E.S. Bird Library has seen its fair share of trials in the past couple of years — running out of shelf space, students fighting for more group-study areas as others push for more academic research materials, controversy over off-site book storage — all the while dealing with an inherently tight budget.

A glimmer of hope came to library administrators when the family of The New York Times columnist and Syracuse University alum William Safire pledged a gift to redesign Bird’s basement, a rearrangement that would free up space on upper levels.

But when tests showed old carpeting from the basement contained a carcinogen, polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs — in fall 2009, staff put the renovations on hold and added toxin removal to its to-do list.

SU Risk Management and the Environmental Health Office have since been running tests on the basement floor and discussing with administrators possible options for moving forward with construction, said Dale King, assistant dean of administration services at Bird. Crucial core samples were taken Wednesday morning that will show how deep the PCBs have filtered into the concrete floor, a measure of how big or small — and expensive — PCB removal might be.

‘The Environmental Health Office is the main area looking at it, along with risk management, to see what we can possibly do to move forward,’ King said. ‘We’re not sure if they are there or they aren’t still there. They might have etched in the concrete, but we don’t know. And if they’re there, we don’t know how deep it may go.’

Wednesday’s samples will show if the PCBs are in the basement and how deeply they’ve penetrated the concrete. The deeper the PCBs are, the harder their removal will be, King said.

PCBs, outlawed in manufacturing in 1978, originated from the carpeting installed in the basement during the 1970s. At the time, the chemical was a common component of caulking and industrial glues, like the one used to hold the carpeting to the floor of Bird. In the 2009-10 school year, Bird moved shelving and research materials from the basement to a Syracuse warehouse and ripped up the carpeting, King said. It was during this process that testing was done and results came back PCB-positive.

There is no danger to students in the library basement today, as the PCBs are not free-floating. The danger comes with construction, like the proposed renovations, which would kick up the chemical into the air, King said.

University administrators have also been working with the Environmental Protection Agency to figure out proper and legal solutions. But many of the proposals so far have been unrealistic, said TC Carrier, director of program management at Bird. Suggestions included sealing or entirely ripping out the floor, both of which are structurally impossible or too expensive.

‘We really don’t have our options in front of us yet,’ Carrier said.

No matter how small the procedure is to get rid of the toxins, it will be an added expenditure to the cost of redoing the basement, she said. The redesign already includes the creation of two classrooms — one large and one small — a large and comfortable study space, and gallery space along the perimeter to showcase student work. The redesign would have allowed for administrative offices to be moved to the basement and free up shelving space on the top floors.

Architects have already laid out the design and picked color schemes and possible furniture. PCB removal is the last hurdle before getting construction underway.

Bird and other university buildings are not the only ones dealing with PCBs confounding construction projects. In September 2009, the EPA revamped its guidelines for dealing with PCBs found in caulks and glues, said Elias Rodriguez, EPA spokesman, in an e-mail. The updated guidelines were in response to a number of schools and colleges nationwide that discovered the toxin, according to an EPA news release on the guidelines.

‘PCBs have been banned for the last 30 years for most uses,’ said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in the news release. ‘But unfortunately high levels of PCBs are present in many buildings and facilities constructed prior to the PCB ban, including, most recently, some schools.’

PCBs were most commonly used in transformer oil, and for a while the EPA had been managing the safe removal and interaction with that form of the toxin, King said. It wasn’t until recently the EPA had to figure out how to dictate safe removal of PCBs left over from caulk and glue, which is why progress on the basement has been so slow, he said.

Until the test results come back from core samples drilled for on Wednesday, the future of the library’s basement and space issues are still up in the air. Renovations in Carnegie Library, the campus’ first library, throughout the next several years will allow a transfer of collections and help reduce the crowding at Bird, Carrier said

Administrators are expecting construction at Carnegie to run more smoothly, as it was built in 1907, decades before PCBs became a standard part of manufacturing in the 1950s. And for now, administrators are remaining optimistic that the core sample test results will get the ball rolling on a solution.

‘It’s frustrating to everybody that we can’t move forward,’ Carrier said on Wednesday. ‘But the fact that they’re testing today is a really good sign.’

rastrum@syr.edu

Published on September 29, 2010 at 12:00 pm