Word: toxication
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Uncle Sam's big toxic cleanup is a failure -- and a legal nightmare...
...reason for the stillness is the neighborhood's proximity to something called the Brio Superfund site, a place that once housed two waste-disposal plants and now contains a witches' brew of toxic effluviums. Southbend's wells have been polluted by such chemicals as chloroform and xylene, while a black, oozing tar has bubbled upward into driveways and garages. Residents say air contaminants, such as trichloroethane, have been responsible for personal tragedies. Among them has been a rash of birth defects: in one four-month period, 11 deformed children were born; other children suffered serious heart and reproductive-organ problems...
...wrong with the extensive government cleanup program known as Superfund. Though nearly $1 billion has vanished in litigation, damages and other costs, virtually nothing has been done to the Brio mess in the way of actual cleanup. The pattern has been regularly repeated nationwide: instead of redressing the worst toxic-dumping problems, the program has become a vast legal nightmare, one that has turned interested parties against one another in a frenzy of litigation...
...mankind can do to the environment. "I first saw the dangers in Stavropol, where poor farming practices produced sandstorms that carried away topsoil," he said during an interview with TIME. While in the Kremlin, he confronted one horror story after another of skies blackened by smokestacks, rivers ruined by toxic wastes and fields flooded by ill- conceived dams. "Farmers rebelled against these outrages," he said, "but because of the command system, their revolt was not heard." Then came the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, which "was the final argument. All of us then understood the kind...
...Croatia from the fighting that has ravaged the Balkans; the establishment of a Geneva-based industry council that would help prevent chemical catastrophes like the gas leak that killed 2,000 in Bhopal, India; and an initiative to focus attention on problems that involve the use and disposal of toxic products by the world's military establishments...