In the 1920s, farmers succeeded in conquering The Great Prairie Plains of the Midwest. The plains were then transformed into the “amber waves of grain” we know today. However, this transformation came with a heavy price.

In fact, the agricultural triumph over The Plains was the tipping point that changed a typical La Nina-type drought cycle into an enormous environmental disaster that we now know as the Dust Bowl.

Depending on where you are in the world, a drought can have different meanings. According to the United States Weather Bureau, a drought is a period of 21 or more days during which rainfall is no more than 30 percent of the average rainfall for a specific geographical area at a designated time of year. 

The Dust Bowl was an area in the United States that experienced an extended and intense period of drought, which lasted from 1931 until 1939. The states that made up the Dust Bowl were Kansas, southeastern Colorado, northeastern and southeastern New Mexico, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. 

Throughout the Dust Bowl, soil from roughly 150,000 square miles of farmland was blown by the wind into huge dust storms. Immense clouds of dust filled the sky as far east as New York City, New York and Baltimore, Maryland.

While the Dust Bowl occurred during a period of drought, researchers know that the Dust Bowl drought, while much hotter and drier than a typical drought, did not fit the profile of the periodic droughts that generally hit farther to the south. Actually, while regular climate oscillations may have triggered the initial drying, the contribution of human land degradation played a big part in this atypical disaster.

In the absence of modern agricultural techniques, large-scale crop failures at the drought’s onset reduced vegetation cover, which only exacerbated the heat. Then, the resulting dust storms brought on by the badly eroded croplands also affected the atmospheric moisture content enough to further intensify drought conditions.

In 1931, dust from the seriously over-plowed and over-grazed prairie lands began to blow. And, it continued to blow for eight long, dry years.

As the storms blew across the plains, it came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. This just wasn’t any wind, this dust-filled wind made even the simplest acts of life difficult. Taking a walk, eating a meal and breathing were no longer easy and they couldn’t be taken for granted.

Most children wore dust masks to and from school, people started hanging damp sheets over windows in feeble attempts at stopping the dirt and farmers could only watch as their valuable crops were blown away. The agricultural devastation that resulted from the Dust Bowl windstorms helped to lengthen The Great Depression, whose effects were already being felt worldwide. 

During the years of normal rainfall, the grasslands in the Dust Bowl states had been deeply plowed and the land had produced bountiful crops of wheat. However, as the drought of the early 1930s worsened, farmers continued plowing and planting, even thought very little could thrive in the parched soil.

The ground cover that once held the soil in place was now gone. The winds had whipped across the fields pulling billowing clouds of dust and dirt into the skies often reducing visibility to just a few feet. The skies would be darkened for days, and it became common for even the most well-sealed homes to have a thick layer of dust on the furniture. In some of the hardest hit areas, dust drifted like snow and covered whatever was in its path, including farmsteads, cars and city streets.

In 1932, there were 14 reported dust storms, also referred to as “black blizzards” or “black rollers.” As conditions worsened, in 1933, the number of black blizzards jumped to 38. These devastating dust storms spread from the Dust Bowl area and affected the entire country. The extensive drought that accompanied the dust storms is said to be the worst drought in United States history because it covered over 75 percent of the country and severely affected 27 states.

The Yearbook of Agriculture for 1934 says, Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production; 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

Because this ecological and human disaster caused millions of acres of farmland to become useless, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes. These people became known as “Okies” because so many of them came from Oklahoma. Countless Okies migrated to California and other states in hopes of better living conditions and jobs.

However, what they found were economic conditions little better than those they had left behind in the Dust Bowl. Because they didn’t own land and had no home, many people traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and working in the fields for only starvation wages.

With no rain clouds in sight, the drought continued and so did the Dust Bowl storms. On Sunday, April 14, 1935, the worst black blizzard occurred, causing extensive devastation and turning the day to night.

Shortly after Black Sunday, the United States Congress declared soil erosion “a national menace” and established the Soil Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture. The SCS developed extensive conservation programs, which helped to retain topsoil and prevent irreparable damage to the land.

Farming techniques, including strip cropping, terracing, contour plowing, crop rotation and cover crops were promoted. Farmers were now paid to practice soil-conserving farming techniques.

The SCS and these new land-friendly farming techniques was a great step in the right direction, but the storm was not over yet. By the end the year, experts estimated that about 850,000,000 tons of topsoil had blown off the Southern Plains during 1935 alone. The fear was that if the drought continued, the total area affected would increase from 4,350,000 acres to 5,350,000 acres by the spring of 1936.

Because the Dust Bowl black blizzards raged on and the drought continued, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the Shelterbelt Project in 1937, which called for large-scale planting of trees across The Great Plains, stretching in a 100-mile wide zone from Canada to northern Texas. The goal was to protect and preserve the land from erosion.

Native trees, including green ash and red cedar, were planted along fence rows separating properties, and the farmers were paid by the government to plant and cultivate these trees. Ultimately, the project cost roughly 75 million dollars over 12 years, and had somewhat limited success.

However, as time passed, even thought the drought continued, further land conservation efforts began to make progress. The extensive work re-plowing the land into furrows, planting trees in shelterbelts and other conservation methods had finally resulted in a 65 percent reduction for soil blowing.

In the fall of 1939, after nearly a decade of drought, the rain finally came. This brought an end to the black blizzards of the Dust Bowl and allowed The Plains to recover and once again become golden with wheat.

In today’s ever-changing world, in areas where vegetation loss often leads to increased wind erosion, it appears that history could repeat itself and we could experience Dust Bowl-type droughts again in the future.

Researchers with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center report that, although it is not possible to predict the exact time, history suggests that another great drought could certainly occur in the future.

The first step for anyone wanting to predict the risk of a future catastrophic climate event is to look at past occurrences. Unfortunately, however, good rainfall records only go back about 100 years, and accurate atmospheric records only exist for the last 50 years.

With that said, historical measurements do suggest that droughts have been a fairly regular event in this country. North America experienced a dry spell during the 1950s and another in the late 1980s. NASA’s research suggests that there was almost a drought in the 1970s, but for some reason it did not happen.

On a much longer timetable, sediment records, tree rings and other alternative evidence of climate change suggest that The Great Plains has actually weathered multiple droughts, which lasted significantly longer than the Dust Bowl.

These severe droughts appear to have happened once or twice a century over the last 400 years. Some evidence even points to droughts lasting over a decade during the late 13th and 16th centuries, which were much more devastating than the droughts of the 20th century.

It seems that history indicates that we can expect much worse than the 1930s Dust Bowl in the future, but knowing when and where remains anyone’s guess.

In the 1930s and 1940s people and businesses did not pay a lot of attention to what happened to toxic chemicals produced during industrial processes. While there have long been regulations for the handling of these dangerous chemicals, enforcement of these laws was virtually nonexistent or haphazard at best.

Large corporations, such as Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, made a variety of chemicals, pesticides and plastics. This type of company would typically seal the contaminated substances in 55-gallon metal drums and leave them someplace nearby.

For Hooker, Love Canal was a convenient place to store these metal drums.

The Love Canal neighborhood is in the southeast section of the La Salle area of Niagara Falls, New York. The neighborhood spans 36 square blocks in the southeastern corner of the city, along 99^th Street and Read Avenue. Two bodies of water, Bergholtz Creek and Niagara River, define the northern and southern boundaries of the neighborhood.

Love Canal was the dream of William T. Love, an 1890′s entrepreneur who wanted to develop a planned industrial community, Model City. Love’s idea was to take waters from the Niagara River and reroute it around the Niagara escarpment in order to produce cheap hydroelectric power.

Love’s dream was not to be and Model City was never constructed. However, work on the canal to transport waters from the Niagara River did happen. In 1942, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation purchased the Love Canal site. This is where the contamination of Love Canal began.

Between 1942 and 1953 Hooker Chemical disposed of roughly 22,000 tons of mixed chemical wastes into Love Canal, all while children swam and played nearby. Eventually, Hooker stopped using this dumping site and the land was sold to the Niagara Falls School Board for a price of $1.00.

In 1955, the 99^th Street Elementary School was built on Love Canal property and was opened to students. Subsequent housing development of the area brought hundreds of families to this suburban, blue-collar neighborhood along the Love Canal.

As time passed, the neighborhood continued to flourish, as families found the idea of building a new home so close to an elementary school appealing. But, there were problems.

Many homeowners began noticing that their basements leaked. Some families started smelling strange chemical smells and seeing oddly-colored water in their basements. Unfortunately, only a few knew about Hooker’s history of chemical dumping.

A startling symptom that something was not right in the Love Canal neighborhood occurred in 1974, when one family’s backyard swimming pool rose two feet out of the ground. When the pool was removed, blue, purple and yellow chemicals quickly flooded in where the pool had been.

By 1977 and after two years of uncharacteristically heavy rain and snowfall, the former canal was turning into a marshland. With high groundwater levels, portions of the Hooker landfill subsided, 55-gallon drums surfaced, ponds became tainted, basements began to ooze an oily residue, and noxious chemical smells permeated the neighborhood.

Physical evidence of chemical corrosion of sump pumps and permeation of basement cinderblock walls was also obvious. Chemicals were now noticeably seeping into the surrounding streams and soil. City officials looked into different ways of dealing with this ever-growing pollution problem, but determined that the cost was too high and the project ended up being bogged down in red tape.

By this point, many residents were concerned. Not only were they concerned about health issues, they were worried about the plummeting value of their homes. Those who tried to sell their homes, couldn’t sell.

Something finally had to give. So, in August 1978 the results of local, state and federal testing of the air and water in Love Canal basements were made public. State Health Commissioner, Dr. Robert Whalen, made it known that Love Canal was a great and imminent peril to the health of the public.

He suggested that pregnant women and children under the age of two, whose homes abutted one end of the canal, leave their homes. Apparently, the studies provided indisputable evidence of an unusually high rate of birth defects and miscarriages.

This announcement not only enraged homeowners, it left them frightened and discouraged. Many residents made the conclusion that adults and older children throughout the neighborhood

might also be in at risk. It was at this time that the residents took things into their own hands. They organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association to inflict added pressure on officials to buy their contaminated homes.

Lois Gibbs was elected president of the Association. Gibbs, a 27-year-old housewife who lived just two short blocks away from the canal, had a tremendous gift for organizing residents and keeping the Love Canal crisis in the news.

Not long after the birth of the Associations, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a federal disaster site. This proclamation freed up funds for residents of the south end of the canal to relocate. This was great for these families; however, those families living in surrounding areas were left unable to move.

This outraged many because of the mounting evidence of elevated rates of cancer and other serious illnesses. Residents throughout the community began methodically testing substances in their homes, area streams and soil. What they found was a staggering list of dangerous chemicals. Some of the compounds detected were C-56 (a carcinogenic pesticide), toluene, benzene, and even PCBs (a known toxic chemical).

Subsequent studies conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry revealed a frighteningly long list of 421 chemical records for water, soil and air samples in and around the Love Canal neighborhood.

Gibbs decided to conduct a systematic and thorough health survey of all residents outside the approved evacuation area. What she found was not surprising. The survey turned up high rates of bladder and kidney ailments, miscarriages, birth defects and nervous disorders.

After six more months, the state finally agreed to pay for pregnant women and those with small children to be relocated to temporary homes, but it stipulated that these families were to return to Love Canal when their children were older. Frustrated and angered by this temporary relocation, residents continued to write letters, sign petitions and conduct public demonstrations to maintain public awareness of the crisis at Love Canal.

Finally, in 1980, the state of New York publicly confirmed what many residents had long suspected. Among the poisonous chemicals found at Love Canal was dioxin, one of the most intensely toxic substances ever created.

With this announcement, the state had no other choice and agreed to buy the nearby homes. After two years of worrying, activism and continued chemical exposure, the remaining homeowners were finally allowed to leave. This, however, wasn’t the end of the Love Canal story.

Only a decade had passed before the government put some of those very same houses on the market again. A new community of homeowners moved in despite the pollution controversy and debate about whether the Love Canal site was still dangerously contaminated with potentially deadly waste.

Today, 30 years after the pollution crisis, Love Canal is really two areas. Secure behind chain link fence, there is the capped dumpsite that once held entire streets of houses. And, just across the street and to the north is a reborn neighborhood called Black Creek Village. The Village is full of homes that were rehabilitated and sold by the state-formed Love Canal Revitalization Agency.

While the Love Canal environmental catastrophe may not be the worst hazardous waste site the world has ever seen, it is one of America’s most notorious. What transpired at Love Canal led to the development of the federal Superfund program, which aids in the cleanup of toxic waste sites that could pose significant risks to the health and well-being of those living, working and playing around these sites.

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The settling of New England by immigrating Europeans took place mostly in the eighteenth century. As people began making their way to America, the Colonial government gave large pieces of land to groups of people known as ‘proprietors’. Often made up of 6-10 families (sometimes more), these groups had a select number of years to develop the land. “Developing” meant clearing the forest to create open spaces for crops and livestock, and cutting down trees for houses, fences, and businesses.

The peak of the deforestation occurred between 1830 and 1880. It is estimated that, with the exception of northern Maine and the more mountainous regions, nearly 80% of forested regions in New England had been cleared during this time.

Consequently, New England saw a shift in wildlife as well. Where wolves, turkeys, beavers, moose, and cougars once roamed, there was an influx of open-land species like skunks, meadowlarks, rabbits, and foxes.

As settlers moved farther west, many of the New England farms were abandoned, allowing the forests time to re-populate. The tree most common in the first phase of re-population was the white pine, which dominated most of the re-growth in New England. As the white pine stands began to mature, the opening of the Panama Canal and establishing of the railroad created a simultaneous demand for solid shipping containers. Portable sawmills depleted what little re-growth had occurred, and the 1938 hurricane depleted it even further.

In 1897, a group of men formed the Massachusetts Forests and Parks Association, intending to address some of New England’s environmental concerns. Though its primary focus was wildlife conservation, one member – Harry Reynolds – was mainly concerned about New England’s forests. He communicated with several government officials, both state and federal, pushing for measures to protect the land. Responding to a need for forest management, Mr. Reynolds and some of his colleagues formed the New England Forestry Foundation in 1944.

The NEFF set clear guidelines on tree harvesting, and began working with both landowners and lumber companies to enforce the guidelines. Though they met with some resistance in the beginning, by 1946 the Foundation was working with 20 properties that each averaged about 150 acres. By June of 2005, the NEFF managed over 20,000 acres of New England’s forests.

The NEFF’s forest management is multi-faceted. They start by analyzing the current condition of a stand or plot of land. Often, the previous manager has begun a “treatment”, or forest management system, of his own. NEFF’s forest manager must determine whether it is best to continue with the current treatment, or start fresh. The first step is usually one of three harvesting methods: Intermediate Thinning, Regeneration, and Allowable Harvests. After that, the forest is monitored and maintained, which is far more complex than it sounds!

In 1907, just a few years before Mr. Reynolds began making his pleas for forest conservation, a Harvard professor by the name of Richard T Fisher founded Harvard Forest. As its founder and first Director, he began working with his students to develop a comprehensive reforestation plan. What made Mr. Fisher’s plan different was that it took into consideration things like land-use history, human activity, and natural disturbances like hurricanes and thunderstorms. He initiated a series of studies, out of which came the concept of “ecological forestry”. It has revolutionized New England forest management. In the process, he also developed a set of world-renowned dioramas depicting the New England landscape and all its dramatic changes.

Efforts like these have paid off. Between 1885 and 1925, forest cover more than doubled, and exceeded 70% by 1952. It has steadily increased ever since. Over time, New England has learned how to effectively combine natural and managed re-growth to create forests that are much more diverse and ecologically sound.

While most people celebrate the return of the forests, some consider the loss of grassland and agricultural habitats tragic. They believe the “natural” forests in New England are less natural than the ones that were converted to farmland when the area was first settled, and to some extent, they’re right. The forests are not left to grow as they would naturally.

Instead, they are carefully managed by people who have spent considerable time learning the about the history, and the ecological impact, of New England’s changing landscape. By doing so, they are able to build heartier, more robust forests. Trees are still harvested, but they are harvested carefully. With consideration for how each tree, and its absence, will affect the ecology. New England’s forests may not be 100% natural, but they are being built to last.

Sources: “Legacies of the agricultural past..”, Jesse Bellemare, Glenn Motzkin and David R. Foster; D. R. Foster. Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999; New England Forestry Foundation; Harvard Forest

The McCormick and Baxter Creosoting Company Superfund Site is an incredible example of derelict urban space. It is a postapocalyptic wasteland of the highest order. It is an abandoned indistrial zone of more than 50 acres that has been declared a Superfund clean-up site because of creosote and heavy metal pollution.


If you’ve never visited, and you live in Portland, you really should. There is no security, and people are often wandering around. It’s great for urban mountain biking or just exploring.

Be careful though!

The soil and water are still toxic, so don’t take your dogs. Not to mention the fact that it’s just illegal to be there. But no one seems to care.



Information about the McCormick & Baxter Creosote Superfund Site from the EPA:

The McCormick & Baxter site is located on the northeast shore of the Willamette River in north Portland. The legal address is 6900 North Edgewater Ave., Portland, Oregon 97203, and DEQ’s Environmental Cleanup Site Information (ECSI) number for this site is 74. The site includes about 43 acres of land and about 15 acres of sediments beneath the Willamette River.

McCormick & Baxter Creosoting Company operated between 1944 and 1991, treating wood products with creosote, pentachloro-phenol, and inorganic (arsenic, copper, chromium, and zinc) preservative solutions. Historically, process wastewaters were discharged directly to the Willamette River, and other process wastes were dumped in several areas of the site. Significant concentrations of wood-treating chemicals have been found polluting soil and groundwater at the site, and in river sediments adjacent to the site.

From 1942 to 1990, McCormick & Baxter treated utility poles and railroad ties with creosote, pentachlorophenol (PCP), and arsenic compounds. Waste oils generated from the wood-treatment processes were disposed of in unlined ponds and concrete tanks on-site. Surface water runoff from the site was discharged to the slough until 1978, when it began to collect in two storm water collection ponds.

In 1983 and 1984, a consultant to McCormick & Baxter found that soils throughout the site were contaminated with arsenic, chromium, copper, PCP, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are constituents of creosote. Soil contamination extends to depths of 40 feet below ground surface (bgs) in some areas. The consultant’s sampling in 1984-88 indicates that the shallow aquifer beneath the site is contaminated with many of the same substances to a depth of 175 feet bgs. Beneath the site, the shallow aquifer is interconnected with the deep aquifer. The deep aquifer within 4 miles of the site provides drinking water to approximately 97,000 people.

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The Taylor Yard in 1925, courtesy of The River Project. Click the photograph and then scroll down to see what it looks like today as modeled in Google Earth.

What will its Future Reflect?

Taylor Yard is a beaten up place, marked by the phases of Los Angeles history. This 200 acre site, just north of downtown along the L.A. River, is reported to be the place where the City of Angels got its name. According to The River Project, Father Crespi, diarist for the Portola Expedition, gushed for over 1,000 words on August 2, 1769 about this “green, lush valley,” with its “very full flowing, wide river,” and “riot of color” in the surrounding hills. The expedition feasted on the plentiful game and fish and named the river and valley for “Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula,” or the Queen of the Angels.

The Taylor Yard today, via Google Earth

After almost 200 years as part of the Rancho San Raphael, which stayed with the Verdugo family after California was annexed by United States in 1850, the land was subdivided in 1881. The area then hosted farms, residences and summer cottages for a few decades before the natural splendor that wowed LA’s founders was buried definitively by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1920’s. Southern Pacific used the site as a freight-switching facility and employed about 75% of the workforce in the surrounding communities.

In the late 1930’s, the river’s naturally dynamic banks were imprisoned in concrete as part of a massive flood-control project, and Taylor Yard consolidated its central role in the city’s development as a modern industrial center.

As the local industrial economy declined, the landscape it made sank into abandonment and decay. In the 1960’s, Southern Pacific began re-routing trains away from downtown and Taylor Yard. In 1985, the site lost its function as a freight switching facility, along with several hundred jobs.

Such a shabby site seems an unlikely prize to fight over. But fought over it is. In 1999, when City Council approved a developer’s proposal for an industrial and retail development that would have put 650,000 square feet of industrial warehouses on the site and next to a residential area, the community fought back. An alliance of nearly 40 community, business, faith-based, environmental and social justice organizations successfully challenged the city’s approval of the project in court, and the developer opted to sell the land to the state.

The competition over the future of Taylor Yard reflects two competing visions of the site. One vision is grounded in the site’s current conditions – well-trampled, largely abandoned – and leads to proposals for utilitarian developments. The other vision calls upon the natural wonder the site once was to support demands to make the site serve the recreation, health and spiritual needs of its community the way it once served the community’s need for jobs.

In the first vision, there is little about the site that needs to be protected; in the second, the redemption of the neighborhood, the river and the city is at stake. As Arthur Golding, Chair of the L.A. River Task force of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, writes, “The Los Angeles River today is a relic of the physical, economic and intellectual landscape of the 1930’s.” He goes on to declare that, “to rethink the river is to discover a unique opportunity to define urban places, join neighborhoods and communities together, and reconnect us to our landscape and our history.”

In 2000 the second vision gained ground when the State of California allocated $45 million to purchase a portion of the site for a new state park. The groundbreaking for the 40-acre park was held in January 2005. The park will house soccer fields, a running track and other sports facilities, in addition to 20 acres of natural parkland, picnic tables, an amphitheater and bike paths. While scaled back from earlier plans, the groundbreaking nonetheless represents concrete progress towards a green, living Taylor Yard that nourishes nearby communities instead of dragging them down.

When the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) recently announced that the preferred route for a new high-speed train between L.A. and San Francisco would border the site – a proposal no doubt based on the site’s current conditions – outraged editorials reflected widespread community investment in the new, redemptive vision of Taylor Yard. As stated in an opinion column by the Los Angeles Downtown News, “There is simply too much potential for a great community resource to have it compromised by a high speed train.”

The CHRSA bowed to public pressure and, on August 3, 2005, announced that, “instead of selecting a specific alignment, a wide corridor has been identified for further study between Burbank and Los Angeles Union Station.”

The fact that the redemptive vision for Taylor Yard had enough traction to get the CHRSA to reclassify the site as part of an area for future study, rather than the preferred route for the high speed train, indicates a revolutionary departure from the usual thinking about environmental and community impacts from major projects. Normally, such thinking centers around how much harm a project is expected to cause. It’s a new thing to base activism, and subsequently public decision-making, on the improvements a project could prevent.

It’s a new and hopeful thing. And it’s not limited to Taylor Yard. Similar work has been going on for even longer to create a park in “the Cornfield,” another derelict industrial site about two miles downriver from Taylor Yard. Both projects are part of a broader initiative to “bring back” the L.A. River and remake the surrounding neighborhoods. The Center for Law in the Public Interest, one of the groups behind the “Heritage Parkscape” initiative to link cultural and historic resources around the heart of the city, articulates the challenge directly: “In park-poor Los Angeles, it is necessary to bring natural space to the people, and take people to the natural space.”

It is far from certain to what degree the new vision will prevail at Taylor Yard and in the city as a whole. Utilitarian needs for jobs and infrastructure remain, and not everyone is bought into the new vision. Regardless of the outcome of any individual struggle, however, the fight for Taylor Yard and other sites along the L.A. River provides a model for other campaigns to move beyond “preservation” to work for livable – and living – communities, even in places where they’ve already been lost.

On April 26, 1986 the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant performed a routine 20-second shut down of the system that seemed to be just another test of the electrical equipment. Seven seconds later, a surge created a chemical explosion that released dangerous radionuclides into the atmosphere. The force of the explosion spread contamination over large parts of the old Soviet Union, now the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Based on the official reports, nearly 8,400,000 people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were exposed to the resulting radiation. According to official reports, thirty-one people died immediately and 600,000 liquidators, involved in fire fighting and clean-up operations, were exposed to dangerously high doses of radiation. Whilst serving compulsory military service for the USSSR, tens of thousands were sent to the reactor in Chernobyl to try to contain the radioactivity. Tragically, in the case of Chernobyl, time does not heal wounds. News of the disaster and its devastating effects has long ago fallen from the headlines, replaced by new calamities.

Between 23 – 29th of March 2005, Humanity for Chernobyl completed interviews with Chernobyl liquidators in their native city of Donetsk in far eastern Ukraine. Chernobyl victims face not only continuous major health problems, but also the economic and political problems in Ukraine. Together these problems make life for Chernobyl victims almost impossible.

Many of these people are not able to receive the medical attention they desperately require and have a tiny pension, which goes nowhere near the actual cost to buy necessary medical drugs. Most liquidators need surgery, hospitalization, blood tests, medication, and vitamins. Many liquidators need operations, which they can never afford. With their pension of about 100 dollars a month, they are not able to buy food and they can hardly afford to buy the drugs necessary for them to survive. The cost of medication is comparable with prices in the U.S since most medical drugs are not produced within Ukraine. The unique kleptocratic market system there inflates the price of everything, especially medicine.

Soldiers who had injuries before Chernobyl were also sent to work in the plant. Vladimir Filatov was serving in Afghanistan where he suffered 3 injuries and contracted malaria, and 5 years later he was sent to Chernobyl. Another liquidator Alexander Antymonjuk was the only one of 14 people who survived a mining accident and a few years later was sent to Chernobyl. Unfortunately, the pension for these people is not equivalent to their achievements in serving their country.

Chernobyl victims who are able to perform some kind of work are trying to find it, but many are afraid to say that they are Chernobyl victims as Ukrainian companies may not want to employ them.

Konstantin Slav is still trying to work. He doesn’t tell anyone at his workplace that he is a liquidator and he needs serious medical care & observation. It seems to be an extraordinary but recurring theme that employers will fire workers if they realize that they were liquidators.

Chernobyl is a taboo subject in Ukraine and being a Chernobyl victim does not win you any favors. Slav and others like him suffer not only enormous challenges to their health, but they also face being stigmatized by their own communities. In Ukraine it is not easy to find and keep jobs, even for young and healthy people, and there is no place for invalids.

Every Chernobyl liquidator is a hero having served a duty to humanity at large. Some are unable to continue, thousands have already passed away and more and more each day fall prey to their untreated illnesses. For photographs and Chernobyl liquidator stories please look at the Humanity for Chernobyl website.

"Standard Oil formed the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company. Not long after, the company changed its name to Anaconda Mining Company. The company engaged in questionable business practices, and at one point they even resorted to gunning down strikers in the Anaconda Road Massacre…[In the] 1950s, the Anaconda company switched its focus from the costly and dangerous practice of underground mining to open pit and strip mining. This marked the beginning of the end for the boom times in Butte." wikipedia

"Thousands of homes were destroyed to build the Berkeley Pit, which opened in 1955. At the time, it was the largest truck-operated open pit copper mine in the United States. Other strip mines were built in the area, a few of which are still operational. In 1982… the water pumps at the bottom of the pit were shut down, which resulted in heavily acidic water [pH 2.5] filling up the pit." wikipedia

"The Pit received national attention as a poster child of environmental damage when a flock of migrating snow geese chose to land and rest on the Pit’s toxic waters in November of 1995. They drank the highly acidic water and close to 350 died." ButteAmerica

"The water in the underground mines and Berkeley Pit is highly acidic and high in concentrations of arsenic, copper, cadmium, cobalt, iron, manganese, zinc, and sulfate, plus other inorganic constituents." MBMG

"As of April 6, 2005, the Pit’s water level was 5,251.43 feet above sea level. The water level climbed about 3.65 feet since the last issue of PitWatch in Fall 2004. Since June 1996, when PitWatch was first published, the water has risen about 123.15 feet." PitWatch

The EPA built a facility on the south shore of the pit to both remove the copper and add lime to the water, making a sludge that can then be dumped back into the pit. This U.S. $18 million facility is removing metals from 2 million gallons of water per day flowing from Horseshoe Bend.

Copper is recovered from the water and smelted elsewhere. The operation of this extraction facility requires ten tons of lime per day and generates a sludge contaminated with iron that is dumped back into the pit water. The copper in the water is swapped for iron in the water. In other words, the EPA cleanup is making the pit more toxic. It’s a "terminal sink."

Eventually, the water level will rise to the so-called critical level of 5,410 feet above sea level. One source forecast that this would happen in 2021, a more recent one claimed it would happen in 2018.

The water level has 158 more feet to rise before it reaches the critical level. Since the Pitwatch organization started keeping track in 1996, the water has risen about 123 feet.