Word: toxication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...devastation is seldom certain or clear or quick. Broken chromosomes are unseen; carcinogens can be slow and sneaky. People wait for years to find out if they or their children are victims. The fears, the uncertainties and the conjectures have a corrosive quality that becomes inextricably mingled with the toxic realities...
...find out what it is like to live in the same neighborhood with toxic wastes, Associate Editor Kurt Andersen visited three communities with similar concerns but profoundly different circumstances. Times Beach, contaminated years ago, is now a Missouri ghost town; Holbrook, Mass., is discovering that it has a serious problem, but perhaps not a catastrophe; in Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government...
...nation," says O'Donnell, "it was like lightning. I thought, 'I have an answer!' " The same answer, she thinks, explains why Mark's best boyhood friend now has Hodgkin's disease. It might be coincidence, a professionally skeptical out-of-towner suggests. She looks wounded and incredulous. "With a toxic site as impregnated with the yuckos as this...
...September, four men and a woman in boots and rubbery white suits used a huge tread-mounted pump to dig out a 10-ft. plug of earth for testing by the EPA. Their gas masks hung nearby, just above the spot where a dark little stream flows from the toxic site under the fence and away into the forest. For now, the locals who are worried are waiting. They await the results of more soil and water tests, and the results of more precisely targeted health studies. Most of all, naturally, they await results at the site itself. They want...
First you tear up 250 acres of California ranchland. Then you fill the holes with tons of sewage, cyanide, Nair hair-removal cream, spoiled Coca-Cola syrup, winery dregs, rocket fuel, rat carcasses, nitric acid, paint chips and fish organs. What do you get? A state-of-the-art toxic-waste-treatment facility...