Word: icmesa
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...parliamentary investigating committee has issued a damning report on Italy's worst ecological disaster. On July 10, 1976, an explosion at the Swiss-owned Icmesa chemical plant discharged a thick white cloud of dioxin, one of the deadliest known poisons, over some 4,000 acres of the small industrial suburb 13 miles north of Milan. As the poison settled on homes and gardens in the following days, thousands of pets died, crops were infected and hundreds of people developed nausea, blurred vision and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of a skin disease known as chloracne...
...unlikely to be trusted by readers concerned with accuracy, responsibility or perception. A pity. For Fuller has just written a true, tragic account of Seveso. Italy, a town ravaged by a toxic chemical. The "Italian Hiroshima" occurred shortly after noon on July 10, 1976, when a chemical reactor at Icmesa, a plant owned by the Swiss firm of Hoffmann-La Roche, overheated, then blew its safety valve and released a huge grayish cloud into the clear Italian sky. Workers and company officials assumed that the cloud and the droplets that fell from it onto homes, gardens and livestock were composed...
Seveso's nightmare originated at Icmesa, a chemical plant that makes trichlorophenol, which is used in manufacturing disinfectant soaps and deodorants. The process can produce a highly toxic substance with the jawbreaking name of tetrachlorodibenzodioxine, or, as it is more commonly called, TCDD. On the morning of July 10, a stuck safety valve caused an autoclave to overheat and speed up the chemical reaction that produces TCDD. The result was an explosion that released two kilos (4.4 lbs.) of the poison...
Scorched Earth; Officials at Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss-based company that owns Icmesa, have urged Italian authorities to destroy the factory, tear down houses, burn the surrounding vegetation and skim off a foot of topsoil over the entire area affected by the TCDD. Italian officials have not yet decided to adopt such a scorched-earth policy. But army troops have so far evacuated more than 700 people from villages near the plant, and authorities have ordered blood tests on some 15,000 people in the area. Officials are also taking some controversial steps to confine the effects...
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