Leading off today: There's nearly as much glass as grass showing up on one of the practice fields at Edison Tech in Rochester, and there are fears that the dangerous development is just the start of problems related to building the facility atop a former landfill.
Toxicity tests have revealed no hazardous materials, school district officials reported Thursday, but the investigation is continuing. An independent lab has tested for a number of hazards including organic compounds, metals and PCBs and found no problems.
"The health of our students was foremost in our minds, and the results show that the soil does not pose a health hazard," interim district Superintedndent William Cala told the Democrat and Chronicle.
District officials said school staff did a sweep of the practice field recently to remove pieces of glass but more appeared after a heavy rain several days later. That raises the possibilty that the cap of the landfill, which was closed in the early 1970s, has ruptured.
Speaking of scares: Two Queens councilmen criticized the NYC Education Department for failing to reveal that Information Technology H.S. in Long Island City sits atop a toxic chemical plume.
Councilmen James Gennaro and Eric Gioia said the city never told the public that the four-year-old school occupies a former metal-plating warehouse contaminated with lead and petrochemicals, the New York Daily News reported.
The city was able to withhold the information by leasing the property for $1.5 million a year, they said. A public review would have been required had the school been built on city-owned land.
A cleanup of the property included installation of a system to vent harmful compounds from the subterranean plume before they could enter the building, but the councilmen contend the fix may worsen the problem by also capturing toxins from adjacent sites.
Watch those knees, please: The Democrat and Chronicle, which has done several thorough stories on the subject in recent years, reported again Thursday on knee injuries in female athletes.
The paper says about 1,200 female athletes playing soccer, volleyball and basketball at 24 high schools in Monroe County are learning how to prevent noncontact ACL tears through a two-year, $101,295 grant from Greater Rochester Health Foundation.
Trainers will visit each team three times this year. Teams are expected to do the 20- to 25-minute stretching routine three to four times a week as a strategy to reduce injuries.
More than 1.4 million U.S. females have had ACL tears in the past 10 years, twice the rate of the previous decade, according to Andy Duncan, physical therapist and director of sports rehabilitation at University Sports Medicine in Rochester. An estimated 30,000 high school and college-age females suffer the injury each year.
Each ACL injury can cost $17,000 for surgical repair and rehabilitation, the story noted.
Harrier highlights: Dyestat.com's weekly regional rankings of top cross country teams have started. Queensbury, Shenendehowa and Smithtown lead the boys list; Fayetteville-Manlius, Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake and Saratoga lead the girls.
New York is a region unto itself in the weekly rankings to conform to the way Nike Team Natonals is now set up.
The Post-Standard did a follow-up this week on F-M's quirky disqualification over the weekend. I've seen and heard comments from several observers around the state reacting to the DQ for doing strideouts too close to the start of the race. All I can say is that the
