At 3 pm, 19 call centre employees fell victim to headaches, vomiting and eye irritations. A safety perimeter was set up and over 60 fire-fighters were dispatched to the site; all 127 employees present at the time were evacuated and the victims received medical exams. The air conditioning/heating and ventilation system was shut down.
The next morning, 19 other employees were intoxicated while waiting on the call centre parking lot, as were 42 middle school children at a nearby institution. All victims were examined and then released. The firm was closed. Emergency crews measured carbon monoxide, chlorine, hydrogen sulphide and hydrocarbon levels, all of which proved to be normal. A laboratory specialised in atmospheric measurements conducted analyses inside the buildings, on the outside and in the pipelines. An elected official, the Deputy Prefect and the Health Department of the Classified Facilities Inspectorate visited the site. The operator commissioned a detailed verification of its installations, concentrating on the refrigerant fluid of the air conditioning system, without providing any conclusive results.
On 18th November at 5:50 pm, 2 employees experienced the same symptoms; 1 of them had not worked on either the Thursday or Friday, which were the days of the previous alerts.
The company’s site comprised 2 buildings, the first dating from 1999 while the second was a former warehouse remodelled in 2005; out of the total workforce of 350, 85% were women and the overall state of health among employees was considered to be good.
Following a previous intoxication incident in January 2008 (ARIA no. 34152) whose cause had been ascribed to carbon monoxide, sensors were installed on the industrial zone, inside the call centre and at the middle school, yet these sensors did not detect any presence of CO. The hypothesis of intoxication by carbon monoxide was thus dismissed.
The hypothesis of building the call centre on the site of a former dump was also rejected, as the former dump was in fact located several hundreds of metres away.
The Classified Facilities Inspectorate did not observe any anomalies inside any of the facilities in the vicinity of the call centre.
An interregional epidemiological unit performed an investigation based on the analysis of victim witness accounts. After this study, the unit noted a lack of correlation between the symptoms presented by the centre’s staff and the schoolchildren who fell ill; on the other hand, such a correlation could be established between the symptoms observed during the January intoxication episode. According to the epidemiologist experts, these disorders would be due to the “unhealthy building” syndrome, which encompasses multiple factors relative to, among other things, the socio-psycho-professional setting, the work environment, the climate, abrupt temperature changes and stress.
