Lead detected beneath SSHS practice field

Area will undergo more testing before contaminant is removed

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Board of Education President Liz Dion announced last week that during the course of construction at the high school, soil testing revealed that part of the back practice field was contaminated with lead.

The field was being used as a staging area for construction equipment. Soil tests, which are required to be conducted for construction projects like this, showed that lead was present in an area of the field measuring about 30 feet by 60 feet, one to two feet underground. The district and its architects met with officials from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to discuss what to do about the contamination.

“The school district will take whatever steps are necessary to remediate the problem, and in the interim has fenced off the area and closed it to the public,” Dion said at the board meeting on July 15. “As more information becomes available, the district will keep the public informed.”

Superintendent William Johnson stressed that the field does not present a danger to nearby residents. “One of the things we learned about lead is that it doesn’t travel,” he said. “It’s heavy. It tends to be encapsulated in the ground, and it doesn’t move.”

How the lead got there, however, is a mystery. “We just don’t know where it came from,” Johnson said. “We have no idea. I’m trying to find what, if anything, was on that particular site. I can’t find anything in records that would indicate what was there.”

Closing off the area shouldn’t affect construction, Johnson said, since none was taking place on the field. “So we’ve had to juggle around our staging area, at least temporarily, until that’s removed,” he said. “We may lose some parking spaces on the north lot.”

The next step, Johnson explained, is to remove the soil, most likely under the supervision of the DEC. Before remediation can begin, the DEC is ordering more soil testing in order to determine the extent of the contamination. Once the agency gives the go-ahead, the district can begin the work of removing the soil. Until then, the area will remain fenced off.

“We didn’t need to put a cover on it,” Johnson said. “We just needed to fence it off. We didn’t even need to do that, but we did. We want to take as much precaution as we possibly can.”