By Angela Marshall
Office workers evacuated, 2 taken to hospital
An office building at 371 Merrick Road was evacuated on Feb. 12 after an unidentified odor made several people ill. According to the Rockville Centre Fire Department, two people were taken to a local hospital and later released.
Problems in the office building, which houses several professional and medical businesses, are not new. Workers say they have been reporting the smell, which resembles rotten eggs or sulfur, intermittently for about two years, and a spokesperson for the fire department said they are called to the building every couple of months.
In the days following the evacuation, several employees said they often suffer from headaches, nausea and sometimes vomiting. I'm very upset about this, said Sue, a medical worker, who declined to give her last name.
She left the building Feb. 12 with chest pains and trouble breathing. No matter what we do, it doesn't get resolved, she said.
The people at Gilman Management, who oversee the building, know how she feels. A man identifying himself only as Mr. Gilman said that the company has paid close to $80,000 trying to figure out the cause of the odor and how to get rid of it. So far, we have not been successful in stemming it.
Gilman said he recently hired a third environmentalist to look at the problem. And though Gilman declined to share what environmentalist Ken Burns theorizes is the problem, he did say it is the first theory he has heard that appears to have some merit. Testing it, he said, will cost another $15,000, and they would know by next week if Burns was correct.
Gilman said that none of numerous tests conducted on the building have shown any dangerous levels of toxicity.
This was confirmed by Cynthia Brown, a spokesperson for the Nassau County Health Department, who said they have been receiving calls about the smell since July 1999. Everybody is working very hard to locate the source and correct it, she said.
One current theory, according to Brown, is that the problem might be associated with the plumbing system.
This comes as little comfort to people who work in the building. Sue said she does not plan to return until she is told once and for all that the building is safe. She is particularly nervous, she said, because one of her children was born with a stomach problem that doctors believe was caused by chemical exposure when she was pregnant. That exposure happened years ago in a different state, but it still makes her nervous about the possibilities.
Sue said she returned to the building on previous occasions despite her fears because as a single mother she needed the job and because she loves her work. However, after the recent evacuation, she decided she no longer wanted to risk her health. I absolutely love the people that I work with, she said. I just want an okay that it's safe to work there.
The Herald spoke with many other workers who experienced headaches and other symptoms, but because they were afraid for their jobs and the health of their companies, most would not talk on the record.
