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#environmental-disaster
4 articles
Deepwater Horizon: The Largest Marine Oil Spill in History
On the night of 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a massive offshore drilling rig working for the oil company BP in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, was finishing an exploratory well when a surge of high-pressure gas blasted up from the seabed, engulfing the rig in fire. Eleven workers were killed in the explosion and the inferno that followed; the rig burned for a day and a half and then sank, and the well a mile below on the ocean floor began to hemorrhage oil into the sea. The safety device meant to seal the well in just such an emergency — the blowout preventer — failed to work, and for eighty-seven days the broken well gushed crude oil into the Gulf as the world watched a live video feed of the plume billowing from the seabed and a succession of attempts to stop it failed. By the time the well was finally capped, an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released, making it the largest marine oil spill in history. The slick spread across the Gulf and fouled the coastlines of five states, killing birds, sea turtles, dolphins, and fish, devastating the fishing and tourism economies of the Gulf Coast, and inflicting ecological damage that would persist for years. The disaster was not, the investigations concluded, a freak accident or an act of nature, but the preventable result of a cascade of failures and cost-cutting decisions by BP and its contractors — a catastrophe born of choices that put schedule and expense ahead of safety. This is the story of the blowout, the spill, and the reckoning that followed.
Love Canal: The Neighborhood Built on a Toxic Dump
Love Canal was an ordinary working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York — streets of modest homes, an elementary school, families raising children. It was also built directly on top of one of the worst chemical waste dumps in American history. Beneath the lawns and the playground lay some 21,000 tons of toxic chemical waste — pesticides, solvents, dioxins, and dozens of other hazardous compounds — that the Hooker Chemical Company had buried in an abandoned canal through the 1940s and early 1950s. When the dump was full, Hooker capped it, and in 1953 sold the land to the local Board of Education for a single dollar, including in the deed a warning about the buried chemicals and a clause disclaiming all liability for what might happen. The school board built an elementary school on the site anyway, and homes rose all around it. For two decades the buried chemicals were largely out of sight. Then, in the 1970s, after years of construction had breached the clay cap and unusually wet weather raised the water table, the poison began to come back up — oozing into basements, surfacing in yards, pooling on the school playground, burning children's skin, and killing gardens. Residents who had noticed for years the strange odors and the unexplained illnesses — the miscarriages, the birth defects, the cancers — finally began to connect them to the ground beneath their feet. Led by a young mother named Lois Gibbs, the residents organized and fought, and in 1978 their crisis forced a presidential emergency declaration, the evacuation of hundreds of families, and the creation of the law that still governs the cleanup of toxic sites across America. This is the story of the neighborhood built on a poison, and the people who refused to be ignored.
Minamata: The Mercury Poisoning a Company Hid for Years
For more than three decades, a chemical factory in the small Japanese coastal town of Minamata discharged mercury into the sea, and for years the company that owned it knew, or had every reason to know, what that mercury was doing to the people who lived there. The Chisso Corporation made acetaldehyde using a process that produced methylmercury as a by-product, and from the 1930s it released that poison, in its untreated wastewater, into Minamata Bay and the surrounding Shiranui Sea. The mercury accumulated in the fish and shellfish that were the daily food of the local fishing families, and it destroyed their nervous systems. By the 1950s the town was witnessing terrible scenes: cats convulsing and hurling themselves into the sea, birds dropping from the sky, and then people — fishermen and their wives and their children — struck down by a mysterious illness that robbed them of control over their bodies, their senses, and sometimes their lives. Children were born already poisoned, having absorbed the mercury in the womb. When researchers traced the cause to the Chisso factory's effluent, the company disputed the science, funded doubt, and kept discharging mercury for years more. Most damning of all, Chisso's own company doctor had proved, in a quiet experiment with cats, that the factory's wastewater caused the disease — and the company suppressed his findings and ordered him to stop. The poisoning continued until 1968. The victims would spend decades fighting for recognition, compensation, and the simple acknowledgement of what had been done to them. This is the story of Minamata disease, one of the defining environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century, and of the long concealment at its heart.
Seveso: The Toxic Cloud That Changed European Safety Law
On a Saturday in July 1976, a chemical reactor at a factory near the small town of Seveso, north of Milan, overheated and burst its safety valve, releasing a cloud of toxic chemicals into the air over the surrounding countryside. The factory, called ICMESA, was a subsidiary of a Swiss multinational, and it was making an ingredient for disinfectants by a process that produced, as an unwanted byproduct, a tiny quantity of one of the most poisonous substances ever synthesized: the dioxin known as TCDD. The cloud carried some of that dioxin out over the towns of Seveso, Meda, and their neighbors, settling invisibly on gardens, fields, rooftops, playgrounds, and people. At first almost no one understood what had happened. The company was slow and evasive about the nature and the danger of what had escaped; it took days for the authorities to grasp that dioxin was involved, and weeks before the most contaminated area was evacuated. In the meantime, the warning signs accumulated: small animals and birds sickened and died, and children began to develop chloracne, the disfiguring skin condition that is a hallmark of dioxin poisoning. There were no immediate human deaths, but the contamination forced the evacuation of hundreds of people, the slaughter of tens of thousands of animals, the demolition of homes, and an agonizing public debate about the risks to pregnant women. Out of the disaster came the Seveso Directive, the European Union's landmark law on industrial hazards, which still bears the town's name. This is the story of the toxic cloud over Seveso, the slow reckoning with what it carried, and the safety regime it forced into being.
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