News Coverage
Workers should have used protective gear, official says
Published September 26, 2002
Duluthians who volunteered to help sand down and fix up the Playfront playground Sept. 14-15 really should have been required to wear protective gloves and facemasks, environmentalists and a state health official said Thursday.
They also should have washed their hands before eating pizza during lunch at the park that weekend.
Organizers of the "work weekend" countered that the precautions taken were more than adequate to protect volunteers from the arsenic-treated wood.
"When you sand the wood, that increases the amount of arsenic you can ingest. You're making it airborne," said Carl Herbrandson, a toxicologist for the Minnesota Department of Health. "What happened wasn't good. It shouldn't have happened. But it's done now. Hopefully, it won't happen again." Almost 100 volunteers turned out to sand the 12-year-old wooden playground. They prepared the structure for a coat of sealant that will be applied next week. Next month, volunteers will be called upon again to replace wood chips and pea gravel with sand.
"I can see the concern of the environmentalists, but in our case there really shouldn't have been any. We used common sense," said Denise Bussa of the Junior League of Duluth, the group that organized the work weekend.
Junior League members say they encouraged volunteers to wash their hands in the bathrooms between the playground and the Bayfront Festival Park stage. They also provided gloves, masks and information about wood treated with arsenic, copper and chromium.
"Then we left it up to the volunteers whether they wanted to use them or not," Junior League member Maureen Pittack said. "We supplied everything."
About six dozen masks were used by volunteers, Bussa said.
"It wasn't a heavy-duty sanding, either," she said. "It was mostly just going over the wood to remove splinters. We removed dirt more than anything. The amount of sawdust was negligible. You had to really look for it."
Pittack, who helped with the sanding work, chose not to wear protective gear.
"I just didn't feel there was a concern," she said. "I didn't think there was any reason to be concerned. I mean, that's the same wood everyone uses to build their decks and stuff at home."
Her lack of concern appeared to be widespread, said Jamie Harvie, a member of the city's Environmental Advisory Council and a founding member of the Institute for a Sustainable Future, a small Duluth nonprofit that supports a healthy environment.
He said many of the volunteers he saw while he was down there worked with bare hands and exposed faces.
"Even fewer of them washed their hands before eating pizza," Harvie said. "People don't know there's arsenic in that wood or how dangerous arsenic can be. It's a question of informed consent. If you don't know what you're dealing with, you don't know how to take precautions. If you don't know what the risks are, how do you know to take precautions?
"I'm just saying let's use precaution," Harvie said. "These are simple Minnesota Department of Health safety guidelines we're talking about here. That's all."
The Ithaca, N.Y., firm that designed Playfront provided written precautions for working with the treated wood. The precautions are similar to fact sheets available from the state health department and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
"We pretty much recommend the same precautions as the wood-products industry," said Mark Leathers, president of Leathers and Associates. "Things like wearing a mask, washing your hands, things like that."
"It's hard to believe what happened, at least the way I heard it," said Sean Gray of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental advocacy and watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C.
"It is amazing to me that people were invited down there to sand this structure without being required to wear gloves or masks and were then served pizza, which was probably covered with a thin layer of arsenic-loaded dust," Gray said. "That's a story in and of itself."
The coat of sealant that will be sprayed onto Playfront next week will be the first the playground has seen since shortly after its construction in 1990. The EPA and the state Department of Health recommend sealing wood pressure-treated with chromated copper arsenate at least every two years. A city official has said the city didn't do additional treatments because it was too labor intensive and because the EPA assured the city that it did not pose any increased health risks.
The city will pay $1,000 for the sealant. There will be no labor costs because city employees and Junior League members will do the work.