As we saw last week, agriculture since the Green Revolution means extensive use of fertilizer from natural gas. Because of this there is going to be lots of anhydrous ammonia (NH3) somewhere to distribute to lots of farms. It’s relatively easy to manufacture. It’s also very dangerous to store, transport, and use, unless handled very carefully, acording to safety protocols, all the time.

The stuff is also hard to secure, mostly because people are always trying to steal it for who knows what reason. So there’s a danger there, because the people who are ripping this stuff probably don’t read safety instructions. Another danger is of course the sabotage risk. But mostly, like with lots of things in life, the real danger is from accidents. Complex systems can fail, people can fail, organizations can fail, and according to the EPA, over a million people would be harmed if there was a worse-case failure here.

The danger is real. The biggest problem with making this stuff is that you start with natural gas, which means you’ve got a pipleline somewhere. Pipeline accidents happen somewhere in the world a few times per year (see this pdf for 2002 incidents). Most sabotage happens outside of the United States closer to where the fuels are extracted such as Nigeria, rather than in Lima, Ohio, but leaks and pressure blasts seem to happen everywhere.

As we zoom in we notice a regular pattern on the ground, a field of big white blips. This is where Google Maps fails us as their images are far too low resolution to be of any help. To make this work we need to go over to TerraServer.

Here you can see part of the three General Dynamics plants, where among other things they make the M-1 Abrams tank, as well as the BOC Gases Hydrogen Production Plant. In this image the black areas in the upper left are the City of Lima Wastewater Treatment Plant, where all of the waste water is treated, first built in 1930 and later renovated and rebuilt at great expense. This message from the treatment plant’s home page does not inspire confidence:

Throughout the plant each stage of treatment is monitored and controlled by a computerized process control system (PCS). Lima’s wastewater PCS consists of distributed programmable logic controllers which are monitored using a desk top computer network.

I feel better already.

Oddly enough if you search for anhydrous ammonia in Lima very not much comes up, but look up the word plant and you get all kinds of industrial supply companies. Let’s try looking in the water.

The drinking water there tested in 2004 (pdf) for Nitrate, Atrazine (a herbicide runoff), Choloform, Chlorine, Coliform… in other words, normal, safe to drink. Hmmm. No wonder Americans spent $7.7 billion for bottled water in 2002, and $8.3 billion in 2003.

Ohio seems to be a pollution friendly state; in 1998 they gave a special air permit to BP Chemical so that they could expel Butanediol into the air. This is toxic stuff that turns into the drug GHB among other things when the body metabolizes it. They can legally dump this stuff into the air? I could not be making this stuff up.

When talking about a huge industrial production facility like this one, the word factory is interchangable with plant. Most plants of the vegetable kind are generally pretty benign. This kind of plant is not.

Free clorine, grown here, is rare in nature and is incredibly toxic to life — so toxic that chlorine gas was used by the German Army against the French in 1915 as a weapon of war. Producers describe it as “fatal after a few breaths.” Since most uses for this stuff are industrial, accidents with chlorine tend to happen around other chemicals, and these interactions have effects that are combinatorialy more harmful to life.

Chloride, the ion Cl- on the other hand is common in nature, and is found everywhere, especially in seawater. In inland seas like the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea, places where ocean water has evaporated, it is also abundant. The cloride in these salty waters was emitted volcanically over millions of years, concentrated by the motion of water. It didn’t go away. It persisted. Manufactured chlorine also persists in the environment. It is permanent.

Most industrially produced chlorine is made through the electrolysis of brine, reusing these salts; This factory is probably placed right where it is because of the readily available water and electricity in Niagra Falls, NY. According to the EPA, over a million people would be harmed in a worst-case accident at this plant, which is why most people don’t want to live near a chlorine factory.

As toxic as chlorine is, lots of chlorine factories would be worse to live near than this one. For some incalculably stupid reason, people still make chlorine using mercury, a process invented in the 19th century. Mercury, which is then either released into the air (see pdf), or ‘lost’, also persists in the environment. When people eat fish that eat fish, the environmental mercury is concentrated and causes all sorts of serious health problems.

For some reason, the Google Maps satellite view is blurred out even though other areas around there are a much higher resolution. For this reason the image above comes from Microsoft’s TerraServer. On both you can see how the factory is positioned relative to the surrounding environment, and the effect it has on the land. As usual, click the picture to visit.