by John Boyle
NARRATION: Very little is known about the potential dangers of the air pollutants that people breathe during the course of a normal day.
So researchers sent a team of high school students who live citywide out wearing backpacks that monitored air quality.
What they found out surprised them.
Some of the devices the students wore had elevated levels of Iron, manganese and chromium in ratios that pointed to only one thing.
TAPE: It was pretty clear early on that it was a source of steel, (we were looking for some source of steel dust,) something that could be generating fine dust of steel.
NARRATION: Stephen Chillrud is a geochemist and the lead investigator of the project. His team analyzed the student's traveling patterns and found that those with the elevated levels of steel dust all lived far from school. When school was out during the summer and the steel dust disappeared, the scientists knew they had found the source.
TAPE: (Chillrud) That was one of the first things that made us go Aha , maybe it's the subways!!
TAPE: sound of brakes grinding against rails … fade under and fade out sometime by the end of following narration.
NARRATION: Forty-eight thousand steel wheels roll over more than 600 miles of steel rails every day.
And the resulting friction sends more than a million pounds of steel dust each year into the tunnels and stations of New York's subways.
But Chillrud says its too early to be worried.
TAPE: (Chillrud) The levels are so much lower than the levels that are known to cause health impacts in industrial occupational settings that we really don't know whether these levels currently cause any health impacts or not.
NARRATION: While it may not be time for subway riders to head for the exit, what about the thousands of people who work in the subway, spending a good part of their lives underground? The New York City Transit Authority has called steel dust nuisance dust because it doesn't violate the rules of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, better known as OSHA.
But Doctor Frank Goldsmith, the Director of Occupational Health for the Transit Workers Union says that OSHA rules are based upon old data that isn't updated by federal medical standards. He points to steel dust as a perfect example.
TAPE: (GOLDSMITH) It's composed of manganese and chromium. Chromium is a carcinogen and manganese is a neuropathy problem … which can give you parkinson type outcomes.
NARRATION: Mike Samuelson is the Chairman of the Transit Workers Union Track Division and represents about two thousand workers.
TAPE: (SAMUELSON) I've worked all night in the subwy, came home took a shower and woke up with the sheets tinted with a kind of a puke brown color from the filth on the track. The steel dust is there. What damage it does to us in the long run is yet to be seen. It absolutely is not a healthy thing to wake up and (over the 8 hrs you were sleeping to) have this gook ooze out of your skin.
NARRATION: After the study was released, a spokeswoman for the New York City Transit said that the Authority would work on a future study to assure their employees and the public that steel dust is not a significant known health risk.
For Columbia News Radio, I'm John Boyle