The following letter was sent by Malibu Parents for Healthy Schools to the Superintendent of the District:
Dear Ms. Lyon:
As you know, at the Task Force meeting Oct. 31, Dr. Rosenfeld requested that the raw test data for the PCB tests be provided immediately by Frontier Labs directly to Dr. Rosenfeld. We understand that this raw test data was provided to the District last Friday. However, when Dr. Rosenfeld contacted Frontier Labs to obtain the raw test data, he was told that the District had forbidden the lab from sharing the data with him. In addition, over the last week Dr. Rosenfeld has made numerous email requests for access to this data directly to you and the District’s environmental consultant, Mr. Katchen, with no response. This is inconsistent with the District’s promise of transparency and cooperation.Â
The District has already released a statement with its preliminary findings about PCB contamination based on the test data that has so far been kept secret. We appreciate the fact that the District agreed to use Frontier Lab-which is the lab recommended by Dr. Rosenfeld-but in order for the parents and teachers to trust the ultimate findings, it is imperative that the raw data be independently reviewed by Dr. Rosenfeld. Please authorize the lab to release the raw data directly to Dr. Rosenfeld.Â
Finally, now that the PCB samples have been taken and tested, we will need to discuss the plan for additional soil testing for those contaminants such as benzene, toluene and chlordane, which were detected in the soils at the Malibu campus by ARCADIS in 2010. ARCADIS found that the concentration of such contaminants exceeded the California maximum limits and presented a cancer risk above the maximum acceptable level for school sites. While ARCADIS found that the overall health risk posed by PCB contamination was greater than that posed by the other contaminants, the cancer risk from such other contaminants was substantial nonetheless. The order of priority for testing and any possible remediation will depend upon our expert’s review of the PCB raw test data.
Ken Miller and Len Simonian, Malibu Parents for Healthy Schools