The Campus Community Alliance for Environmental Justice was founded in a Caldwell Hall classroom, right across the Court of Carolina from the recently shuttered Poe Hall. In February 2024, our environmental history class was studying PCB activists in Warren County. In 1982, they staged a seven-week protest to stop the construction of a PCB dumping ground in the poor, predominantly Black county.
Environmental activist Dollie Burwell’s 10-year-old daughter said she was arrested while screaming, “Don’t bring the trucks in. I don’t want to die from cancer.”
Their protest made national news and spurred studies showing the link between race and environmental hazards, ultimately birthing the environmental justice movement. Those residents understood then what many at NC State have only recently learned: PCBs are insidious, persistent and dangerous.
When Poe Hall closed, people stepped forward to publicly share their experiences with cancer and autoimmune diseases. Yet for 18 months, NC State administrators doggedly avoided discussing the health impacts of PCBs. This inaction was a disservice to our community and a dismissal of PCB research which widely agrees that these chemicals have health impacts, which include life-altering diseases like skin conditions, liver damage, cancer, autoimmune disorders and thyroid disease.
The other problem with PCBs is that once created, they stick around. They are part of a larger class of chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants. PCBs range in toxicity, but all PCBs are harmful to environments and people in the long run. This combination of deadly health impacts and longevity has created a toxic problem on our campus — one made more dangerous by lack of decisive action by NC State administrators.
Earlier this month, the NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation for Poe Hall was released, but it is far from a complete picture of what happened in this building — its scope was limited to employees. Non-employees, students and alumni who spent years in Poe Hall were excluded entirely. It also only considered three specific cancer types, ignoring other serious diseases that have well-documented links to PCB exposure.
The report does include key recommendations for NC State, including encouraging employees to tell their healthcare providers they worked in Poe Hall and were potentially exposed to PCBs. The report also says that NC State should conduct further epidemiological studies and form a health and safety committee with employee representatives. NC State has yet to propose implementation of the latter two recommendations.
Employee and student involvement is critical. We know better than administrators what is happening in the buildings we use every day. As far back as the 1990s, employees in Poe Hall reported concerning environmental conditions, including leaking fluorescent lights, which are a leading source of PCB exposure in schools. Despite decades of complaints, Poe Hall was not closed until November 2023.
As news about Poe Hall’s elevated PCB levels spread, other UNC system schools took preemptive action. UNC-Charlotte, NC A&T, UNC-Asheville and UNC-Pembroke all implemented comprehensive building testing campaigns as part of their facilities maintenance programs in 2024.
There are more than 70 buildings currently in use on our campus constructed before the federal ban on PCBs in 1979. WRAL reporting confirmed that 23 have tested positive for PCB-containing materials, but these are only the ones that have undergone any testing at all. None aside from Poe Hall have been subject to comprehensive PCB testing which includes air sampling or surface wipe tests.
Faculty and students have reported concerns about multiple buildings to the Campus Community Alliance for Environmental Justice, including at least one person who worked in 111 Lampe and was recently diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma. These are not isolated incidents, they are patterns demanding attention.
Chancellor Kevin Howell has the power to change the trajectory. Under his tenure, NC State has already filed suit against Monsanto, the company that originally produced these chemicals. We urge the chancellor to treat Poe Hall as our “canary in the coal mine.” We need a comprehensive, campus-wide building testing campaign now.
What we do at NC State matters. The media attention on Poe Hall gives us influential responsibility. We must model an environmental plan that prioritizes people over buildings and bottom lines, ensuring that schools everywhere are safer because of the standard we set. We owe it to the environmental justice movement — born right here in North Carolina — to get this right and to honor the legacy of its founders.
