The Poisoning of America

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As a result, the poisons have turned up in surprising places. Not far from home plate at New York City's Shea Stadium, a festering pond containing PCB, toluene, benzene and DDT turns red, blue or green as the mixture of the waste changes. The mess is so flammable that the pool has caught fire twice in the past year. In the marshes around New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex, home of the pro football Giants, some 200 tons of mercury residues have contaminated Berry's Creek, causing Selikoff to declare, "On a bad day, breathing in the Meadowlands may be as dangerous as driving at Indianapolis." The abandoned shafts and tunnels in the hills above Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River lure illegal chemical dumpers. So much poison has been poured for so long into one deep hole near Pittston that Republican Senator John Heinz insists, "This is more dangerous than Three Mile Island because we don't really know what's down there." Six New Jersey men, including Russell Mahler, president of Hudson Oil Refining Corp., have been indicted in Pennsylvania on charges of illegally tossing chemicals into the shaft, thereby polluting the river.

No accurate count of all the toxic-waste dumps is possible. Many reveal themselves only when a flash flood or gradual erosion exposes rusting and cracking drums. Searching for clandestine sites, some 100 EPA agents are tracking down reports of midnight dumping, or seeking out acrid odors permeating wooded acres or strange colors staining rivers and streams. So far, the EPA estimates that there are some 50,000 sites where chemicals have been dumped. The EPA believes that 2,000 of these dumps may pose serious health hazards.

The public got an inkling of the seriousness of the problem last year with the revelation of the horror that had occurred in New York's Love Canal. Contamination from a landfill laced with chemicals seeped into the area on the outskirts of Niagara Falls. A total of 1,200 houses and a school had been built near the site. Alarmed by studies of damage to the residents' health, the Federal Government finally paid for the temporary evacuation of families. At present, 710 families have been declared eligible to move, and about half have left the area. Researchers are continuing to probe the residents' high incidence of cancer, birth defects and respiratory and neurological problems.

The Love Canal story emerged gradually, but three events this year in the New York City region demonstrated suddenly and spectacularly just how heedlessly the chemical compounds have been stored. In April, residents of Elizabeth, N.J., and nearby Staten Island, N.Y., were jolted by explosions from a dump containing at least 50,000 chemical-filled barrels. The blasts rattled windows in Manhattan skyscrapers ten miles away. On July 4, an industrial-paint-manufacturing company that stored chemical wastes in its backyard flamed into a four-alarm blaze that spread toxic fumes over the city of Carlstadt, N.J. Three days later, storage drums at a chemical disposal plant in Perth Amboy, N.J., erupted in a barrage of explosions and a roaring fire that wiped out seven buildings and 16 businesses in an industrial park. Nearby residences were evacuated for several hours because no one knew how toxic the spreading smoke might be.