Learning to cope with high-tech risks
We are, all of us, out there on emergency bivouac.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
In Middleport, N.Y., a small community northeast of Buffalo, elementary schoolchildren huddle over their notebooks, just 400 yards from a pesticide factory operated by the FMC Corp. A month ago a faulty pump at the neighboring plant spewed out methyl isocyanate gas, the same substance that was stored at Bhopal, India, where more than 2,500 people died last week. Firemen evacuated the 600 youngsters from the school, and 30 of them were treated for eye irritations.
Some 7,000 miles away from Middleport, schoolchildren in Tokyo practice drills very much like the air-raid exercises of the '50s, ducking under their desks at the screech of an alarm. Reason: if a large earthquake hits the city-as one did in 1983-the network of gas pipes that circulates throughout Tokyo could explode, unleashing, among other things, a deadly blizzard of flying glass.
That problem will not affect Times Beach, Mo. Windows in the houses there are boarded up, and the wind whistles down the lonely streets of a newly created ghost town. Last year more than 2,000 inhabitants left when the water and ground were found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of dioxin.
The participants in all three cases face a common dilemma: industrial dangers. Those hazards can be divided into two rough categories: primary and secondary disasters. Primary disasters are the quick explosions, fires or leaks that strike with the surprise of a hurricane, killing instantly and widely. The tragedy last week at Bhopal, when deadly gas escaped from a Union Carbide plant, was of the primary variety. Such violent, large-scale tragedies are dramatic and terrible, but extremely rare, particularly in developed nations like the U.S. The occasional deaths that do occur in those mishaps are almost always confined to employees who were on-site at the time. "There are a lot of accidents in which two dozen miners are killed," says a spokesman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Washington. "But fortunately, there have been damn few in which great numbers of civilians have been involved."
More chronically worrisome to environmentalists are the secondary disasters, those that lead to the slow poisoning of ground or water. Hazardous-and nuclear-waste dumping fit into this category. With little knowledge or thought of the long-term consequences, factory trash containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chloroform, dioxin and radioactive traces is buried underground or dumped into the ocean. Although absolute links are difficult to prove scientifically, many of the chemicals in hazardous wastes are believed to cause cancer and birth defects. More than 66,000 different compounds are used in industry, and less than 2% have been tested for possible side effects. Over the years the dangers of slow, toxic seepage may far outweigh the confined outburst of a primary disaster.
Nevertheless, the specter of a violent chemical explosion is very real. Late in November, for example, Mexico suffered its worst industrial calamity when a series of gas tanks exploded in San Juan Ixhuatepec, a suburb of Mexico City, killing 452 people.