Dangerous Playgrounds
By: Whitney Ray
Updated: November 15, 2007
A dangerous discovery forced a local school district to make some playground equipment off limits. At Southside and Northside Elementary Schools in Siloam Springs, wooden playground equipment was treated with a substance containing arsenic. School officials ran test on the equipment after they heard the substance was banned. Of the four tests conducted three came back positive for the poison. Ingesting arsenic in small amounts can cause lung and blather cancer in about one in 10,000 children, but even with odds like that school officials didnt want to gamble. Some of the equipment will be destroyed and school officials are still looking at ways to save some of it.
