The Environmental Protection Agency is bringing a new team of specialists to Cardozo Senior High School to try to determine whether mercury found in the building twice in the past week might have been left from a Feb. 23 spill, EPA officials said yesterday.
While police, school and environmental officials attempt to make sense of the three mercury incidents at the Northwest Washington school, classes for Cardozo's 830 students will resume today at the University of the District of Columbia. School officials said classes will be held at UDC during the three to five days that Cardozo will be shuttered for cleaning.
Cleanup of Cardozo Senior High School continues after the discovery of more mercury Sunday. Students will be bused to classes elsewhere today.
(Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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Another D.C. school will be closed today after an unrelated mercury spill there yesterday afternoon. Students at Hardy Middle School broke a thermometer while playing with it, and classes at the Georgetown area school were canceled late last night to allow for testing and further cleanup, officials said.
School officials ordered all mercury removed from city schools after some of the liquid metal was spread in 2003 at Ballou Senior High School. D.C. schools spokeswoman Roxanne Evans said it was not clear whether the thermometer at Hardy had been overlooked or whether it had not been considered as falling under the order.
"It's difficult to say," Evans said. "The superintendent is asking the same question."
School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey said in a statement last night that he would issue a new directive that all mercury be removed from all city schools.
At Cardozo, mercury droplets were found Sunday in the school basement, one day after the D.C. Department of Health had announced that the mercury discovered Wednesday in a third-floor stairwell had been removed and that the 400,000-square-foot building was safe to reopen. Cardozo also was closed from Feb. 23 through Feb. 28 because of the initial mercury episode, in which two students have been charged.
Last night, police arrested a 16-year-old Cardozo student in connection with the incident. A 15-year-old student and a 16-year-old student were charged earlier.
Without acknowledging that any mistakes were made in their two previous cleanups of Cardozo, EPA officials yesterday backed off earlier statements that they were "100 percent certain" Wednesday's incident was a new mercury spill.
Members of the environmental response team being brought to Cardozo will "look at the chemistry of [the] mercury to see if they can give us a different view of why we're finding it -- whether it's new or old," said Marcos A. Aquino, on-scene coordinator for the EPA's removal response section for Region 3.
Aquino said the team, which possesses a higher level of scientific expertise than the previous cleanup crews, includes eight people who will monitor and sample the air for mercury vapor. The specialists will bring in 40 pumps to test the air, compared with the six pumps used in the earlier cleanups, he said.
"They will walk through every hallway and every classroom, looking at everything that may look like environmental mercury," Aquino said. "We're bringing in fresh instruments so we can be sure the equipment is functioning properly."
Cardozo students, who have missed 27 hours of instruction because of the cleanup work, will report today at 11:30 a.m. to Garnet-Patterson Middle School, where a bus will take them to the UDC campus for a half-day of classes, school officials said. A full day of classes will be held at UDC tomorrow.
"Our goal is to get students back to where they need to be," Evans said at a news conference outside the central administration building yesterday. She added that after Cardozo reopens, the academic day might be lengthened to make up the lost instructional time.
Unlike the second discovery of mercury, which occurred while classes were being held, Sunday's discovery was made after the building had been sealed off with security guards.
Police and school system officials said a custodian discovered the 12 or so pinhead-size mercury beads. The school system had directed its custodial workers and its contractor to clean and examine the building after the EPA crews had finished their work, to make sure that no mercury had been overlooked.
The officials said the custodian was sweeping in a corner in the basement when the beads rolled out. She alerted a supervisor, who notified authorities.
One D.C. police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said detectives believe that the EPA and its contractors might have missed the mercury in the third-floor stairwell during the cleanup after the Feb. 23 incident. Police and school system officials said videotape from a surveillance camera shows EPA officials walking through the area twice without cleaning it.
EPA spokeswoman Megan Dougherty said she was not aware of such a videotape.
Dougherty acknowledged that a custodian found the mercury Sunday. "She was sweeping and noticed it. Where it came from I couldn't guess," Dougherty said. "Our major concern is that it's there, rather than how it got there. It's the police's job to discover the source."
In yesterday's incident at Hardy, just off Wisconsin Avenue NW, students found the thermometer in an old terrarium in a classroom and began playing with it, a spokesman for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Services Department said.
The thermometer broke, spilling less than a quarter of a teaspoon of mercury, said spokesman Alan Etter. He said nine students and two staff members were in the building, and one of the staff members was decontaminated after testing positive for mercury.
A teacher got the mercury into a bag and threw it in an outdoor trash receptacle, Etter said.
School spokeswoman Evans said the school would be cleaned overnight, then tested. She said she expected a decision on whether to reopen the school tomorrow would be made after test results come back this evening.
Staff writers Allan Lengel and Martin Weil contributed to this report.
