Hot on the tail of reports that industrial waste has been used in the construction of school running tracks in Beijing, come accusations by Shenzhen parents who say their children have been affected by paint fumes from a nearby construction site.
From the homepage of Songping Elementary School's website
Concerned parents have reported that in past months a heavy, acrid paint smell had occasionally hovered over Nanshan District's Songping Second Elementary School, causing young children to have nosebleeds, feel faint, suffer from rashes and display other adverse symptoms. Although the connection has yet to be confirmed, the work site has stopped the recent paint job and the local environmental bureau is investigating the incidents.
Mr. Li, the representative of the first grade parents’ committee at the school, told a reporter at SZ News that the majority of students who had reported symptoms were in the first grade.
One of the worst cases is a child who has suffered four or five nosebleeds since the beginning of the school year.
“I fear that it will have harmful effects towards the children’s growth.”
School medical records indicate that within the last two months, seven children have suffered nosebleeds.
Another parent, Ms. Li, also has a child in the first grade and recalled how last month her son began breaking out in a rash on certain areas of his body. Even after medical ointment was applied the rash did not go away.
At that time she wasn’t sure why this had happened, but she started hearing similar stories from other parents, told in the grade’s WeChat group. According to her, they complained about a strong paint smell that permeated the school, and more than 10 parents revealed that their children had suffered from nosebleeds, rashes, and other ailments.
The child’s grandmother confirmed that the paint smell was there, as she had smelled it herself when going to pick up the little boy from school. At that point, Ms. Li said, she realized that an environmental problem might have caused her son to break out.
Parents at the Songping Second Elementary School said they reported their concerns to the school on June 15 and that the school had said they were already negotiating with the construction site. However, on June 17, according to parents, the smell was still there.
The South side of the Songping School
According to spokesmen for the school, they immediately asked the construction site to stop after receiving complaints on the 15th, but the workers were slow to comply, only finishing on the 17th.
The school also said they had supplied each grade with products like activated carbon to safeguard air quality, and planned to do regular checks on the air within the school.
The reporter for SZ News heard a slightly different story from a representative of the construction site, who insisted that although the paint smell in the school did indeed come from them, they had ceased all painting work immediately after being contacted by the school.
The site’s safety officer Mr. Peng explained that the workers had been dipping pieces of mesh in vats of paint in order to prevent them from rusting: “…we didn’t think that the paint smell would be so strong as to make parents and the school unhappy.”
After they received complaints on the 15th, they immediately stopped the painting work and transported the painted mesh away from the site.
The Nanshan Environmental Protection Bureau reported that they had received at least one complaint late at night on the 17th and had assigned two law enforcement officers to visit the construction site as soon as possible. Once there, the officers did not smell any paint, nor did they witness any painting going on.
The leader of the Nanshan bureau recently inspected water treatment in the area.
Besides this, the Shenzhen Environmental Monitoring Center Station paid a visit to the elementary school on June 17 in order to check air quality. Results showed that levels of benzene, toluene, xylene, formaldehyde and other common harmful substances within the school fell within safety limits.
Benzene, a particularly harmful substance, showed up at level well below what is considered the safety threshold. All in all, the station concluded, the air in the school was not harmful to the human body.
Of course, that doesn’t rule out any harm before the 17th, when the paint fumes from ongoing jobs could have affected kids. The city’s second-level environmental bureau is still looking into the details of the incident.
[Images via Songping Elementary School, Baidu Maps, Nanshan Environmental Protection Bureau]
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