"Environmental Health? We just saw a film clip about you," said the archivist in the University of Washington’s Library Special Collections Division. He unearthed two minutes of film, nearly 40 years old, titled "Arson." It showed the Environmental Health Laboratory assisting local fire marshals in determining whether a suspicious fire was deliberately set.

Although the equipment and research techniques have become vastly more sophisticated in the past 40 years, that mission refl ects what the laboratory still does today, said Dave Kalman, chair of our department and former lab director.

The old film showed lab staffer Robert Orheim using a gas chromatograph and a Hitachi magnetic sector mass spectrometer, which had the capacity to identify a single mass spectrum at a time. In contrast, Kalman said, a modern instrument collects several thousand spectra automatically, catalogs their masses and compares them with a library of nearly 100,000 reference spectra, all within minutes.

Crude as the 1970s analysis was, it could identify petroleum hydrocarbon residues (or "accelerants" in arson parlance). "The State Fire marshals didn’t have a lab so, whenever they suspected arson, they’d bring the samples and we’d see if there was any accelerant in the residue," recalls Senior Lecturer Emeritus Lee Monteith. "In one incident, when a family home burned, the only sample they could get was a teddy bear. The lab analyzed it and, sure enough, it contained gasoline vapors."

Monteith, who joined our department in the mid-1960s, remembers the early days. One milestone was an interdisciplinary study involving the US Forest Service and the UW departments of Forestry and Mechanical Engineering, aimed at reducing air pollution from forest slash burning.

Today, the EH Lab provides both analytical and consultation services for our department’s two other service units: the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic and the Field Research and Consultation Group (Field Group).

The lab is often asked to evaluate reaction byproducts from industrial processes and combustion products of workplace materials, said Lab Director Russell Dills. One unusual example was the examination of decades of old records from a company’s laboratory to evaluate the probability of benzene exposure.

The lab still has ties with fire departments. It regularly analyzes the canisters of air that firefi ghters breathe. Recently, the lab helped a fire department determine if a new fire-suppressant additive could harm firefi ghters.

The sampling was done during a practice drill that involved burning down a house. Dills and Marc Beaudreau of the Field Group built a multi-chemical sampler that firefi ghters took into a burning room. While the fi ery sampling was dramatic, the analysis was the standard industrial hygiene work the lab performs routinely.

—Kris Freeman contributed to this story

Lee Monteith won first prize at the holiday party science fair for his display of 1947-era sampling equipment. Photo by Karen Hanson.