Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much more might be done, however, to find new methods of taking the poisonous punch out of hazardous chemicals. The EPA spent only $43 million in the first five years of the Superfund program on basic research and development of such techniques. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, as much as $50 million a year could be spent usefully...
...paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident's bright white graffito: GOODBYE TIMES BITCH...
...downhill. Parents seldom ventured into the area. So the town fathers and mothers did not know enough to fear that the moon glob and the barrels might have come from the Baird & McGuire factory, the plant at the Pastures' edge that produced pesticides and insecticides. Then in ( 1982 the EPA ranked the land near the top on its national list of high- priority hazardous-waste sites. The following year the town government forced the plant to close. "Two years ago I thought it was over," says Leah Abbott, one of the homemakers in Holbrook (pop. 11,140) who has found...
...Every few months, it seems, there is another frightening bulletin. First the EPA found the soil and water around the factory laced with arsenic, DDT and chlordane, among other contaminants. The most pressing concern was the danger to drinking water. Three town wells had been adjacent to Baird & McGuire; the last one was closed only in 1982. Running by the factory is the Cochato River, which for years flowed to Holbrook's water supply. But in 1983 the river was sluiced away from drinking water, and the most intensely contaminated ground near the factory covered with a clay...
...into the Cochato--and leaching Lord knows where else, say the minority of townspeople who are upset. A water main that runs right under the site still supplies a thousand homes. Last spring the Cochato's sediment was found to include arsenic and naphthalene. Then last summer even the EPA seemed jolted: high concentrations of dioxin were discovered at Baird & McGuire...