The industries which made the water of the holy River Ganges and a river of the south Chennai toxic were found to be tanneries (Mehta 1988; Vellore Citizen 1996). In the Ganges pollution case, tanneries discharged untreated effluents in the river, and near Kanpur the water of Ganges was found to be highly toxic. In the other case, the Pallar River of the state of Tamil Nadu became highly polluted because tanneries discharged chemicals used in treating leather, which resulted in nonavailability of potable water. Recently, the Supreme Court of India ordered the closure of industries or to shift them from the territory of the State of Delhi as their untreated effluent and sludge was polluting the holy River Yamuna (Hindustan Times 2000; Times of India 2000).
Flixborough
On Saturday, 1 June 1974, the Nypro (UK) site at Flixborough was severely damaged by a large explosion. Twenty‐eight workers were killed and a further 36 suffered injuries. It is recognized that the number of casualties would have been more if the incident had occurred on a weekday, as the main office block was not occupied. Offsite consequences resulted in 53 reported injuries. Property in the surrounding area was damaged to a varying degree.
The chemical plant was designed to produce 70 000 T/Y of caprolactam, a raw material for the production of nylon. The process used cyclohexane as a feed and oxidized it to cyclohexanol in the presence of air within a series of six catalytic reactors. Under process conditions, cyclohexane vaporizes immediately upon mixed depressurization, forming a cloud of flammable cyclohexane vapor mixed with air. Reactor 5 was found to have a small crack in the stainless steel structure in the series using a 20 in. pipe, even though the reactors are normally connected using 28 in. pipe. The temporary section of piping was not properly supported and it ruptured upon pressurization, releasing an estimated 30 T of cyclohexane in a large cloud. An unknown ignition source caused the cloud to explode, leveling the entire plant facility. The resulting fire in the plant burned for over 10 days. The accident could have been prevented by following proper safety design and operating procedures, including reducing the inventory of flammable liquids onsite (CCPS 1993; Crowl and Louver 1990).
Love Canal Tragedy
Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history. But that’s not the most disturbing fact. What is worse is that it cannot be regarded as an isolated event. It could happen again – anywhere in the United States – unless we move expeditiously to prevent it.
It is a cruel irony that Love Canal was originally meant to be a dream community. That vision belonged to the man for whom the three‐block tract of land on the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, New York, was named – William T. Love. Love felt that by digging a short canal between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers, power could be generated cheaply to fuel the industry and homes of his would‐be model city.
But despite considerable backing, Love’s project was unable to endure the one‐two punch of fluctuations in the economy and Nikola Tesla’s discovery of how to economically transmit electricity over great distances by means of an alternating current. By 1910, the dream was shattered. All that was left to commemorate Love’s hope was a partial ditch where construction of the canal had begun. In the 1920s the seeds of a genuine nightmare were planted. The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite.
Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated. Love Canal will always remain a perfect historical example of how not to run such an operation. In 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, then the owners and operators of the property, covered the canal with earth and sold it to the city for one dollar. It was a bad buy. In the late 1950s, about 100 homes and a school were built at the site. Perhaps it wasn’t William T. Love’s model city, but it was a solid, working‐class community. On the first day of August 1978, the lead paragraph of a front‐page story in the New York Times read: “Niagara Falls, N.Y. – Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal.”
In an article prepared for the February 1978 EPA Journal, I wrote that, regarding chemical dumpsites in general, “even though some of these landfills have been closed down, they may stand like ticking time bombs.” Just months later, Love Canal exploded. The explosion was triggered by a record amount of rainfall. Shortly thereafter, the leaching began.
Corroding waste‐disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.
And then there were the birth defects. The New York State Health Department is continuing an investigation into a disturbingly high rate of miscarriages, along with five birth‐defect cases detected thus far in the area. The father of one the children with birth defects said, “I heard someone from the press saying that there were only five cases of birth defects here,” he told me. “When you go back to your people at EPA, please don’t use the phrase ‘only five cases’. People must realize that this is a tiny community. Five birth defect cases here is terrifying.”
A large percentage of people in Love Canal are also being closely observed because of detected high white‐blood‐cell counts, a possible precursor of leukemia. When the citizens of Love Canal were finally evacuated from their homes and their neighborhood, pregnant women and infants were deliberately among the first to be taken out.
“We knew they put chemicals into the canal and filled it over,” said one woman, a long‐time resident of the Canal area, “but we had no idea the chemicals would invade our homes. We’re worried sick about the grandchildren and their children.” Two of this woman’s four grandchildren have birth defects. The children were born and raised in the Love Canal community. A granddaughter was born deaf with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth, and slight retardation. A grandson was born with an eye defect.
Of the chemicals which comprise the brew seeping through the ground and into homes at Love Canal, one of the most prevalent is benzene – a known human carcinogen, and one detected in high concentrations. But the residents characterize things more simply. “I’ve got this slop everywhere,” said another man who lives at Love Canal. His daughter also suffers from a congenital defect.
On 7 August, New York Governor Hugh Carey announced to the residents of the Canal that the State Government would purchase the homes affected by chemicals. On that same day, President Carter approved emergency financial aid for the Love Canal area (the first emergency funds ever to be approved for something other than a “natural” disaster), and the U.S. Senate approved a “sense of Congress” amendment saying that Federal aid should be forthcoming to relieve the serious environmental disaster which had occurred.
By the month’s end, 98 families had already been evacuated. Another 46 had found temporary housing. Soon after, all families would be gone from the most contaminated areas – a total of 221 families have moved or agreed to be moved. State figures show more than 200 purchase offers for homes have been made, totaling nearly $7 million.
A plan is being set in motion now to implement technical procedures designed to meet the seemingly impossible job of detoxifying the Canal area. The plan calls for a trench system to drain chemicals from the Canal. It is a difficult procedure, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it will yield some degree of success. I have been very pleased with the high degree of cooperation in this case among local, State, and Federal governments, and with the swiftness by which the Congress and the President have acted to make funds available.
But this is not really where the story ends. Quite the contrary. We suspect that there are hundreds of such chemical dumpsites across United States. Unlike Love Canal, few are situated so close to human settlements. But without a doubt, many of these old dumpsites are time bombs with burning fuses – their contents slowly leaching out. And the next victim cold be a water supply, or a sensitive wetland. The presence of various types of toxic substances in our environment has become increasingly widespread – a fact that President Carter has called “one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era.”
Chemical sales in the United States now exceed a mind‐boggling $112 billion/year, with as many as 70 000 chemical substances in commerce. Love Canal can now be added to a growing list of environmental disasters involving toxics, ranging from industrial workers stricken by nervous disorders and cancers to the discovery of toxic materials in the milk of nursing mothers.
Through the national environmental program it administers, the EPA is attempting to draw a chain of Congressional acts around the toxics problem. The Clean Air and Water Acts, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Pesticide Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act – each is an essential link.
Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, EPA is making grants available to States to help them establish programs to assure the safe handling and disposal of hazardous wastes. As guidance for such programs, we are working to make sure that State inventories of industrial waste disposal sites include full assessments of any potential dangers created by these sites.
Also, USEPA recently proposed a system to ensure that more than 35 million T of hazardous wastes produced in the United States each year, including most chemical wastes, are disposed of safely. Hazardous wastes will be controlled from point of generation to their ultimate disposal, and dangerous practices now resulting in serious threats to health and environment will not be allowed.
Although we are taking these aggressive strides to make sure that hazardous waste is safely managed, there remains the question of liability regarding accidents occurring from wastes disposed of previously. This is a missing link. But no doubt this question will be addressed effectively in the future. Regarding the missing link of liability, if health‐related dangers are detected, what are we as a people willing to spend to correct the situation? How much risk are we willing to accept? Who’s going to pick up the tab? One of the chief problems we are up against is that ownership of these sites frequently shifts over the years, making liability difficult to determine in cases of an accident. And no secure mechanisms are in effect for determining such liability.
It is within our power to exercise intelligent and effective controls designed to significantly cut such environmental risks. A tragedy, unfortunately, has now called upon us to decide on the overall level of commitment we desire for defusing future Love Canals. And it is not forgotten that no one has paid more dearly already than the residents of Love Canal.
Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Coal Power Plant Toxic Ash Sludge Spill
On 22 December 2008, a retention pond wall collapsed at Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston plant in Harriman, Tennessee, releasing a combination of water and fly ash that flooded 12 homes, spilled into nearby Watts Bar Lake, contaminated the Emory River, and caused a train wreck. Officials said 4–6 ft of material escaped from the pond to cover an estimated 400 acres of adjacent land. A train bringing coal to the plant became stuck when it was unable to stop before reaching the flooded tracks (White 2008). Hundreds of fish were floating dead downstream from the plant. Water tests showed elevated levels of lead and thallium (Knoxville News Sentinel 2008a, b).
Originally, TVA estimated that 1.7 million cubic yards of waste had burst through the storage facility. Company officials said the pond had contained a total of about 2.6 million cubic yards of sludge. However, the company revised its estimates on 26 December, when it released an aerial survey showing that 5.4 million cubic yards (1.09 billion gal) of fly ash was released from the storage facility (Knoxville News Sentinel 2008a). Several days later, the estimate was increased to over 1 billion gal spilled (CNN 2008). The size of the spill was larger than the amount TVA claimed to have been in the pond before the accident, a discrepancy that TVA was unable to explain (New York Times 2008). The TVA spill was 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, which released 10.9 million gal of crude oil (Encyclopedia of the Earth 2018), and it was expected to take weeks and cost tens of millions of dollars to clean it (Knoxville News Sentinel 2008c). According to the TVA, rain totaling 6 in. in 10 days and 12 °F temperatures were factors that contributed to the failure of the earthen embankment (Valley Precipitation 2008).
The 40‐acre pond was used to contain ash created by the coal‐burning plant (White 2008). The water and ash that were released in the accident were filled with toxic substances. Each year coal preparation creates waste containing an estimated 13 T of mercury, 3236 T of arsenic, 189 T of beryllium, 251 T of cadmium, and 2754 T of nickel, and 1098 T of selenium (Associated Press 2008; Valley Precipitation 2008).
Cuyahoga River Fire
The Cuyahoga River is in the United States, located in Northeast Ohio, that feeds into Lake Erie. The river is famous for having been so polluted that it “caught fire” in 1969 (Figure 2.3). It was the disaster that ignited an environmental revolution. On that day, 22 June 1969, the Cuyahoga River burst into flames in Cleveland when sparks from a passing train set fire to oil‐soaked debris floating on the water’s surface. By 1969, the Cuyahoga River was not a unique experience in the United States. A river flowing into Baltimore, Maryland, caught fire on 8 June 1906 (CPD 1926). In Philadelphia, the Schuykill burned in the 1950s (Kernan 1958). The Buffalo River in upper New York state burned in the 1960s (UPI 1984). The Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, repeatedly burned (US 1974).
So, why is the Cuyahoga River fire a seminal event in the history of water pollution control in the United States? Because it was a catalyst for change in federal government’s role in water pollution control. Although the federal government had powerful tools to control water pollution, for example, the River and Harbors Act of 1899 and the Water Quality Act of 1965. States and cities were left to fend for themselves. The flaming Cuyahoga became a figurehead for America’s mounting environmental issues and sparked wide‐ranging reforms, including the passage of the Clean Water Act (CWA) (1972) and the creation of federal and state environmental protection agencies.
But the episode itself did not quite live up to its billing. It was not the first fire, or even the worst, on the Cuyahoga, which had lit up at least a dozen other times before. And industrial dumping was already improving by the time of the 1969 blaze. The reality is that the 1969 Cuyahoga fire was not a symbol of how bad conditions on the nation’s rivers could become, but how bad they had once been. The 1969 fire was not the first time an industrial river in the United States had caught on fire, but the last. The event helped to spur the environmental movement in the United States (Adler 2003).
The Great Smog of London
Great Smog of 1952 was a severe air‐pollution event that affected the British capital of London in early December 1952. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants – mostly arising from the use of coal – to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted from Friday, 5 December to Tuesday, 9 December 1952 and then dispersed quickly when the weather changed.
It caused major disruption by reducing visibility and even penetrating indoor areas, far more severe than previous smog events experienced in the past, called “pea‐soupers.” Government medical reports in the following weeks, however, estimated that up until 8 December, 4 000 people had died as a direct result of the smog and 100 000 more were made ill by the smog’s effects on the human respiratory tract. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, about 12 000 (Figures 2.4 and 2.5) (The Great Smog of 1952 2014).
The Prime Minister at that time, Winston Churchill, was adamant that it would pass, simply dismissing it as a “weather event.” London had suffered since the thirteenth century from poor air quality (Brimblecombe 1976), which worsened in the 1600s (The Observer 2002), but the Great Smog is known to be the worst air‐pollution event in the history of the United Kingdom, and the most significant in terms of its effect on environmental research, government regulation, and public awareness of the relationship between air quality and health (Bell et al. 2004; The Observer 2002). It led to several changes in practices and regulations, including the Clean Air Act 1956.
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