal policy that the agency would not buy any more carpet that contained one suspect chemical, 4-phenylcyclohexene, or 4-PC.
But nearly five years after banning 4-PC from its own offices, the EPA is still saying that no direct tie has been proven between human health and 4-PC or any other chemical in carpet.
And until science proves a direct cause-and-effect link, EPA and Consumer Product Safety Commission officials say their agencies are hamstrung.
At Senate hearings last October, commission executive director Eric Peterson said this lack of a direct link was the reason his agency rejected petitions by attorneys general from 26 states to put labels on carpets, warning of possible ill-health effects.
Leslie Gersing, spokeswoman for New York State Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams, said the labels would have warned consumers that allergic or respiratory reactions might be caused by new carpet.
She said EPA studies now under way “are all well and good, but those studies take years. In the meantime, we need a common-sense warning.”
Said Rep. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent and a leader in the effort to put pressure on the agencies: “Now we can have a long investigation as to what the cause may be, but the $64 question is, are consumers becoming ill?”
Sanders also pointed to a Catch-22: The agencies say they have no link, but neither the EPA nor the Consumer Product Safety Commission nor the industry has “done the kind of research that might have led to that causal link.”
The private Anderson Laboratories Inc. of Dedham, Mass., has tested carpets and found severe effects in laboratory mice.
About 300 carpet samples have been tested so far, said Mark Goldman, the lab’s general manager. At least one in every four mice exposed to air blown over warmed carpet died, he said. Others suffered paralysis or nerve disorders. “With most of the products we look at, and we have looked at many, many indoor products, we have modest, if any, effects,” said lab President Rosalind Anderson.
Van Gelderen sought to raise questions about the validity of Anderson’s experiments, saying the lab “tweaked the tests.”
But Yves Alarie, a toxicologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has followed the issue, called Anderson’s tests “reasonable toxicology.”
EPA officials have traveled to Anderson’s lab to try to replicate her results. EPA spokesmen say no firm results are expected before late June, and it may be late 1994 before they know enough to take regulatory action.
In the meantime, Sanders and others said the EPA and product safety commission must withdraw their support for a “green tag program,” in which the carpet industry tests a particular line of carpet once a year and, if it meets air quality guidelines, tags the rest of the line as having passed the test.
“It represents an advertising strategy, not a plan to protect public health,” Sanders said.
Van Gelderen called the green tag program a good-faith effort to demonstrate that “carpet is being tested for chemical emissions as part of a chemical emissions reduction program.”
Even as the arguments continue, so do complaints about carpet emissions, and efforts to cope with the purported effects of those emissions.
Several EPA employees have been moved from headquarters to an office specially designed to be free of toxic threats, Hirzy said.
The Sands family is finishing work on a new home on the outskirts of Montpelier. The house is designed to protect the children, who Linda Sands says still suffer from weakened immune systems; for example, the hardwood floors are coated with beeswax instead of polyurethane, and rugs are made of wool.
Linda Sands is convinced by her experiences, and similar stories she has heard, that carpet harmed her family. She is angered by the pace of action--or lack of it--so far.
“I just want to see that no other children get poisoned,” she said.
