UPDATE, OCTOBER 5, 2006:
Venice Gondolier is reporting that the secret ingredient in Bob Rigby's proposed anti-red tide formula is bleach (story). Not so oddly, bleach is one of the things we guessed it might be in the article below, which was originally published in February of 2005. Bleach. Which has long been known to kill red tide anyway.

 

I'm locking my door and I'm not coming out
Ya know....

It's when thoughts like what's written below come to me that I realize that I must be cursed.

Still....

Anyway, here's a letter that I sent off to the Herald-Trib, which was published in their February 25 edition. It's not shiny and happy and I'll bet that there are going to be a lot of folks very angry with me for raising this issue. It references Laura Green's article "Red Tide's Conqueror?" in the February 23 edition of the Herald-Trib.

If I wasn't the most hated man in Venice before, what do you bet that I am now?

Laura Green's article in Wednesday's edition reports on experiments done at Venice High School using a mysterious anti-red-tide formula developed by local tinkerer Bob Rigby.

According to the article, local TV coverage and statements made to the Venice City Council, nobody but Rigby knows the makeup of the secret chemical formula, a formula tested in a public high school. The science teacher, school administrators and even the City Council, which helped fund the study, are totally ignorant as to what chemicals have been introduced into a high school classroom. What's even stranger? Nobody seems to have any objections to this secrecy.

I'm all for science and for kids being exposed to new learning experiences, and I don't mean to rain on a lot of parades here, but nobody even knows if it is a chemical formula for sure or a biological one. Or a radioactive one. This formula, for all that that the school system knows, could be anything from bleach to nitroglycerin to a live sample of the HIV virus. As ridiculous as that may sound, school officials can't deny knowledgeably that it isn't any of those things right now.

A good friend of mine is a retired school system administrator from New Jersey. His response when he read about the experiments? "I'd have suspended everyone involved and recommended firing them just to avoid the potential for lawsuits and bad press."

While I'm not suggesting that, still, it seems that there is a surprising amount of common sense missing from school officials who approved this and from city officials who funded it.

Another question: What the heck happened to the common sense of the journalists handling this story? Didn't it dawn on them to be asking the same questions I just raised?

John Patten, Venice

A little background
About eight months ago, I got wind of this. I spoke then with Rigby (who is actually a heck of a nice guy and is adamant that he is on to something here) along with the school principal, Candice Millington, the science teacher involved (I'm pretty sure I talked with him, but I'm recounting this from memory, so I may have skipped him) and a couple of folks up at Mote Marine. My concerns then were: why is a high school doing a blind research project with an unknown substance?

The folks at Mote wouldn't say anything on the record with any names attached to a quote, but off the record I did get a comment to the effect that this all sounded goofy and that they would look into it. One of Mote's concerns wasn't with the substance being tested but that kids might be playing around with the red tide organism without the proper protective gear (whatever that means -- I have no idea what protective gear you would need to handle samples of red tide). From the high school I was told that the project was on the skids and that they most likely would not be proceeding with the study for the very reasons that I raised issue with. I never did write the story on this, mainly because it would have been a story on something that wasn't going to happen.

Rigby, meanwhile, was adamant that the experiments would be completely safe, which is fine. Rigby, however, is not charged with the safety and welfare of children enrolled in a public school.

And so I forgot about the whole thing.

Then, at last Tuesday's council meeting, a big show was put on by rightfully proud students about all the work they had done. The kids apparently put their hearts and souls into this along with a hell of a lot of hours, and I in no way intend to try to demean them for that -- they have every right to be proud of their work.

It may be that these experiments are fine and dandy, I am not taking issue with that. What I am concerned with is that unknown chemicals can wind their way into the hands of high school kids while nobody within the school system can knowledgably say what the kids have been exposed to, all on the word of a local inventor and a public official. This is done all on the say so of Bob Rigby and on Mayor Dean Calamaras (who had helped push the project along on behalf of Rigby), two guys who themselves only have high school educations.

I've heard that the kids weren't directly exposed, that the teacher did all the handling of the chemicals. If it was exposed to the same air that the kids were exposed to, they were exposed. Moreover, it doesn't matter -- it still begs the question of why there were chemical or biological samples of an unknown makeup and with an unknown danger factor allowed onto the campus and into the classroom. While this probably will all turn out to be completely safe (hopefully, anyway), it all sets a very bad precedent and puts the school, and city hall as well, into an unknown liability risk.

I'm not saying that they should not have done the experiments. I'm saying they should not have done them as blind experiments. If Rigby had been willing to fully divulge the formula to faculty and parents, then fine. But since he didn't and wouldn't, that should have put the kibosh on bringing any samples of Rigby's mystery potion onto the campus, and there's no way the city should have financially backed the experiments under these conditions.

This, then, makes me wonder if Rigby's formula is no longer protected. Since it was studied in a governmental institution of lower learning and since city hall kicked out some bucks, is the formula and all notes gathered in the experiment now subject to public records laws? Does the public now have a legal right to know what was brought onto a public school campus? I'm thinking that keener minds than mine may end up asking those very questions.

Is red tide research important? Absolutely. Is Venice High School the appropriate place for the initial  blind research study for a for-profit product, a product whose designed purpose is to target and kill specific organisms? Probably not.

Now answer this question for yourself, and here's where I have a problem with all of this: if you or anyone else (student, teacher, visitor, whatever) were to go on to the campus of the high school with a bottle of an unknown substance and you refused to tell anyone what was in it, what do you think would be the school's and/or law enforcement's response?

Another question. Just suppose, for argument's sake, that one or more of these kids comes down with some bizarre but entirely coincidental ailment, serious or otherwise (it could even be an allergic reaction peculiar to just one kid). A parent starts getting nosy and wants to know what their kid has been exposed to. What are school officials supposed to say? How liable in a lawsuit is the school for allowing this? How liable is the city for funding it?

I have no answers to the above and maybe they are just silly questions. Then again, maybe they aren't.

On the upside, at least the kids weren't experimenting with asbestos. We reserve those experiments for city employees.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.