Toxic waste beginning to kill Americans

Press, 20 December 1978, Page 21

Toxic waste beginning to kill Americans

America’s toxic waste is rising from burial places across the country to take its revenge for decades of careless garbage disposal. It is “a raging but invisible epidemic in which many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of deaths a year result,” according to James Moorman. Assistant Attorney General for the Justic Department’s lands and natural resources division.

It bubbles from fissures in the earth, seeps into the waterways, and befouls the air. A lot of it, particularly industrial waste, a soup of lethal chemicals, is suspected of causing cancer, birth defects, and a variety of ailments that only recently have been associated with waste. The most dramatic ex-

ample of the havoc which waste can wreak came last August when 230 families had to be removed from the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls after chemical waste pumped into the canal 25 years earlier began to seep through the basement walls of their homes. Examination of medical records showed a higher than normal incidence of cancer and birth defects apparently caused by the toxic waste.

The incident prompted the Congressman. John Lafalce, of New York, to warn his colleagues in the House of Representatives of “the ticking time bombs” of waste disposal sites across the country. A recent survey by the Environmental Protection

Agency (E.P.A.) listed, as a rough estimate, 32.254 landfill, storage and other sites that could contain hazardous waste material. An E.P.A. administrator, Douglas Costle, called it “an extremely serious environmental problem” and noted that it was being compounded by the continued production of hazardous chemical wastes —3O to 40 million tons annually.

E.P.A. which is now under Congressional pressure to produce guidelines for enforcement of waste disposal laws, says that it has identified 15 industries, including metal, chemical, textile, and petroleum, which produce 85 per cent of the country’s hazardous wastes. Hospitals generate an estimated 155 tons of

disease - causing waste annually.

A study in Minnesota found that more than 20 per cent of such waste was deposited, in open dumps; 15 per cent was used as landfill; and much was disposed of “by methods unknown.”

Increasingly, the grim effects of waste disposal are making newspaper headlines. These are some examples:

1. A fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico was killed when he hauled up in his net a drum of chemicals that exploded. 2. The ground exploded when workers tried to dig near a manufacturing plant in West Virginia. 3. Arsenic is seeping into a major waterway in lowa from the chemical dumping

ground of a small drug manufacturer. 4. The land and creek surrounding an abandoned plant in New Jersey was found to contain more than 120 parts per million of mercury. A dose of 160 parts per million of methyl mercury is considered lethal.

5. A corporation had to pay a million dollars to clean up its mess when a deadly load of chemicals it ordered a truck driver to dump on the nearest private land he could find began to leak. 6. A policeman who caught a dump truck operator pouring chemical waste into a city sewer at midnight reported that the stuff ate the soles off his shoes. The Environmental Pro-

tection Agency reported recently that there is “an army of midnight movers who empty their toxic cargoes into the nearest sewer, stream or lake.” In the heavily industrialised north-east, the ground water that millions of people depend on for drinking is already widely contaminated, and “the pressure to use contaminated water will grow as ground water use increases.” In the last few years, Congress has passed or amended several laws designed to increase the enforcement powers of the Justice Department and the E.P.A. So far, however, the E.P.A., which must set the guidelines for enforcing those laws, has not done so, and the best estimates now are that it will not

promulgate any before 1980.

“For all the good this law is doing, Congress might as well not have passed it at all,” Representative Lafalce complained in recent testimony before a House committee.

Government officials, however, remain pessimistic that corporations will respond in time to the increasingly urgent situation. “A lot of them are going to wait until the law knocks on their particular doors,” one said.

“They can't relate to anything but profits, even

though they are up to their necks in their own filth.”

There is also gloom about the prospects for cleaning up the mess industries and municipalities have already created. “We don’t have the money to go in and exhume dangerous waste sites, or clean contaminated waters—nobody does,” said one E.P.A. official.

In many cases, he added, the cost would run into millions of dollars, and that even if officials could find out who was responsible for creating the problem, “the chances are they w'ould not have the wherewithal! to clean up.”

By

PETER KIERNAN

NZPA-Reuter