Hazards Of a Toxic Wasteland

By Natalie Angler

Learning to cope with high-tech risks

We are, all of us, out there on emergency bivouac.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In Middleport, N.Y., a small community northeast of Buffalo, elementary schoolchildren huddle over their notebooks, just 400 yards from a pesticide factory operated by the FMC Corp. A month ago a faulty pump at the neighboring plant spewed out methyl isocyanate gas, the same substance that was stored at Bhopal, India, where more than 2,500 people died last week. Firemen evacuated the 600 youngsters from the school, and 30 of them were treated for eye irritations.

Some 7,000 miles away from Middleport, schoolchildren in Tokyo practice drills very much like the air-raid exercises of the '50s, ducking under their desks at the screech of an alarm. Reason: if a large earthquake hits the city-as one did in 1983-the network of gas pipes that circulates throughout Tokyo could explode, unleashing, among other things, a deadly blizzard of flying glass.

That problem will not affect Times Beach, Mo. Windows in the houses there are boarded up, and the wind whistles down the lonely streets of a newly created ghost town. Last year more than 2,000 inhabitants left when the water and ground were found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of dioxin.

The participants in all three cases face a common dilemma: industrial dangers. Those hazards can be divided into two rough categories: primary and secondary disasters. Primary disasters are the quick explosions, fires or leaks that strike with the surprise of a hurricane, killing instantly and widely. The tragedy last week at Bhopal, when deadly gas escaped from a Union Carbide plant, was of the primary variety. Such violent, large-scale tragedies are dramatic and terrible, but extremely rare, particularly in developed nations like the U.S. The occasional deaths that do occur in those mishaps are almost always confined to employees who were on-site at the time. "There are a lot of accidents in which two dozen miners are killed," says a spokesman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Washington. "But fortunately, there have been damn few in which great numbers of civilians have been involved."

More chronically worrisome to environmentalists are the secondary disasters, those that lead to the slow poisoning of ground or water. Hazardous-and nuclear-waste dumping fit into this category. With little knowledge or thought of the long-term consequences, factory trash containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chloroform, dioxin and radioactive traces is buried underground or dumped into the ocean. Although absolute links are difficult to prove scientifically, many of the chemicals in hazardous wastes are believed to cause cancer and birth defects. More than 66,000 different compounds are used in industry, and less than 2% have been tested for possible side effects. Over the years the dangers of slow, toxic seepage may far outweigh the confined outburst of a primary disaster.

Nevertheless, the specter of a violent chemical explosion is very real. Late in November, for example, Mexico suffered its worst industrial calamity when a series of gas tanks exploded in San Juan Ixhuatepec, a suburb of Mexico City, killing 452 people.

There are 30 other big gas plants in and around Mexico City, the world's largest metropolis (pop. 18 million). One facility frequently cited as a potential "time bomb" is a refinery at Azcapotzalco, in the northern part of the city, that was built in 1959. At the time, few people lived in the area; now the neighborhood is as crowded as the rest of Mexico City. Says one worried housewife: "If there were an accident, we would be talking of thousands of lives lost, not hundreds." In the aftermath of the San Juan Ixhuatepec disaster, there have been calls to shut down or relocate the refinery to more isolated quarters, but either course would cost a prohibitive $300 million. "High risk," said a report by the Mexican presidential commission on industrial accidents, "should not be interpreted as imminent danger."

In another example of a primary mishap in North America, plumes of noxious malathion last October wafted from an American Cyanamid pesticide plant in New Jersey to cover most of Staten Island, N.Y. About 150 people were treated after inhaling the fumes.

Western Europe also has its share of potential disasters. That lesson was made clear eight years ago, when a chemical reaction at a plant in Seveso, outside Milan, Italy, set off a mild explosion, discharging a cloud of between 1 lb. and 22 lbs. of poisonous dioxin into the atmosphere. Since then, 10 million cu. ft. of contaminated earth has been buried in large pits and covered with clay, plastic sheets and cement. Newly seeded grass masks any signs of the event. Although no one died because of the mishap, it remains to be seen whether the local cancer rate will have increased as a result of the severe dioxin exposure.

Several European countries produce or import an array of deadly compounds, among them methyl isocyanate (MIC). In Britain, a division of Ciba-Geigy Chemicals, Ltd., is the only company permitted to deal with the substance. Located two miles from Grimsby, a town of 92,000, the firm imports and stores the chemical in 45-gal. stainless-steel drums. No more than 18,000 gal. is kept in stock at one time. But even with these precautions, Grimsby villagers gathered in protest after they found out that the lethal compound was being held in their midst. They were led by Anthony White, a resident of nearby Pyewipe, who said bitterly: "If someone mentally disturbed broke into the works and released the stuff, we would all be killed."

Among the biggest stockpilers of MIC in Europe is France. In the southern countryside of Beziers, La Littorale, SA, a Union Carbide affiliate, stores some 20 tons of the chemical, which it imports from the U.S. because the French government prohibits the manufacture of MIC. La Littorale officials proudly point to the facility's extensive security features. The air in the plant is automatically monitored, and should any gas escape from a drum an alarm would call in a crack emergency team. If large enough, the leak would also trigger a water system to deluge and wash down the MIC. Declares Heinz Trautmann, president of La Littorale: "The situation in France is very different from that in India."

In the tragic wake of Bhopal, safety reviews are under way in most of the U.S., the world's biggest producer and user of MIC and other pesticides. Nearly a billion tons of pesticides and herbicides, comprising 225 different chemicals, was produced in the U.S. last year, and an additional 79 million lbs. was imported. MIC is stored or used at plants in New York, West Virginia, Texas, Alabama and Georgia. Those insecticides not dependent on the compound, like malathion, are also construct ed of toxic molecules. Dow Chemical Co., one of the nation's largest producers of agricultural and industrial chemicals, is reconsidering its safety and spillage codes. American Cyanamid, a major chemical manufacturer, is busy comparing its emergency procedures with those of Union Carbide.

Nor are chemical firms alone in their soul searching. As the world's industrial leader, the U.S. has 219 operating oil refineries, more than any other country. It is crisscrossed by 250,000 miles of oil pipelines and 1.3 million miles of natural gas conduits. Sometimes refineries and storage tanks are clumped together like rusting armadas of iron behemoths, belching smoke into the sky. Along the New Jersey Turnpike, near the towns of Linden and Carteret, many oil storage tanks are higher than a ten-story apartment building. Should a plane from nearby Newark International Airport crash into that complex, the resulting fireball could engulf one of the most heavily populated areas of the nation. Fire drills at plants in northern New Jersey have been stepped up since the Mexican explosion.

Given the potential for calamity, the safety record of the American chemical and energy industries is impressive. Last year U.S. chemical firms had 5.2 reported occupational injuries per 100 workers, an outstanding record in manufacturing. Declares Geraldine Cox, technical director for the Chemical Manufacturers' Association: "We are the safest industry in the U.S."

Disasters do take place, of course, but they are more likely to strike developing nations than industrialized ones. The reasons are both complex and delicate. Some critics charge that corporate greed is at fault, that big businesses will set up shop in a poor nation simply to take advantage of cheap labor and lax laws. Says David Bull, chief of the Environment Liaison Center in Nairobi, Kenya: "There is a growing tendency for the larger multinational chemical concerns to locate their more hazardous factories in developing countries to escape the stringent safety regulations which they must follow at home."

Others insist that the answers are not so straightforward. Subsidiaries of American firms claim that they generally rely on existing specifications of domestic plants to design foreign ones; there are no structural discrepancies between the two. Where the factories differ is in the local conditions: petrochemical facilities in the U.S. are often strategically placed in remote areas; when a factory is built in a developing nation, it may start out in an isolated spot, but needy workers soon gravitate toward it in search of a job. What is more, with superior roadways and familiar emergency procedures, potential U.S. victims are more easily evacuated from a hot spot. After a train loaded with a toxic brew of chemicals derailed in Louisiana two years ago, 2,700 inhabitants of the nearby town were moved out almost immediately. Says Martin Henry, director of field services for the Boston-based National Fire Protection Association: "People were evacuated within an hour and kept away for two weeks."

Ironically, government has policed industry less effectively than industry has policed itself. One good reason: safety pays. The fewer accidents, the lower the medical costs and worker compensation insurance payments, and the less labor time lost to recovery. Says Jeffrey Leonard, a senior associate at the Conservation Foundation in Washington: "Safety centers a lot more on human procedures than on the question of regulation."

Not so the cost of environmental controls and cleanup, which may be why long-term toxic-waste problems are more consequential issues than unusual disasters. Environmentalists stress that worries about the big blowup should not distract attention from the regulations and enforcement needed to beat back the world's ever growing piles of poisonous and nuclear sludge. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. industry, from the giant conglomerates to the local dry cleaner, annually produce some 90 billion lbs. of toxic wastes, laced not only with familiar poisons, including arsenic and mercury, but with exotic ingredients like trichlorophenol, used in the manufacture of herbicides.

Regardless of their potency, only 10% of the chemicals are disposed of properly; the rest are dumped as conveniently as possible: into rivers, inadequate landfills, abandoned mine shafts, old missile silos, swamps and fields. The Natural Resources Defense Council in New York estimates that there are as many as 50,000 toxic-waste dumps around the U.S. At least 14,000 of these sites are or soon could be dangerous; their contents are dripping into soil or water supplies. The full effects of these gradual seepages may not be felt for ten to 15 years, the time it takes for some cancers to be recognized.

Perhaps the classic example of a hazardous-waste site is Love Canal in Niagara Falls. Over a period of 20 years, Hooker Chemical Co. dumped millions of barrels of industrial wastes into a landfill site. The acres were covered over and sold to the city in 1953. Houses were constructed, families moved in. By the early '70s, the basements of the homes were flooded with black ooze from the toxic wastes, and the people living atop the mess were complaining to their doctors of asthma, kidney disease, hepatitis and birth defects. In 1978, dozens of families were evacuated and some of their houses were bought from them by the state. The words "Love Canal" became synonymous with poison.

Elsewhere in the nation, communities have been disrupted by toxic chemicals. Children in Woburn, Mass., are victims of one of the highest rates of leukemia in America. Eleven of the 17 who have died from that cancer lived within half a mile of two wells that have been contaminated by a chemical dump. Even California's Silicon Valley, once the picture of high-tech wholesomeness, now suffers from waste woes. The problem first came to light two years ago, after a group of residents claimed that the birth-defect rate in Los Paseos, a suburb of San Jose, had jumped. At the same time, it was discovered that the Fairchild Camera and Instrument company, among others, was leaking perilous solvents into the community drinking water, although the two events have not been conclusively linked. By the reckoning of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, chemical leaks from dumps at computer and bioengineering firms threaten many more sources of water supply. Says Activist Lawyer Ted Smith of San Jose: "If we lose the underground water basin, it's back to the desert here."

A brief trip around the world might reveal a globe bulging at the seams with man's effluvium. Last September, the owners of a Re-Chem International chemical-waste-reprocessing plant in central Scotland announced that they were closing "for financial reasons." Local citizens and Greenpeace activists blame the plant for the local babies that have been born with severe visual defects and sometimes without eyes at all. There is an unusually high rate of cancer in the area. Analysis from the government chemist's office confirmed that the plant's burning of PCBs was giving off dioxins.

Although critics of nuclear-waste disposal have been particularly outspoken, the problem has not yet become as pressing as toxic dumps. In the U.S., there are many sites where low-level radioactive wastes are discarded, but scientists have yet to figure out what to do with the highly radioactive material that is stockpiling at nuclear plants around the country.

Despite widespread indifference, some progress in waste management is beginning to emerge. Both California and Louisiana, among the leaders in policing efforts, now have "toxic-material task forces." Under the direction of the state police, the Louisiana unit has full jurisdiction over transportation of hazardous goods in the state, and frequently stops careless truckers of dangerous materials to hand out fines. A toxic-waste "strike force," serving the county of Los Angeles for the past two years, boasts that it has sent twelve high-ranking officials from various companies to prison for illegally dumping hazardous waste. The message, says Barry Groveman, special assistant to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, "is that hazardous-waste dumping is a violent crime against the community."

There is a limit, of course, to how much can be done to detoxify contaminated landfill or to turn a freshly percolating mass of lethal chemicals into the equivalent of whole-wheat flour. That limit is money. In the U.S. alone, the EPA estimates, it would take at least ten years to clean up the 2,200 most dangerous waste sites and require up to ten times the $1.6 billion Congress allocated for the job in 1980.

In a world where rapid economic development is critical to the survival of the poorest, painstaking environmental concerns and flawless safeguards against disaster often seem like impossible or impractical luxuries. Lurching sometimes, stumbling at others, technology and its many implications move forward. "As a society," says Michael Brown, author of Laying Waste, a study of toxic chemicals in America, "we have to accept reasonable risks in order to reap reasonable benefits." Knowing the benefits is easy. The hard part is achieving acceptable odds on the risks. -By Natalie Angler. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington and Peter Stoler/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington, Peter Stoler/New York