Miami Hurricane, November 14, 1980

              Two Movies Make Florida Premieres	The 'Canes Will Be Heading
At The Campus Beaumont Cinema	Down South To IMOshvilfe
— In ENTERTAINMENT Page 6	— In SPORTS Page 8
Students Fear Asbestos In Ceilings
By MARTHA MARTIN
News Writer
Within the past few weeks, architecture students have become concerned with the asbestos fibers falling from the ceilings of the engineering and architecture building.
The intake of asbestos fibers has been found to cause cancer up to 30 years after the fibers are inhaled.
President Henry King Stanford has set up a committee to evaluate the hazards to the students and faculty, and to find ways of resolving the problem.
According to Dr. Eugene Eckstein, associate professor of biochemical engineering, and a member of the Committee to Study Asbestos in Ceilings, there are four solutions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognizes concerning asbestos in schools.
"Asbestos could be encapsulated, enclosed, removed, or monitored so no one would vandalize the ceilings, which would cause the fibers to fall more freely, some even in chunks,” Eckstein said. “The general consensus of the committee is that if we can get the money, the best method is to remove it |the asbestos|.”
The cost of removing the material has been estimated at $500,000. Eckstein sees this as the biggest problem. “In the process of evaluating the hazards, the committee gives ideas, then the president's office tries to get them the money,” he said.
"I'm pleased that the cabinet is going to consider it |a plan to deal with the asbestos problem |, because the president's cabinet is the body with the most financial control. I think this is moving up the priority list."
Eckstein feels the reason nothing has been done in the past about the asbestos problem is because the samplings of air taken by representatives of the Aetna Corporation have been determined to be harmless. He does not think the tests are relevant in judging the hazard.
"EPA says our sampling method is not the correct way to measure asbestos," Eckstein said.
The last air sample was taken in September of this year, and according to Oliver Bonnert, vice president for Business Affairs, and chairman of the asbestos committee, the tests concluded that the air in the engineering and architecture building contained .03 percent of asbestos fibers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration maintains that asbestos content in air should not exceed .5 percent.
Two years ago, asbestos was
found on the ceilings of the Maho-ney-Pearson complex. The dorms were renovated at a cost of approximately $400,000 to $500,000. But air samples taken after the renovation seem to confirm Eckstein’s doubts as to the efficiency of air samples in testing for asbestos content.
"When the air was tested after the reparations on Mahoney-Pear-son, the sample showed the same percent of asbestos fibers as in the engineering building — .03 percent," Bonnert said.
But according to Eckstein, there is no single prescribed procedure that can tell whether or not asbestos is hazardous.
Architecture students who spend up to 12 hours a day working in building, and others who even sleep there, have strong feelings about the cancer-causing material.
"As long as I wake up and find this white film all over me, I’m gonna be worried," said Ed Ihejiri-ka, an architecture student.
The white film Ihejirika referred to sprinkles upon the students during the night.
Eckstein does not believe that what collects on the students’ arms and faces is asbestos. "There's a possibility that there is a film of asbestos but I doubt it. It could be a number of things, like dust,” he said.
"I’m a commuter, but I spend enough time here to worry about the asbestos in the air,” said Sonia Chao, an architecture student. "They should come and sleep here one night and see how this junk is falling.”
The University may be facing difficulties if it does not remedy the
asbestos situation. A student who wished to remain anonymous said, "If they don't do anything by next semester, my parents and I will seriously think about suing the school."
A faculty member who chose to remain anonymous said, "The amount of money sustained in damages from lawsuits would be greater than the cost of fixing it."
Chao said, "They figure if they pretend the problem's not there, the problem won't affect them. But that's not the solution."
“If they keep ignoring it, eventually they're gonna pay more to remove it," Ihejiriko said.
The Committee to Study Asbestos in Ceilings will present its ideas to the president's cabinet today in hopes of resolving the problem.
Demolition Of Shacks Is First Phase Of Plan
By SHARON HINSON
News Writer
A demolition company is scheduled to "clean up and clean out" the fire-gutted remnants of the shacks behind the Memorial Building on Nov. 28, according to Oliver Bonnert, vice president for Business Affairs.
The Campus Beautification Committee and the L.ong Range Planning Committee decided not to replace the shacks with a parking lot, said Bonnert. Instead, the space will be saved as a green area and as a possible location for future buildings.
Another building. Physics Building II, is also scheduled for demolition on Nov. 28, Bonnert said. It was not burned down because some faculty members feared that experiments conducted in nearby buildings might be affected by the smoke and heat.
“Eventually, the plan is to demolish all the wooden buildings |on campus|," Bonnert said.
Bonnert noted that the wooden buildings were deteriorating, rendering them almost uninhabitable. "It was not economically feasible for the University to repair these buildings," he said.
Starting the week of Oct. 17 and on the two succeeding weekends, temporary buildings 41 and 44 (the shacks) served as fire practice for the Coral Gables Fire Department, Bonnert said.
This is part of a schedule UM Is following. "What we've done in our planning guide is to identify the space needs for the next 10 years for the University, taking into account that the projected entering freshman classes show a decline of 2 percent in the next five years," he explained.
Part of UM’s schedule includes the demolition by 1984 of 13 buildings built between 1946 and 1948, Bonnert said.
However, before a building can be torn down, the University must create additional office or classroom space, he said. The completion of the building for the School of Business Administration provided the additional space which allowed the demolition of some of the buildings.
According to Armando Rodriguez, speaker of the Undergraduate Student Body Government (USBG) Senate, some student organizations were displaced from the shacks.
“It's impossible,” he said, “for all the clubs to meet in the Student Union. I thought it would be a pretty good idea to give them |the shacks!t0 those clubs that wanted them.”
Bonnert said that, to the best of his knowledge, all the clubs have been relocated.
Rodriguez said he plans to try to determine which building was the first one on campus and to put up a plaque by it. He said that one of the wooden shacks might have been that building.
According to Bonnert, the first UM buildings were not even built on this location. They were on University Drive and Riviera Drive — the site of what was known as the cardboard college, he said.
The campus was located at that site until 1946, when the Merrick Building was completed. A year later, construction of the Memorial Classroom Building was completed, lk>nnerl£aid.
The Merrick Building was actually started in 1926, but a major hurricane that year, although it left the uncompleted building still stunding, swept the funds away, Bonnert said.
In 1946, the first "temporary" buildings were also constructed.
"These 'shacks,'as they are affectionately called, were brought down from Palm Beach, from an army or air force base," he said.
In the coming years, there are plans to have "an increase in student quality, programs and facilities," Bonnert said. One of the facilities UM hopes to complete is a communications building.
Other buildings that Bonnert said the University hopes to build include a behavioral medicine building and a University park complex. This complex, he said, will be built after six residence apartments (numbers 24-29) are demolished in the future.
Serving as an entrance to UM.the complex will be located across from the Metrorail University station. It will possibly include faculty and student apartments, an underground parking garage, and retail space for stores, Bonnert said.
These plans are still some years from completion, but the University is moving toward its goals. Bonnert said.
The next step is the planned demolition of temporary buildings 61 and 82 in 1981.
Miami Hurricane RICK VEINGRAD
. . . the sfutre will he sorer/ os o green orco
Loan Welchers Will Not Graduate
By WENDELL GAERTNER
News Writer
The Undergraduate Student Body Government (USBG) Loan Agency will not re-open this semester because of difficulties in collecting debts owed to it, according to Bill Mullowney, director of the Student Loan Agency and USBG treasurer.
The loans, which began in the spring of 1977, provided $30 short-term loans with no interest, if the loans were repaid within three weeks. After that, a $1 per week service charge was assessed. The loans were designed to provide emergency money for students.
According to Mullowney, the loans are funded from an allotment of ap-
proximately $2,000 from the Student Activity Fee Allocation Committee (SAFAC). Mullowney stressed that when that money is lent, no more loans can be made until the current loans are collected.
About 75 students have not repaid loans, forcing the Agency to close. Mullowney said that he sent a letter to those students this summer but only “four or five replied.”
Because a legal contract was signed when the money was borrowed, the Agency has hired a lawyer to collect the loans. Mullowney also said that Dean of Students William Sheeder will withhold permits to register, transcripts, and diplomas of those students. The possibility of such actions was stat-
ed in the contracts, but these actions had not been taken until now, according to Mullowney.
Some of the un-repaid loans go back to the beginning of the program; the administrative charges on these have run into the hundreds of dollars. Mullowney said that the Agency will only collect $60 from each of the students who have not paid, and that most of this money will go to cover legal expenses.
Mullowney expects loans to be available about two weeks into next semester. "It will be tougher next year not to pay the loans back," Mullowney said.
Mullowney stressed that this is a very worthwhile program, and that, most of the students who took part in it repaid the loans without any problems.
By ANA M. LOPEZ
News Writer
Authorities on the volatile issue of nuclear energy debated its pros and cons Wednesday, Nov. 11, at the “Rock” by the Student Union. The debate was sponsored by Lecture Series.
Taking the stand in favor of nuclear energy was Pete Morris, a Westinghouse Corporation nuclear engineer sent to represent a program sponsored by the corporation. The program, “Westinghouse Campus America," provides speakers to debate on behalf of nuclear energy. The only requirement was that the University
Miami Murntana/GAYLE WALD
Morris
had to provide the opponent.
Morris' opponent was Martin Hodder, a prominent environmental and public interest lawyer who has been involved in anti-nuclear legislation.
Before the debate, a press conference was held for the campus media in the Student Union. When each debater was asked what had prompted him to take the position he was defending, a heated argument ensued, as each man tried to discredit the other.
One major point of disagreement was the safety of the nuclear reactor’s field cycle of nuclear waste. Hodder said these wastes could easily leak, as had happened in Washington in 1972. and that the radiation level could pass a certain threshold level that would cause a nuclear chain reaction.
Morris argued that this was a physical impossibility. He offered two points to support his statement. First, most of the nuclear waste comes from nuclear warfare experimentation and not from reactors, he said. Second, he maintained that the possibility for leakage is minimal because nuclear wastes are usually disposed of in a solid form.
During this period, Jacques Moritz, who was to mediate the following debate, had to call more than once for debating courtesy between the opponents.
In the formal debate, each speaker was given 12 minutes to introduce himself and present his stand. A 20-minute question-and-answer period followed. Finally, each speaker had five minutes to present his closing arguments.
Morris opened the session by stating, "We have to get something straight here. The crisis we have to face is a shortage of oil and gas, not a general energy crisis, as it is often referred to."
He said that in Florida alone. 42 million barrels of oil are burned to generate electricity, at a cost of $1.3 billion to consumers. Morris noted that none of this money is being pumped back into the state’s economy. "Most of it is going to the oil-exporting countries such as Venezuela,” he said.
Morris admitted that nuclear energy is not the final answer. He maintained that Americans should make a collective effort to make more use of public transit systems and to further develop the possiblities offered by solar energy. Solar energy, however, is not going to
prove to be a practical alternative in all parts of the country, he said.
Morris was quick to note that while the price of building nuclear reactors carries a $235 million price tag, they have saved consumers $1 billion in fuel costs during the past eight years.
One critical point of controversy in the nuclear energy issue is the health risk of reactors.
Morris stated that the total health risks of the use of nuclear power equals the total health risks of use of electricity powered by coal. "This is because of the high level of pollution which energy from coal creates," he said, citing the National Academy of Science and the American Physical Society as his sources.
He concluded his presentation by saying that the worst thing the American public can do is to stop diversifying its energy resources. The result would be that the U.S. would not be able to free itself from dependence on foreign oil. he said.
Hodder began his presentation by criticizing West-inghouse Corporation for only being interested in the profit-making aspects of nuclear energy. He maintained that the company ignores the dangerous health hazards nuclear power represents. He told the audience, "I need your help. Earth needs your help. We all need your help.”
Hodder described what can be caused by the leakage of nuclear wastes. The process itself is not an explosion in the general sense of the word, he said: instead, it is an explosion of steam from which the resulting radiation could equal the amount of radiation that was released when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
He continued by saying that such information was often concealed from the American people, particularly during the Eisenhower administration, and he praised the effort being made in recent years to expose the actual dangers of nuclear energy.
He also added, in rebuttal to Morris' statement about saving the consumer money, that nuclear reactors are very expensive to build, and even more expensive to maintain Many nuclear reactors are in dire need of repair, and the costs of repairs could run much higher than initial building costs — approximately $500 million.
Hodder concluded his talk by saying that the big corporations were "not concerned about humanity, but
only concerned about making a profit.”
The debate was followed by a question-and-answer period, in which each opponent had a chance to respond to each question.
One question asked was whether we can reach independence from Arab oil without nuclear energy.
Morris said, "One point seven million barrels of oil could be eliminated, or about $20 billion. It would greatly reduce our dependence on Arab oil, especially crucial now with the tensions in the Persian Gulf."
“The issue here isn’t economics; it's the immense danger present with the use of nuclear reactors.” responded Hodder. "We have many other undeveloped sources of energy available."
Morris ended by saying that the real issue is solving the shortage of energy. Hodder concluded that we cannot afford to take the risk of an accident.