Industrial Environmental Management. Tapas K. Das
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.
2.6.1.6 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).
2.6.1.7 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).