The Deadly Cloud

As soldiers stood guard in the northern Italian town of Seveso, hundreds of villagers last week loaded into their cars or hand-drawn carts the few belongings they were allowed to take, then fled southward. Behind them they left the bodies of scores of animals in a desolated area now sealed off by barbed wire. The cause of the exodus: a cloud of toxic gas caused by an explosion at a chemical plant in Meda, twelve miles north of Milan.

Seveso's nightmare originated at Icmesa, a chemical plant that makes trichlorophenol, which is used in manufacturing disinfectant soaps and deodorants. The process can produce a highly toxic substance with the jawbreaking name of tetrachlorodibenzodioxine, or, as it is more commonly called, TCDD. On the morning of July 10, a stuck safety valve caused an autoclave to overheat and speed up the chemical reaction that produces TCDD. The result was an explosion that released two kilos (4.4 lbs.) of the poison.

Already accustomed to smoke from the factories that have sprung up in the region in the last decade, nearby townspeople at first paid little attention to the white chemical cloud. But they could not ignore it for long. "The wind carried it here," recalls Vinicio Lazzaretti of the small town of San Pietro. "I couldn't breathe. It made my eyes water. The next day all the leaves and plants and flowers were riddled with small holes, as if they had been struck with tiny hailstones." Within a few days, household pets in the area started to bleed at the nose and mouth, then die. Farmyard chickens dropped dead, wild birds fell from trees, mice and rats crawled out of their holes and died. One farmer saw his cat keel over, and when he went to pick up the body, the tail fell off. When authorities dug the cat up for examination two days later, said the farmer, all that was left was its skull.

Still not fully aware of the danger, residents of the region went on with their daily routines. They ate vegetables from their gardens, drank milk from their cows, despite the fact that it tasted peculiar, and, in some cases, even cooked and ate the chickens that had been killed by the cloud. It was not until July 14, when some 14 children were hospitalized for burns and pains, and adults began complaining about liver and kidney problems, that the dimensions of the threat became clear.

TCDD is so toxic, according to one scientist, that a single gram is capable of killing thousands of people. The gas can cause blistering, and damage to the liver, spleen, kidneys, respiratory tract and nervous system; it may also cause deformities in unborn children.

Scorched Earth; Officials at Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss-based company that owns Icmesa, have urged Italian authorities to destroy the factory, tear down houses, burn the surrounding vegetation and skim off a foot of topsoil over the entire area affected by the TCDD. Italian officials have not yet decided to adopt such a scorched-earth policy. But army troops have so far evacuated more than 700 people from villages near the plant, and authorities have ordered blood tests on some 15,000 people in the area. Officials are also taking some controversial steps to confine the effects of the accident to those already afflicted. Doctors are urging women who might have been exposed to the TCDD not to become pregnant for at least three months, and they are making birth control services available. The government has gone even further. Despite grumblings from the Vatican, it has authorized abortions, under normal circumstances illegal in Italy, for all women whose unborn babies might be malformed by the gas.

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