Word: velsicol
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Excerpted in the New Yorker three months before it was published as a book, biologist Rachel Carson's eloquent, rigorous attack on the overuse of DDT and other pesticides--she called them "elixirs of death"--had already upset the chemical industry. Velsicol, maker of two top bug killers, threatened to sue the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which stood firm but asked a toxicologist to recheck Carson's facts before it shipped Silent Spring to bookstores...
...Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid--indeed, the whole chemical industry--duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media. (TIME's reviewer deplored Carson's "oversimplifications and downright errors...Many of the scary generalizations--and there are lots of them--are patently unsound...
...years the pesticide containing chlordane and heptachlor has been the nation's No. 1 termite killer. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that Illinois-based Velsicol Chemical Corp., the sole manufacturer of the chemical cousins, had agreed to stop production. The company disputed that exposure to the pesticide, which has been linked to increased risk of cancer, is a health hazard. But Velsicol said it would stop making the compound, which under the brand name Termide is used in about 1 million U.S. homes each year, until the EPA is satisfied that it can safely be applied...
...some 40 years, beginning in the 1930s, the Velsicol Chemical Co. (formerly the Michigan Chemical Co.) had dumped and burned toxic industrial chemicals on a 3.5-acre site along the Pine River near St. Louis, Mich. A county golf course was developed beside the dump. By the mid-'60s, fish in the river contained high levels of such known or suspected carcinogens as PBB, PCB and DDT. Working with EPA, the company in 1982 agreed to spend $38.5 million to clean up the area. At the golf course, all soil was removed to a depth of 3 ft. below...
...Velsicol is a subsidiary of Northwest Industries. The Michigan Chemical Company, the manufacturer of Firemast that began the PBB fiasco, is also a subsidiary of Northwest Industries. Both chemical companies are facing civil suits and criminal charges...