Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Eleven people were hospitalized for breathing problems after an aging light ballast emitted smoke at P.S. 123 in Manhattan.
On Sept. 6, drops of an oily substance leaked from a light fixture on Staten Island and landed on a fifth grader seated for her first day of school. Last Friday, a light in Public School 170 in Brooklyn oozed a similar liquid onto floor tiles, forcing kindergartners to leave the class.
And on Tuesday, an antiquated light ballast emitted smoke into a classroom of middle-schoolers in Manhattan, sending nine students and two adults to a hospital with breathing difficulties and setting off an evacuation.
Regular episodes like these, as well as a federal lawsuit, are putting enormous pressure on the Bloomberg administration to speed up its process for replacing light fixtures containing the cancer-causing chemicals known as PCBs. The fight has pitted the city not only against an angry phalanx of parents, who are demanding the light fixtures be removed more quickly than the city has proposed, but also against the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has taken up the issue himself, placing personal phone calls to President Obama's chief of staff and the head of the E.P.A. to plead for more time.
But on Wednesday, city officials released a statement saying the city could complete the job "well before the previously announced timetable of 2021." Because of continuing mediation in the lawsuit, city officials said they could not elaborate.
Since September, officials in the E.P.A.'s New York office have tracked 48 cases of light ballasts emitting smoke or leaking a tarlike material into classrooms, according to officials and the Service Employees International Union, which represents school custodial workers.
The city has said that in virtually all of the cases, its "wipe-testing" of surfaces in the area showed PCB levels were either too low to be detected or below the E.P.A. cleanup standard, which is 10 micrograms per square centimeter. The E.P.A. and others have asked the city to also test the air. But air monitoring is not mandatory, and the city has not made it part of the protocol. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said that PCBs are "persistent in our environment," and that air testing could not definitively connect PCBs to a specific source.
But Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, said the city was afraid that if air tests came back positive for PCBs it would "put more and more pressure on them."
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are known carcinogens that have been linked to serious health problems including cancer, impaired immune and reproductive function, and lower I.Q. The long-term effects of exposure to elevated levels of PCBs in the air of school buildings is unclear. PCBs were used in lighting ballasts in many fixtures that were installed beginning in the 1950s.
In 1976, Congress banned a broad range of synthetic compounds known as PCBs.
Aging fixtures with leaking PCBs have also been detected in schools in several other states, including Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oregon.
Officials said that nearly 800 of the city's 1,400 school buildings could have PCB-containing lights. In 2011, the city agreed to replace those light fixtures within 10 years. That length of time, the city said, would allow it to more easily absorb the estimated cost, which has ranged from $700 million to nearly $850 million.
In March, Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of Federal District Court in Brooklyn declined the city's request to dismiss the lawsuit demanding a speedier replacement plan. "The court will not begrudge the city its right to zealous advocacy, but neither will the court abide the city's insouciant foot-dragging, which, in the end, is all that can be said for its position," the judge wrote. "With the cognitive development of children at stake, it would have been refreshing to see humanitarian concerns trump the compulsion to delay litigation with quite so many spurious arguments."
The school system has finished work at 92 buildings, Ms. Feinberg said. This summer, she said, at least 105 buildings are scheduled to have their lighting fixtures replaced, including P.S. 123, the site of Tuesday's incident.
Karmah Herring, 14, was in the classroom when the light started emitting a foul odor. "It smelled like feet and yogurt and nastiness," she said. She told her teacher about the smell and "he thought it was coming from outside."
"After my class left, smoke started coming out a lot," she said.
All those taken to hospitals with breathing troubles were released later Tuesday.
On April 11, another smoking ballast was reported at the school, but testing of surfaces in the affected room showed PCB levels were too low to detect. No air monitoring was done. The Department of Education said tests following Tuesday's incident would take two days.
The city's statement on Wednesday that it could speed up the replacement plan was in marked contrast to the arguments Mr. Bloomberg made in 2011 to William M. Daley, then President Obama's chief of staff, and Lisa P. Jackson, the recently departed E.P.A. administrator.
Ms. Jackson characterized the mayor as "a New Yorker; tough," but not unpleasant. Despite his pleas, she said, she refused to change her position that the city needed to move faster.
"Every time we got more information, it pointed in the direction that the threat was larger than we previously thought, not smaller," she said.
Randy Leonard contributed reporting.
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