It happened to Stanford. It happened to Yale. And the University's environmental regulation administrators want to make sure it doesn't happen to Harvard.

In the aftermath of fines levied on Stanford and Yale last year for violations in the storage and disposal of hazardous waste, Harvard must deal with the warning signs that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on college laboratories.

According to Thomas E. Vautin, associate vice president for Facilities and Environmental Services, the fines have put Harvard on notice that it, too, will have to tighten controls over chemicals and other toxins from research laboratories or face similar penalties.

And the fines, compared with campus precedents, are stiff. Stanford will pay close to $1 million for violations of California hazardous waste disposal laws. Yale, for similar violations, agreed to pay $348,000.

Vautin says that Harvard has used the situations in Palo Alto and New Haven to modify its techniques for properly storing and disposing of hazardous waste.

Learning from Stanford and Yale

According to California Environmental Protection Agency officials involved in the Stanford infractions, many of the violations included improper handling and storage of chemicals which could have led to serious incidents.

Stanford was accused of about 1,600 violations over a six-year period, from March 1988 to June 1994.

In one instance, investigators discovered hazardous waste containers left open. Many of them contained incompatible chemicals that were stored dangerously close to each other.

Yale faced a similar situation as U.S. EPA officials last fall charged Yale with keeping open or damaged containers of hazardous materials in areas where students worked, storing incompatible chemicals together despite risk of explosion and improperly labeling dozens of waste containers.

Yale was also cited for allowing students to work with highly explosive wastes without any formal risk training.

Although Vautin says Harvard's record of compliance with environmental regulations is significantly better than that of Stanford and Yale, the citations the other universities received led to renewed efforts to develop better waste management methods in Harvard's laboratories.

"Partly what we do is learn from the experiences of others," says Vautin. "It's not as though there are a lot of new regulations to carry out, but old ones are being applied and interpreted in new ways."

According to Joe Griffin, Harvard's manager of environmental affairs, these new interpretations signify a definite trend toward more rigorous standards.

The government has been taking a closer look at non-industrial sources of pollution," Griffin says. "The message being clearly sent is that there is going to be a stricter by-the-book approach to regulation."