But she had seen the first victim with her own eyes. It was her understanding that there had been a gas leak of some kind. The secretary gave us all the information she had. A cafetorium is a room that doubles as an auditorium and a cafeteria.
On the left were the teachers’ lounge, the cafetorium, and the kitchen. The offices, the clinic, and the library were on the right-hand side. The other school facilities were off the entrance hall. The entrance hall ran back to a cross corridor that led to the classrooms. The building was standard design for contemporary Florida schools. Enriquez and I talked for a moment at the entrance to the building. She was the person nominally in charge, but you couldn’t say she was in control. We asked around and were finally directed to the head secretary. It turned out that the school principal was away somewhere at a meeting. Enriquez and I cut through the mob, looking for someone in charge. I had got the impression that most of the school had been stricken by whatever the trouble was. There were a lot of them-several hundred, it looked like. They had been marched out of the building in fire-drill formation and were lined up quietly in the shade of some trees at the far end of the school grounds. The school had called the fire department, and the fire department had called the rescue squad-and the media all monitor the fire department’s radio frequency. But the explanation, it turned out, was simple enough. I had never seen anything like it, and I had to wonder how come. And neighbors and passersby and parents all rushing around. Television cameras from four local stations.
#TELLS OF HISTERA FULL#
We had to park half a block away, because the school parking lot was full of trucks and vans and cars of all kinds-all parked every which way. And I remember my first sight of the school. “Warm, anyway-warm enough to make me think that the ‘poison gas’ at the school might have something to do with the air-conditioning system. “I remember it was hot,” he told me, standing at his office window and gazing down through the palm trees in his memory at the bare maples and last night’s foot of new snow. His recollection was undimmed, indelible. He has moved up, both professionally and geographically, to Rochester, New York, where he now serves as director of the Monroe County Department of Health, and it was there, on a winter day, that I talked with him about the summons to the Bay Harbor Elementary School. Nitzkin is no longer associated with the Dade County Department of Public Health. His coffee cooled on his desk, untasted and forgotten.ĭr. He was out of his office in two easy, five-foot strides.
DiSalvo, he was already on his way to the school. Enriquez to meet him at once at his car as for Mr. The other was to a staff physician named Myriam Enriquez, in the Disease Control Section.
One was to an industrial hygienist named Carl DiSalvo, in the Division of Environmental Health. He thanked her and hung up-and then picked up the phone again. And I think I’d better drive out to the school and take a look myself.” Many of the children were ill, and some had been taken to a neighborhood hospital by the rescue squad of the municipal fire department. There had been a pipe break or a leak of some kind, Miss Sonderegger had been told, and the school was engulfed in a pall of poison gas. Miss Sonderegger was calling to report that her Miami Beach unit had just received a call for help-for the services of a team of public-health nurses-from the Bay Harbor Elementary School. He put down his coffee and picked up the phone and heard the voice of a colleague, Martha Sonderegger, the department’s assistant nursing director. It was around half past ten on a sunny Monday morning in May-May 13, 1974. Nitzkin, chief of the Office of Consumer Protection, a section of the Dade County, Florida, Department of Public Health, sat crouched (he is six feet nine) at his desk in the Civic Center complex in downtown Miami, stirring a mug of coffee that his secretary had just brought in.
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