A SORDID SACRAMENTO STORY

As car and house owners know, a new installation has more flaws than one that has had time to be "de-bugged" or broken in; it is not a paradox, but a regular tenet of reliability theory that brand-new equipment is unreliable.

If not only the piece of equipment, but the entire technology is new, the effect of the initial problems is, of course, far more pronounced, and this goes both for nuclear plants and energy efficient buildings (though the latter, being less complicated and not really new in principle, would be expected to have fewer problems). However, we will not attempt to disguise our glee when something went radically wrong in a super-energy efficient government building in Jerry Medfly's Sacramento, nor our resentment that one aspect of the affair received no publicity.

With taxpayer-financed lavishness, the $20 million Gregory Bateson State Office Building in Sacramento was designed with solar collectors, a night venting system, a rockbed storage mass to conserve "coolth," a network of trellises and awnings, all controlled, naturally, by the latest computer technology.

Soon after the employees moved into this Palazzo d'Amory, they began to complain of headaches, dizziness, respiratory problems, additional nausea (additional to having Jerry as boss), hair loss, rashes, and other ailments; the California State Employee Association claimed that as many as 150 out of 1,224 employees were ill on any one day. Such morsels of truth have a way of inspiring additional fears, and when two employees died (off the premises, of unrelated causes), the deaths were rumored to be attributable to the mysterious toxins in the building.

The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal-OSHA) was then called in and on four days last April set up stations for environmental monitoring ("as defined in T8CAC 3204"). Their report of May 13 and 14 (kindly made available by a reader) found highly unmysterious causes that most people could have guessed at even without T89CAC 3204, mainly lack of ventilation and failure to instruct the occupants how to work the numerous gadgets of Lovinsian "frugal but elegant living."

There were formaldehyde emanations from preservatives in fabrics on room dividers, detectable by odor, but well below the level allowed by regulations; slightly elevated levels of carbohydrates, including traces of benzopyrene (a carcinogen, probably from the automobile exhausts of street traffic in the area), slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide, bad lighting in places, and the volume of fresh air in several parts of the building fell below the minimum standard of 5 cfm (cubic feet per minute) per person; on the 2^nd floor West, the cfm's were negative, that is, the fans brought in a little of the fellow employee's body odors. A rumor mill probably started (we would guess on reading the report) and multiplied the genuine complaints.

These complaints are easy enough to cure: Let the electrical ventilation system work (as behooves an energy conservation project) for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week; and give the employees a little instruction not to touch dividers or anything else (as behooves a frugal, yet elegant lifestyle). Both are among the recommendations of the report, and with one exception to be reported in a moment, our feeling is that all the data on formaldehyde and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons might better be conveyed in simpler English as stink, stuffiness and stupidity.

[More: The Cal-OSHA report is neither extraordinarily interesting nor easily available, but this seems a good place to recommend a useful (if sloppily bound) document: Cooling and Heating Load Calculation Manual prepared by ASHRAE (Amer. Soc. for Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers), $7 from Govt. Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402, stock no. 008-070-00459-3.]