Word: soils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with hazardous waste, you become acutely aware of every sneeze, every rash. You wonder about being well 20 years from now." Chatting with fire fighters near a blazing Elizabeth, N.J., dump site at 3 a.m., Stoler glanced down to see his nylon sneakers "being eaten by chemicals in the soil. They were literally dissolving off my feet...
...than the steady rise in the number of wells found to be contaminated by chemicals. Fully 50% of all Americans depend on ground rather than surface water for their drinking supply. Water that may have fallen to earth as long as a century ago has percolated slowly down through soil and porous rock to collect in vast underground aquifers that were virtually void of chemical and bacteriological impurities. Now substances, mostly petrochemicals thought to have been harmlessly disposed of years ago, are beginning to show up even in the deeper U.S. wells. This contamination will grow as those forgotten chemicals...
Vance is even more concerned about the future. He fears that the ground water beneath the sandy soil has been polluted, and this will show up later in wells. "It's a perfect setup," he says. "We think what they did with some of the chemicals was just pour 'em out on the ground. Glub, glub, glub." When state and local officials failed to get results, the federal EPA declared a water emergency and took over the cleanup chore. So far, it has spent nearly $1 million and estimates that complete removal of all hazardous wastes...
...took years of local agitation and a lawsuit filed by the State of Michigan, but something now is being done by Hooker Chemical Corp. (which also left contamination at Love Canal) to help dispose of some 1.2 million cu. yds. of chemical waste, drums and contaminated soil on its 880 acres of property on the edge of Montague. The cleanup may be too late to satisfy many residents in the community, a small town (pop. 2,396) of gracious, shaded houses along the shores of White Lake. State water officials estimate that some 20 billion gal. of ground water have...
...past, ground water was kept pure because the soil at the earth's surface could be counted on to act as a filtration system, a kind of geological "kidney" that would scrub out bacteria and other insoluble contaminants placed on or in the ground before they could seep down to the water table, the ground water's upper limit. But this filtration system does not reliably screen out the waste chemicals cropland now leach into the soil from a variety of sources, including cropland that has been sprayed with pesticides, and industrial dumps like the pools into which...