Word: reporter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Today, according to the report, a five-mile wedge of Seveso has been successfully detoxified, at a cost of $32 million, by government teams that cleared and buried entire acres of plants and even topsoil. Most of the 736 residents who were originally evacuated have been able to return to their homes, but 285 are still locked out of a 215-acre area enclosed by the yellow fence. That inner bulls-eye remains blighted by concentrated "leopard spots" of contamination and continues to defy all attempts at purification. "It may be a wasteland forever-we just don't know...
...committee report spares almost no one who was involved in the disaster. The operation of the plant, owned by the Swiss firm Givaudan of the Hoffmann-La Roche chemical and pharmaceutical group, was unsafe to begin with. Company officials waited 27 hours after the accident before notifying municipal officials of the danger. Even then, city and provincial administrators were slow to respond. In separate judicial actions, in fact, ten local officials face possible charges of dereliction of duty...
...cancer in animals. One, benzene, has been linked to leukemia in humans. Women living in the area have suffered 50% more miscarriages than would be expected. There is also a high incidence of birth defects among children; of 24 youngsters in the southernmost section of the neighborhood, health officials report four are mentally retarded. Local residents are doubly upset by the suggestion that they leave the area because their houses are now virtually unmarketable, and without money to rent elsewhere, most of them simply have no place...
More often, police are victims of the rising freeway fury. Last year 413 California highway patrolmen were attacked and injured by people they had pulled over to the side of the road, up from 244 in 1973. The Los Angeles police report 364 incidents last year in which vehicles were used for assault...