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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Texas A&M University in College Station Texas,¹ has been conducting research into so-called “select agents,” i.e. biological agents that the government thinks can be turned into biological weapons. The university’s efforts are part of an $18 billion federal program to develop vaccines.

On April 20, 2007 the Centers for Disease Control — the CDC — issued a cease-and-desist order for Texas A&M’s work with the Brucella bacterium.² On June 30, the order was expanded to include all work with select agents and toxins.³ The CDC then conducted a five-day comprehensive inspection of the A&M labs and issued a report⁴ on August 31 listing numerous flaws in oversight, working conditions, and security, including missing vials of select agents, unauthorized research with recombinant DNA, access to the lab by unauthorized personnel, and exposures of lab workers to bacteria that cause brucellosis and Q fever that went unreported to the CDC.

Based on the comprehensive inspection, the CDC has extended the suspension of all select agent and toxin work at A&M until all the issues identified in its 21-page report are addressed.

On September 6, Texas A&M’s interim president, Eddie Davis, held a press conference to address the report.⁵ As to how the universities “select agent” program got into trouble, he said:

“I would tell you that it is our assessment that it we have not had the level of expertise in terms of plants and the complex processes required to run such a select agent program and we’re putting that in place with new personnel.”

On the eve of the press conference, the Sunshine Project, a small non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, that is dedicated to biological weapons control, released documents it had just obtained through a Texas Public Records Act request.⁶ The documents indicated that a flood had occurred in one of the labs on campus.

In a phone interview, Edward Hammond, Director of the Sunshine Project, described what he knows so far about the incident:

“It was obviously a serious flood that happened. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of information. But what we know was that on the twenty-second of February, a biosafety level [BSL] 3 lab that was handling biological weapons agents flooded at the university. It flooded so badly — the water came from above — that the integrity of the lab was clearly compromised. A number of seals were broken. Water infiltrated into the lab from outside.

What’s really perplexing about this is that although the flood occurred on the twenty-second of February, there’s no record of any safety inspection of the lab until seven weeks later, the 16th of April, which probably not co-incidentally was the same day that federal agents arrived on the Texas A&M campus to probe their research program. So we have this nearly two-month delay between a flood that compromised the integrity of a laboratory handling biological weapons agents and any apparent action to assess the damage and get about the business of fixing it.”

University President Davis indicated at the press conference that he was hearing about the flood for the first time then and there.

Davis’ ignorance was no surprise to Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Trivalley CAREs⁷ in Livermore, California, whose organization has sued to keep the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from opening its own BSL-3 facility.

“This is both a national problem and a specific problem at Livermore Lab,” she said in a telephone interview.

“Historically, the manager for Livermore Labs has been the University of California and historically, the University of California has known very little about what actually goes on at the laboratory. I would not be surprised at all to find out in the future that the [new] UC-Bechtel management is in the same position vis-a vis the Livermore biofacility that the Texas A&M President was in respect to the Texas A&M lab, which is they don’t know.”

Representatives of the CDC declined to be interviewed for this story. But in email to this writer, CDC spokesman Von Roebuck wrote that “[a]s part of the select agent rules, labs or entities that are certified are required to immediately report any potential lab exposures, releases or loss of a select agent. Historically, the entities in the program have alerted the CDC to these.”

The Texas A&M situation points out what can happen if the entity inadvertently or intentionally fails to report, and its managing institution –often a university is kept in the dark about what is going on at the lab.

Edward Hammond’s research has turned up similar problems at other labs. He cited a number of exposures to agents including anthrax, plague, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, at the University of New Mexico, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley.

At the press conference, Texas A&M President Davis said, “I think it’s fair to say that the review that was done at Texas A&M in July was very intense, very thorough and very deep. My expectation is that other institutions, under that same level of review, would probably have findings that could be reportable to the CDC.”

Marylia Kelley questions the need for all the high-containment biolabs that are sprouting up across the country, and says money is behind the building boom:

“This country is building way too much biowarfare agent research capacity at other sites in addition to Livermore Lab. Tri-Valley CAREs believes that what is needed is an overarching national assessment of our biodefense capabilities, to look at whether, in fact, we have any deficiencies in our capabilities. The Bush Administration has thrown about $36 Billion on the table and initiated what is in fact a multiagency feeding frenzy to get part of this $36 Billion to build all these facilities willy-nilly across the country.”

Texas A&M hopes to have its labs reopened by the end of 2007.

Sources

¹Google Maps

²A copy of the order is in the Texas A&M files of the Sunshine-Project at http://sunshine-project.org/

³Ibid.

⁴A copy of the report is in the Texas A&M files of the Sunshine-Project

⁵This writer attended by telephone and recorded the event.

⁶The documents are posted on the website of the Sunshine Project

⁷The Tri-Valley CAREs website

The federal government wants to do nuclear weapons testing and bio-warfare agent experimentation on Site 300, near the city of Tracy, California. Tracy, 19 miles from Livermore, home of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, is in the northern part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, some of the world’s most fertile farmland. It is a fast-growing city of the outer San Francisco Bay Area. The 2000 census pegged the population at just over 56,000 people. Five years later, a new estimate found that Tracy had added over 20,000 people.¹

A 5,500-unit housing development is planned for an area only 1 mile from the fence line of Site 300.² Like its neighbors in the Bay Area, Tracy is in earthquake country. The Black Butte Fault, the Midway Fault, the Carnegie Corral Fault and the San Joaquin Fault are all sources of seismic hazard in the immediate area. And Tracy would be endangered by a “well-placed” quake along the San Andreas, Hayward, or Calaveras faults.³

Site 300 is a 7000-acre (11 square-mile) open field owned by the Lawrence Livermore National Lab that is used as a high explosives testing range. It is located on Corral Hollow Road on the outskirts of Tracy, near the heavily-trafficked Interstate 580. Earthquake faults, such as the Elk Ravine Fault, traverse the whole area. Additionally, the area is prone to wildfires.⁴

A Witches’ Brew of Bugs and Bombs

Site 300 has been on the EPA’s “Superfund” list since 1990. It is polluted with many toxic and radioactive materials, including tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and uranium-238. Despite over 25 years on the list, the government still has no cleanup plans for Site 300.⁵

In early March, 2007, community members and environmentalists celebrated a victory when the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District rescinded its decision to allow the Lawrence Livermore Lab to test 350-pound bombs on Site 300. The planned tests were to have simulated full scale nuclear weapons blasts. The district withdrew its permission after learning from local residents that the bombs would contain depleted uranium. The lab did not mention the use of depleted uranium in its initial permit application.⁶

“Generally, depleted uranium is not considered radioactive because its radioactivity level is so low as to be equal to or below background level,” said Lawrence Livermore Lab spokesman David Schwoegler. “It is in the ballast of every sailboat and jetliner and commercial use.”⁷ However, having depleted uranium contained in boat and airplane ballast is different from letting it travel through the air on the wind, and settle on the ground where it might contaminate groundwater, the neighboring farm produce, and the wild plants eaten by the animals in the area. “If these huge explosions had been allowed to go forward, the hills, nearby waterways, the workers and the surrounding community would have all been put at risk,” said Loulena Miles, staff attorney for Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, a nuclear watchdog group in the area.⁸

But while plans for explosives testing are on hold while the federal government decides how it will respond to District’s decision, other plans with respect to Site 300 are going forward. On April 16, the Department of Homeland Security sent its “site selection” team to Site 300 to evaluate the site as a home for high-containment biowarfare agent research. Site 300 is one of 17 locations being evaluated for a proposed lab that is slated to cover 500,000 square feet.⁹

Consider that many communities do not want a “big box” Wal-Mart store in their neighborhoods. This lab would be equal in area to five Wal-Mart big boxes. And whereas Wal-Mart contains things that people find useful, such as groceries, toilet paper and DVDs, the lab would contain such unappealing items as anthrax, bubonic plague and Q fever in the BSL-3 portion of the lab, where potentially lethal infectious or exotic pathogens are kept. The BSL-4 portion of the lab would harbor organisms that cause diseases for which there is no known cure, such as the Ebola and Marburg viruses and Central European tick-borne encephalitis.¹⁰ Not exactly the kinds of things you go looking for when you visit a Wal-Mart.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that “community acceptance” will be one of the selection criteria for the lab. The Tracy City Council has voted against the lab. Additional opposition has come in the forms of petitions, letters to the editor, letter-grams, e-mails, and phone calls to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. Some 7000 people are estimated to have participated in some form of opposition to placing the lab on Site 300.¹¹ “What part of ‘no’ does the Department of Homeland Security not understand?” asks Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley Cares.¹²

It remains to be seen for how long “community acceptance” will remain a selection criteria for DHS. There is heavy opposition to locating a high-containment biowarfare lab in any sizable community, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Boston’s Back Bay. DHS might want to locate these labs in areas where there is a good chance of attracting the highly-educated personnel required to run such a facility. But situating such a lab in an urban area where such highly-educated people are likely to be, presents potential danger to millions. According to DHS, the potentially-affected community whose acceptance of the Department seeks is the community of people “living within a 60-mile radius” of a proposed facility. For Site 300, the potential community is over 7 million people.¹³

DHS wants to scare people into thinking that terrorists are busy designing biological weapons and we have to know what the terrorists are up to. This in itself is terrorism. The evildoers that the current administration would have us believe are lurking behind every tree would have to be extremely sophisticated to work with the organisms that one finds in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories. So sophisticated, in fact, that they would likely be state-sponsored. And by hiding biological research within classified nuclear weapons research facilities, the government leaves itself open to reasonable suspicion that it is the United States, not “terrorists”, that wants to develop offensive biological capabilities rather than to defend against them.

References

1 City of Tracy official web site
2 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007
3 Wikipedia entry for Tracy, California
4 Google Maps
5 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
6 Quick Facts About the Proposed Tracy Biowarfare Agent Research Facility, August 31, 2006
7 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, March 7, 2007
8 AP wire copy read on KPFA Evening News, March 8, 2007
9 Ibid.
10 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
11 Quick Facts, August 31, 2006, Op. Cit.
12 Press release, Tri-Valley CAREs, April 16, 2007, Op. Cit.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.

We’ve made a few improvements to make it easier to virtually visit the places we’ve written about. You can now browse all Sprol articles visually on a map in two different ways.

Visit the Sprol World Map, and via a Google Maps mashup, you can see all of the articles we’ve published so far right in your browser.

If you have Google Earth installed, you can download all Sprol articles in a KML file and visit all the places we’ve written about right from inside Google Earth. Just download the file and then double-click it to load the placemarks into Google Earth.

Seasons Greetings from Sprol!

According to an article by Matthew L. Wald published in the New York Times and excerpted below, Florida Power & Light shipped radioactive waste to regular landfills, municipal sewage treatment plants, and “some unknown locations.” According to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the company has concealed these shipments from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As a game, ask yourself if you would have concealed this information.

If you knew it. If your job might depend on it.

You would of course know that it would take a few decades before it would have any effect on anyone. That it would never be traced back to you.

How would you live with the knowledge?

…a week after the cleanup was completed at a dump site, the company found contamination at a level 20 times what was proposed by the state, and thousands of times higher than what the Environmental Protection Agency allowed for agricultural land; the surrounding area is used for cattle and citrus. emphasis added

[Plaintiff's attorney] Nancy La Vista said she planned to argue that tests of the boys’ baby teeth showed abnormally high levels of radioactive strontium, which is produced when atoms are split and that when ingested binds to human bones. Older people have strontium in their bones that was created from atmospheric nuclear testing. But, Ms. La Vista said, “These kids were all born after Chernobyl, after Three Mile Island, and after atmospheric testing.”

You’re seeing an oil spill off of the coast of Qatar. Spills like this are part of the job when working with oil tankers and huge volumes of fluids. They happen almost all the time.

Exploiting the vast reserves of petroleum in the Persian Gulf region has left unintended, if predictable consequences:

“The maritime people of the Gulf always depended on and cared for the marine and coastal environmental resources on which they depend. Since the discovery of oil, a rapid development process began, with some highly impressive results. This converted an area of extreme environmental hardship into one of the world’s highest per capita income groups. Some of the side-effects of this development process, however, are not entirely desirable. These include declining fish stocks, habitat loss and fragmentation, loss of biological diversity, declining primary marine productivity, as well as the pollution of water, biota, and inter tidal substrates. Perhaps not surprisingly, ecological degradation is also occurring from oil production, oil spills and oil transport. More oil from spills has been released into the Gulf than into any other region on Earth.” UNESCO

The practice of waging war also has a special impact on the natural world:

"One source of pollution that is often overlooked but is of particular interest to the Gulf is the effect of war and armed conflict. The speaker cited statistics of pollution in the Gulf produced through the Iran – Iraq War. The disturbing numbers relating to the Gulf War in 1991 of some 6 to 8 million barrels of oil being discharged into the Gulf dwarfs the numbers of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of some 500,000 barrels off the coast of Alaska." Qatar Petroleum

"Until the late 1960s, it had been almost taken for granted that the oceans were so vast that they would be able to cope with whatever pollution and wastes were dumped into them. Yet it was recognized early that ships, especially oil powered ships, could cause pollution. Both the United Kingdom and the United States introduced legislation in the 1920s to curb discharges of oil resulting from operations such as tank cleaning. Attempts to tackle the problem at an international level were unsuccessful, however, and the outbreak of World War II resulted in the problem being deferred."
Oceans Atlas

Now, of course, there are many many international maritime laws about pollution.

Many people are familiar with the Exxon Valdez spill. It was the largest oil spill in the United States since the 1968 Mandoil spill (pdf), and the largest tanker spill ever in Alaska. Yet Valdez ranks 41st in this list of the largest tanker spills in the world. But oil development spills oil all the time, not just when a particularly destructive if predictable accident happens. Prince William Sound has still not yet recovered.

"At first, many people repeated what was then thought as common knowledge, oil dissipates, nature heals quickly, all will be well in a year or two. This has not been the case with the Exxon Valdez. This massive 987-foot tanker has left a lingering, long-term effect on the natural habitat that surrounds these pristine waters, along with an enormous socio-economic effect that has left many people wondering when and where the next oil spill will be. Many associated with the recovery process, and its more than one hundred projects per year, say it will take longer than a human lifetime to determine if a full recovery is possible (Fine 1999)." Exxon Valdez

It usually takes a disaster to motivate people to change things for a while, and the Valdez wreck was no different. It spurred the passage of the Oil Pollution Act, which among other things banned single-hull vessels in U.S. waters. The EU may be in the process of banning them, but there seem to be some procedural issues.

Some bacteria thrive in oil contaminated seawater. They have evolved to prefer such environments due to natural underwater features called oil seeps.

"Not all oil in the ocean was put there by people. Natural seeps have been discharging petroleum hydrocarbons into the marine environment for millions of years. About 200 natural underwater oil seeps have been identified around the world. In Canada, natural seepage has been observed off the coasts of Labrador as well as the north coast of Baffin Island in the Arctic." Environment Canada

"Because spills are much more concentrated, their impacts on marine organisms are more intense, and in many respects qualitatively different than those of seeps… Toxic constituents are released steadily, but gradually, over the region, allowing currents and natural mixing to dilute their concentrations. Tar mounds on the ocean floor are colonized by bacteria, forming the basis of productive meiofaunal communities. Seep oil does not accumulate on the surface in very thick layers, nor does it cause oiling of many birds or result in heavily tarred beaches. Rocks and cliff faces in some areas show localized deposits of weathered tar.

Major spills, however, may blanket the sea surface of a large area with fresh oil. A thick, gooey water-in-oil emulsion, or “mousse,” often forms on the surface after oil spills, eventually falling to the ocean floor in large amounts or fouling the intertidal zone, beaches, rocky shores, and salt marshes. Organisms including larvae may have no opportunity to escape the sudden influx of oil and high concentrations of its dissolved toxic fractions. Spills often kill large numbers of animals including sea birds and marine mammals. For these reasons, Burger states that, “in any given area, the amount of oil from a catastrophic spill far overshadows the oil coming from natural seeps." County of Santa Barbara

"Sub-lethal effects that impair the ability of individual marine organisms to reproduce, grow, feed or perform other functions can be caused by prolonged exposure to a concentration of oil or oil components far lower than will cause death. Sedentary animals in shallow waters such as oysters, mussels and clams that routinely filter large volumes of seawater to extract food are especially likely to accumulate oil components. Whilst these components may not cause any immediate harm, their presence may render such animals unpalatable if they are consumed by man, due to the presence of an oily taste or smell." ITOPF

Sublethal toxic effects of oil spills are important for people who eat farmed fish, which can’t naturally escape elevated levels of toxins in the water, and lack a locally bred instinctive drive.

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