The Day After the Daycare Webinar – Preventing Another Kiddie Kollege

Terradex wishes to thank the panelists as well as the attendees for their participation in the webinar discussing daycare and the threats posed by contaminated sites.  In the lead up to this webinar, Terradex published a post that sought to provide a fresh look at the progress to prevent the seminal environmental tragedy that unfolded at Kiddie Kollege daycare: children exposed across several years to mercury left in a former thermometer factory converted to a daycare. This webinar follows from a blog post Terradex prepared in September 2010.

From the vantage point of the webinar, progress has been made across four years since Kiddie Kollege.  New Jersey, California, New York and Connecticut shared experiences showing varying approaches.  The USEPA’s participation in the webinar, as well as the attendance by many states, broaden understanding of the threats land contamination can pose to children attending daycare.   A bar is being set toward a national expectation of safety for children at daycare.  A common challenge is the lack of funding for states to meet these challenges. The discussing journeyed through sizing the problem, understanding various state approaches, learning of forthcoming guidance both at the federal and state levels, discovering the limitations of local government zoning as a tool, and appreciating the modes of exposure such as rogue unmapped groundwater plumes and the associated vapor intrusion risk.

Within this post we offer the following:

• A streaming video of the webinar held on September 28
• Downloads of the PowerPoint Presentations
• Links to references identified during the webinar.

The scale of this challenge may be greater than that facing schools.  First, the receptor – all 6 million children in daycare – is younger than school age children. Second, there are more daycares than schools – perhaps as many as 400,000 daycare and family care facilities.  Third, the turnover of a daycare is much quicker – the average life of a daycare is five years. The seminar, hosted by Bob Wenzlau and Mike Sowinski of Terradex, assembled the following panelists:

• Bob Axlerad, USEPA Office of Air & Radiation, Indoor Environments Division – USEPA Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP)
• Diane Pupa, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
• Carolyn Tatoian and Sam Martinez – California Department of Toxic Substances Control
• Lenny Siegel, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
• Bill Ottaway – New York Department of Environmental Conservation
• Larry Schnapf, Schnapf Law Offices and Adjunct Professor at New York Law School
• Larry Zaragoza, USEPA OSWER

The following is a webcast of the video.  Please allow a moment for the webcast to cache.  After the first 30 seconds of play, there is a menu to jump to various panelists.

The following resources were identified during the presentation:

• Terradex Webinar Slides
• PowerPoint Slides from D. Pupa New Jersey DEP
• PowerPoint Slides from S Martinez California DTSC
• Connecticut Department of Health administers a Child Day Care “SAFER” program

Please look forward to a further post that summarizes the remarks and discussions by all speakers. In particular we hope to develop remarks that were prevented by Connecticut’s Department of Public Health on the “SAFER” program.