A Richmond high school will open on time Tuesday because tests found no poison in its classroom air. What the same tests can't fix is the ground the whole city stands on — laced with a dry-cleaning carcinogen at site after site the state admits it lacks the money to clean up.

The chemical that closed John F. Kennedy High for two weeks didn't start there, and a clean bill for one campus doesn't make it go away. Tetrachloroethylene — PCE — is the inheritance of a dry-cleaning trade that ran across Richmond for fifty years. The plume suspected under Kennedy is one thread in a web of contamination the state is still tracing, and every site in that web raises the same unanswered question: who pays, and what happens when the polluter is long gone.

At a town hall on Aug. 13, Dr. Gina Solomon — a UCSF physician who chairs occupational, environmental and climate medicine and has volunteered as an adviser to the district — told Richmond parents she was "extremely confident that the school is safe." Indoor sampling at Kennedy High turned up no vapor migrating from the soil into classrooms, and the campus will open Tuesday on schedule — an outcome that was in genuine doubt two weeks earlier, KQED reported. PCE had appeared in five of six vapor samples pulled from roughly five feet beneath the east edge of campus in late July. DTSC geologist Marikka Hughes said the data showed no pathway for the solvent to rise out of the ground and into occupied rooms.

Teachers cheered the result. It answers the narrowest question and leaves the wider one open. The dirt under Kennedy is thought to link to a larger PCE plume beneath the Miraflores senior housing development half a mile off — and Miraflores is only one of the sites the state has spent years chasing.

Across Richmond, DTSC is working five active PCE sources, with a sixth in neighboring San Pablo, all part of a statewide "Round I" sweep of 112 dry cleaners, Richmondside reported (external source, opens in a new tab). A subsequent look at the state's Envirostor database counted seven dry-cleaning sources at the investigation or cleanup stage in the Richmond area. One, the shuttered Dana Cleaners at 429 S. 34th St., sits about seven-tenths of a mile from Kennedy. Two of the seven are somehow still in business.

Where enforcement has landed, it has landed lightly. Omo's Fabricare Dry Cleaners ran on San Pablo Avenue from 1959 to 2015; this March, the lot's owner and three people who once operated the shop settled with DTSC for a combined $100,800 after missing a 2023 order to investigate and clean the site, the Grandview Independent reported (external source, opens in a new tab). By the state's own reckoning, PCE from that tenth-of-an-acre parcel had already crept 250 feet through groundwater — with traces logged more than 1,000 feet away — and had seeped into crawl spaces and indoor air at buildings nearby. The settlement, DTSC Director Katherine Butler said, showed the agency's "commitment to holding responsible parties accountable."

That commitment collides with arithmetic. Council member Sue Wilson, passing along a DTSC briefing to constituents, said the state is handling about 700 PCE cases and expects the number to climb toward 10,000. A 2021 state fund of $500 million for pollution cleanup in disadvantaged communities set aside $152 million for PCE — a sum, Wilson wrote, that isn't "expected to come close." Make-polluters-pay works poorly, she added, when the polluters are small businesses that shut their doors decades ago. Some parcels have no one to bill at all: the Macdonald San Pablo Wall site near Kennedy is what the state labels an "orphan," contaminated ground with no known responsible party.

Wilson said she wants to test whether the city can sue the manufacturers of the solvent itself. "I want them to pay to clean it up," she wrote (external source, opens in a new tab).

The settlement, DTSC Director Katherine Butler said, showed the agency's "commitment to holding responsible parties accountable."

The burden isn't spread evenly. On the state's revised CalEnviroScreen map, most of Richmond ranks at or above the 90th percentile for hazardous cleanup sites, and those sites concentrate in poorer neighborhoods with more residents of color. Kennedy High passed. The city around it is still waiting to hear who covers the rest.