SF Sheriff's Department training exercise that sickened San Bruno schoolchildren used old, possibly toxic munitions

There appears to be more to the story of noxious tear gas leaking from a building where an SF Sheriff's Department training exercise was taking place last week in San Bruno.

We learned last Wednesday that, a day earlier, 20 students and a teacher at Portola Elementary School in San Bruno experienced eye irritation and were made ill by tear gas that spread toward the school from neighboring SF County Jail #5 on Moreland Drive in St. Bruno.

A significant amount of noxious gas must have been used, as we now learn that the gas canisters were being emptied inside a building, and yet enough of the substances managed to escape to have traveled half a mile to reach. school and caused symptoms in 20 children. At least one child with asthma experienced a severe reaction, as KTVU reported last week.

As the Chronicle reports, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and San Mateo County Environmental Health Services are both currently investigating the incident. And the sheriff's department may still have some explaining to do about the substances used.

The newspaper discovered through an anonymous source that the training exercise, intended to test the effectiveness of the department's gas masks and riot gear against such chemical agents, also involved UC Berkeley campus police and UCSF. These officers “were asked to bring all chemical agents in the campus police inventory so they could be disposed of during the exercise,” as the Chronicle reports, and some of these gas canisters were allegedly been stored. since the 1960s.

The Sheriff's Department said only that the two substances used in the drill were CS gas (2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile), a common riot control agent that can cause respiratory symptoms; and OC gas (oleoresin capsicum), aka pepper spray. But no one can guess what formulations were in the 50-plus-year-old cartridges they were playing with, or what may have happened to the gases over time.

The Chronicle spoke with Emanuel Waddell, professor and chair of nanoengineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, who suggested that the chemical composition of the substances could have changed depending on how they were stored. And Waddell said: “They could become less toxic [over time]and there is a chance that they will become more toxic.

SF Sheriff Paul Miyamoto expressed some slight regret about the situation and, when interviewed by the Chronicle, said of the old gas canisters: “Obviously, we're always concerned that there's some something expired or out of service, as to how we dispose of it. ” He added: “That's part of what we're going to look at as part of our review, to make sure this doesn't happen again.”

Previously: SF Sheriff's Drill Involving Pepper Spray Makes Elementary Students Sick

Top image: A US-made CS gas canister used by Haitian police to disperse protesters in Haiti on September 14, 2023. (Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images)