Investigators from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department and ORION Environmental Services of Federal Way have given Reed Elementary School a clean bill of health Saturday following a joint inspection of the facility Friday evening.
Classes and other school activities will resume Monday, April 19 on their regular schedule.
Reed Elementary School was evacuated twice on Thursday, April 15, due to a mysterious odor that was causing headaches, nausea and coughing among students and staff members. Approximately 25 students and staff members were checked by Tacoma Fire Department paramedics at a triage area set up in the school parking lot. Nine students were transported to Mary Bridge Hospital in Tacoma and two were transported to St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood as a precautionary measure. All students were treated and released later in the day.
After the first reports of a gas-like odor were reported about 10 a.m., the Tacoma Fire Department arrived and instructed the staff to evacuate the building. Staff members reported the odor smelled the strongest outside the building.
Puget Sound Energy checked the entire building and found no natural gas source of the smell. Students and staff were readmitted to the building. When district officials were meeting with the fire department battalion chief during the lunch period, the chief and several others noticed a metallic taste in their mouths. The school was evacuated again as a precaution and students were kept outside until the end of school. No one reported any illnesses related to the second incident. District staff members checked all utility systems in the school but found nothing that would indicate the odor originated from inside the school.
As a precaution, the district cancelled Friday classes at Reed, District crews checked the school twice late Thursday night and again Friday morning and did not detect any recurrence of the odor.
In a written report delivered to the district Saturday, Donna McNeal, an industrial hygienist with ORION, confirmed the earlier district investigation that the odor most likely originated from a source outside the school.
“…I have come to the following conclusions,” McNeal wrote in her report. “There is no apparent reason not to resume classes at Reed Elementary School on Monday morning. My opinion is based on the following. At no time were dangerous or even detectable levels of hazardous materials in the air identified at the school. It appears that there may have been detectable levels of some air borne chemical outside the school the morning of the 15th. After extensive investigation by the district and four outside agencies there is no evidence that the chemicals that caused the odor were generated in the building or by activity on the school grounds.
“An exterior event could have caused the odor. Some of the possibilities include, bleeding of a residential gas tank in the area, events on the I-5, events at the nearby construction sites or events from the air traffic in the area. Isolated events as these could release volatile organic compounds into the air in concentrations high enough to be detected by the human nose. It would be very difficult if not impossible to identify the source of such an event after the fact as these chemicals are extremely transient, especially in the current scenario which is a one time event.”
In addition, Tim Hardin, a Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department investigator who inspected Reed Elementary, wrote in an email to the district: “I agree that at this time it appears that the event that occurred on Thursday was both transient in nature and generated from outside of the building.”
Click here to read the full report from ORION Environmental Services.
Click here to read the full email from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.