“Ive had a lot of sleepless nights,” said Sean McCleery, whose two children, Autumn, 6, left, and Tristan, 3, must continue to be monitored. But what the parents did not know was that the unattractive one-story building, about 30 miles south of Philadelphia, was the site of a former mercury thermometer factory and that their children, who spent up to 10 hours a day there, were being exposed to what the State Department of Environmental Protection described last month as unacceptably high levels of mercury.

A third of the 60 children tested have shown abnormally high levels of mercury in their systems. And while experts have said the levels of mercury found in urine specimens are not high enough to indicate health problems, they are high enough to require long-term monitoring, and the ultimate health implications for the children may not be known for years.

But what is clear, and what is now the subject of an investigation by the state attorney general, is that the responsibility for cleaning up and regulating the building slipped like quicksilver through the fingers of state agencies, local officials and the building’s owner, who in February 2004 allowed Kiddie Kollege to open. “I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights, and my wife cries on a daily basis,” said Sean McCleery, whose two children, Autumn, 6, and Tristan, 3, tested above normal and must continue to be monitored. “You think you’re doing the best you can to protect your children, and it ends up in a heartbreaking situation.”

So while health experts are minimizing the long-term effects of the contamination, that is little comfort to parents and the owner of Kiddie Kollege, who closed the center on July 28, the day the state determined that the building was not fit for occupancy. For now, the state attorney general’s office is investigating who was responsible for allowing a building to open despite mercury vapor levels at least 27 times the regulatory limit. Mercury, a naturally occurring element, is toxic if inhaled or ingested. Symptoms of mercury poisoning in children include insomnia, irritability, rashes and peeling of hands and skin. Mercury vapors are heavier than air and therefore more prevalent near the floor, where children nap and play.

A timeline released by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection describes how a series of missed opportunities and incomplete communications over the past 12 years put children at risk.Christopher M. Manganello, a lawyer in Pitman, N.J., who is representing more than a dozen families, said: “As a pilot, you need a chain of errors, not just one error, to cause a crash. If any one error had not been made, this whole tragedy would not have occurred. The ball got dropped.”

The first missed step came on Jan. 1, 1994, when Accutherm Inc. of Williamsburg, Va., which made thermometers in the one-story building here, closed after 10 years in business. Under state environmental law, a company is required to clean up any spills or toxic materials left behind, even if it files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as the company did in March 1994. But Accutherm did not comply with the department’s directive to clean all the discharges of mercury and other toxic material at the site.

Bill Wolfe, the head of an environmental watchdog group and a former policy adviser at the environmental agency, said the state should have put a lien on the property and erected signs and fences around it to notify neighbors about the possible hazards. The New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act allows for the department to clean up hazards left behind, then to charge the polluter three times the cost. “That’s where the breakdown initially occurred,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Had that been addressed appropriately by D.E.P., all the other stuff would not have occurred.”

Lisa P. Jackson, the commissioner of the environmental department, conceded in an interview this week that the agency needed better tracking of contaminated sites, clearer cleanup priorities and stronger enforcement efforts. “This is an example when all three of those kind of collide in a bad way,” she said. “It crystallizes some of the things we need to do differently.”
(By Tina Kelley, New York Times ,19/08/2006)