On August 12, 1975, on a hillside behind the farm of Hernando L. Acosta, near Holland, N.Y., a small “geyser” or “fountain” erupted and flowed into the tiny brook that cuts through that property. Acosta had developed a large “egg factory” in the course of past years and the brook ran beneath the huge sheds where his hens were housed, which were held in place over belt conveyors.
He was proud of his latest factory, which produced a daily average of twenty thousand eggs of top quality. Finding his brook contaminated with a green slimy and stinking material, the “egg king” traced the source to the hillside “fountain” where he was nearly overcome by fumes. He had found on the way to the source that the small trout in the brook had been killed. He also came upon dead and dying birds on that walk.
Outraged, he drove to Holland to report the flowing pollution. He gave no thought to his hens, all of which were dead when he returned. His new buildings and equipment were heavily mortgaged. And, like others, his efforts to draw the attention of authorities to his loss met with disinterest and inaction. His mortgage was foreclosed in the fall. And his story of the poisoned fountain that flowed into his tiny creek and caused his disaster was widely discredited. The reason for that is suggestive: no one else ever saw the small “fountain.”
At daybreak on the morning after his hens perished dynamiting began on the hill where it had appeared. A new quarry was being opened, it was said. For some weeks massive excavations continued on the hill site and reporters and others not engaged in the work were kept at a distance on the grounds that blasting made close approach unsafe.
Acosta took his loss and his subsequent frustrations in seemingly good spirit. But on November 19 of that year Mr. Acosta, an ardent sportsman, was killed in a hunting accident. It was assumed that he tripped and shot himself as he fell. But it is at least possible that his death was anything but accidental.
He was a cautious and experienced hunter, and no careful study was made to determine why he had, for that once, failed to carry his shotgun in the broken or open attitude. Apparently no ballistic check was undertaken to show his own gun was the death weapon. Mr. Hernando L. Acosta, in effect, could have been murdered as plausibly as he may have shot himself, and perhaps more plausibly. If so, why? Perhaps he knew too much, talked too much and kept digging into the cause of his miseries too stubbornly.
The following editorial appeared on the front page of the Olean Times-Harbinger on Thursday, July 7, 1977:
THE INDUSTRIAL “UNDERGROUND”
One year ago today this newspaper carried a front-page story with banner headlines on the “blue haze blight” of the potato chip crop in the Gainesville area of the Genesee Valley.
Every day last week this newspaper carried banner headlines and a front-page story about the sources of that blight, after a long and incredibly difficult effort by the staff to learn what the “hush-hush” facts were.
During the past week that Times-Harbinger “exclusive” has been picked up by every major newspaper, world-wide.
What the world learned may be summarized as follows:
The disposal of dangerous industrial and other wastes in deep wells has been a widespread and growing practice in USA and elsewhere for decades. With the development of machines capable of boring in hard rock holes of great diameter and at remarkable speed, this practice has become general. Wells twenty feet wide and as much as eight thousand or more feet in depth have been bored in thousands in recent years.
Geologists of high competence have been employed to select the sites of such drilling, in most instances. In many, these scientists have received payments far out of line for their assignments. Scientists are men, and even some highly trained men are open to corruption. Corruption was not, however, an ingredient of innumerable choices of bore sites which have led to a fantastic variety of difficulties, tragedies, losses and calamities to hundreds of thousands of victims. The trouble was “the state of the art.” Geology did not and still does not have a sufficiently detailed body of knowledge about the underlying formations of the earth’s crust to be able, in any instance whatsoever, to say, “You can drill here and put anything you like in the hole and it will not escape for all eternity.”
Furthermore, an unconscionable number of geologists, chemists and other scientists who served as consultants in site selecting were deliberately misled by management. A simplified parallel will serve to illustrate the method. Experts, if told to find a safe disposal site for caustic alkali, such as lye, could and did find such a seemingly proper formation. When, however, the industry had been hooked to the bore, it would pour down hundreds of tons of acid. Rock formations that would not be eroded by alkalis might dissolve rapidly when drenched in acids. And that sort of cheating was very common.
Even where there was no such hanky-panky the results were often grim. The very act of drilling often brought to the surface material that proved what had been deemed a single, unflawed formation was deeply faulted, cracked, filled by intrusive material of some other kind. Often, this intrusive layer extended for great distances and was permeable so that whatever waste might be dumped in the well would seep in the blotterlike layer for long distances, carrying the waste liquid to a point where it might emerge, as was the case of the Buffalo wastes in this area a year ago.
There are many other underground phenomena of nature which are very difficult or even impossible to ascertain from the surface or even from the careful study of a finished bore made by experts prior to use. What, again, in lay terms, seems to be an ideal well in pure, granitic rock, without a flaw of any kind, may have been bored near enough to one or another such phenomenon so that, with use and in time, the adjacent material vents into the well. Hot water and cold, corrosive mineraliferous waters, steam and gases of scores of sorts have thus intruded on wells that appeared safe and sound. When such an event happens the results can be so varied as to make a complete predictive list beyond the competence of modern science.
These and other possibilities have been known for decades and they have given rise to the highly secret, federally sponsored Office of Underground Disposal Management, a bureau which, until the Times-Harbinger acted, looked to be a harmless body of inspectors and scientist-advisers but was, actually, a vast organization linked with industry and given free reign in its long-time effort to keep the public from learning about the true nature and the frequent disasters in well-disposal practices.
Even now, only a sampling of the actual calamities that were hushed up has been uncovered. At least a dozen disasters of some sort owing to well leakage have already occurred in every one of the fifty states. Towns and cities relying on wells for municipal water supplies have suddenly found their underground waters unsafe, even poisonous.
Several earthquakes are now surely attributed to the deep-well disposal of liquid wastes which, by soaking large strata of unstable material, sand, pebbles, shale and so on, have had a “lubricating” effect that allowed the strata above them to slide and slip, with resultant tremors. That particular hazard of such bores has been known since the sixties when Denver, Colorado, suffered several times the normal number of previously rare quakes owing to the quantities of fluid wastes dumped into deep wells by manufacturers of poison gases for the military.
There is good evidence to support the belief that the great quake of last April in the Middle West which sent the Mississippi River at La Crosse, Wisconsin, in a “tidal wave” was owing to shifts of deep strata lubricated by wastes of industries in an area of a hundred miles around the suddenly dropped and wave-shattered city.
There are many more horror stories to come. The secret endeavors of federal and state governments, with the connivance of industry, to keep sources concealed has stuck the American public with innumerable odd events of a large or smaller sort, all harmful, and all or nearly all, with an official explanation of a deliberately misleading sort, when, that is, such events could not be kept from general knowledge by any means.
At this moment no less than
eighteen House and Senate committees are examining the previously “restricted” facts. No doubt legislation will follow, stringent and perhaps even adequate. For such craven secrecy is intolerable in America. Every top official in government and industry as well as every guilty scientist who contributed to this fantastic cabal must be tried and punished. The use of these bores for waste disposal must be stopped or at least permitted only for those wastes that cannot possibly create harm of any sort—which, perhaps, is no wastes at all.
What, then, shall we do with such wastes?
The question remains and it is desperate. Our rivers, still, after seven years of talk and even a good deal of action, are running sewers. The seas grow more dangerously polluted each hour. Science and technology are annually adding thousands of new substances and processes and artifacts to the list of our “achievements,” all productive of wastes, and often of brand-new types of waste material.
Matter is indestructible. We say that—and skip the implications.
Men everywhere are trying to solve these problems and solve them we must—or vanish as a species from the earth.
We are told, daily, by Washington and in the advertisements of the great producing corporations, that the alternatives now being implemented for disposal seem to be as promising as they are titanic in design and construction. Great mountains of solidified wastes will rise in empty deserts under impenetrable cover, and so stand, far from human habitat, eternally, or near enough to that. There they cannot liquify, seep into the earth or evaporate into the air. Enormous tunnels are being driven halfway across the continent and lined with impermeable materials to carry those wastes westward and eastward for later solidification. Underground railways will transport presolidified material to the same areas.
We believe these measures will solve most of the worst of our industrial waste disposal problems.
But the Times-Harbinger promises to keep on with the watch and to assess all the new systems when they go into operation. People in Olean, people in western New York State, people everywhere are, we believe, as proud as we, the editors, of our achievement. One small newspaper in a minor American city has succeeded in launching, by itself, a worldwide awakening and a revolution in uncounted thousands of hazardous industrial procedures.
We are proud, of course. But we feel this is only in fact a typical example of the “American way” of acting. One man or one newspaper can change the sum of events. No American is “powerless” save he believes it!
5. A Preface to the Next Chapters
The “blue haze blight” seen through excerpts from a single newspaper was a local event with world-wide consequences. The “chapters” immediately following concern some events of less magnitude. The first, about the Brownsville bees, is taken from press association reports. The two White House documents were “confidential” and meant to be burned. The peculiar account of the mishaps involving flatulence appeared in The Manhattanite, and the strange story of how the Mississippi Basin Horror began, and who first noticed the cause, appears in E. B. Black’s Popular History of Modern Dilemmas, which was published in 1986. Records of the secret conclave on river use were taken from tape recordings made covertly by one of the men present. Other sources are shown directly.
The intention here was to select “typical” events.
However, as these choices indicate, no environmental mishap or ecological blunder can truly be called typical. Each is unique but many are comparable. Thus any of a hundred of other events, some hushed up, some given massive press and TV coverage, could have replaced those selected.
Chemical additives to foods consumed by Americans had many and far more dire consequences than the example given. The Cleveland disaster was the only one of precisely that causation; but similar wastes in other bodies of water had far more terrible and widespread effects. The President who received the “secret” memos here reproduced was not the first nor, certainly, the last Chief Executive to be furnished with such sinister counsel. Nor was he first to act on such advice.
It is expected that these samplings will suggest how increasingly tormented the public became in the seventies. Toward the close of that decade it was hardly impossible to listen to a news broadcast or pick up a paper without encountering word of some new woe. Most were minor and local but their sum, alone, had collective impact and the larger tribulations, obviously, created great dread. Readers must not overlook that last fact: however worrisome or even alarming the future may be or become it will never give rise to terrors in such abundance and of such shocking novelty. Man does not and will not have the profligate technology for that harm; man’s numbers will not be great enough to have that impact on the biosphere; he probably lacks the mere resources to re-create that condition, even were he foolish enough to try restoring that kind of “civilization”; and surely he knows better now!
6. News Items
BROWNSVILLE FLEES BEES
APIAN ALAMO: TEXAS TERRIFIED
Brownsville, Texas, August 3, 1976. UIPA. The African bees have crossed the border early today near Brownsville and already several score Texans, mostly the young and a few elderly people, have been hospitalized. It is said that several hundred panicky citizens have fled this busy border city of seventy-seven thousand.
The invader, Apis mellifera (Gurgesson), is a mutant form of the “African” honeybee introduced in Brazil about mid-century. It soon escaped into the wilds and began moving northward, causing much pain and occasional deaths with a single sting, while multiple stings were often fatal. Thrusting into Mexico in 1974, its first mutant (Willard-Peccan) form became a hazard to man, greater than all other stinging and biting creatures including spiders, scorpions and poisonous snakes.
The new pesticide, Xano-Lethane, was massively air-sprayed over the infested areas and served to halt the northing trend on the Tampico-Mazatlan line by affecting queens of the subspecies.
The arrival of the almost equally dangerous Gurgesson mutant in Mexico City last spring has received world publicity. However, owing to the fact that Xano-Lethane had an unexpected spin-off in that it sterilized females in several species of insects responsible for the pollinization of a number of hardwoods and certain agriculturally valuable plants and commercially important flowers, the pesticide was not air-applied even though scores of deaths were occurring weekly.
Heavy and repeated plane spraying with Tri-Mort was begun in June and, according to announcements of last month, it had satisfactorily controlled the “death bee” in all urban and most other populous areas. The biospheric costs of that drastic method are not yet known. Heavy fish kills, massive tolls of wild life and considerable loss of cattle and sheep are expected and some have been reported.
Meanwhile, pandemonium in Brownsville and neighboring areas increases hourly. Supplies of screening and mosquito netting are sold out. Automobile dealers and used car lot proprietors report that there will not be an air-conditioned vehicle at any price by nightfall. Many of the winged invaders appeared in queen-led swarms, flying hordes in search of new hives or nesting sites. One swarm found its way into a supermarket and created panic. A stampede ensued with an as yet unknown toll of dead and injured. Another swarm set off the same reaction in a church where thousands had taken shelter owing to its great size and well-publicized air-conditioning system.
Serum is being flown to the beleaguered area, and local radio and TV stations are trying to halt mass panic. The broadcasters point out that only three victims per thousand are the least endangered and that those who are in danger can easily be recognized by a whole-body pink flush that appears within three minutes of stinging. The stings are admittedly agonizingly painful, but the pain recedes in a few hours and, for all but the peculiarly “sensitive” three per thousand, the effect of one or many stings is entirely local and not dangerous.
The city’s mayor, in a broadcast made just before this dispatch was filed, called on the citizens to summon their “traditional stoicism and fortitude,” and stated that “. . .
already the numbers of dead and injured owing to traffic accidents, trampling, fire, heart failure and the many other causes than bee stings is great, growing and shameful. So far,” the mayor went on, “no bee death has yet been reported. Not one!”
Several authorities on the insect have pointed out that the “Brownsville reaction” is “unwarranted, hysterical and incredible.” As one of them comments, “The bees are, at most, a nuisance. They need cause no deaths and no protracted prostration. Sure, they can and do hurt like hell. But the risk of having a sharp pain is no excuse for roaring out of town by auto and getting maimed in the eighty-car crash just now reported on the Pan-Texas Throughway. What’s wrong with those sons and daughters of the Lone Star State, anyhow?”
TEXAS SUES UI PRESS ASSOCIATION
Governor Calls N. Y. Times “Idiot”
Austin, Texas, August 4, 1976. UIPA Special. Governor of Texas John B. Cooker today ordered a damage suit for $25,000,000 filed against the Union-Interworld Press Association and member papers for publishing a series of reports by a local UIPA reporter of the sudden and appalling arrival of swarms of poisonous “African” bees in the Brownsville area.
After reporting what first seemed to be an amusing and not serious situation, the story continued with an objective and even technical account of the history of the stinging insect, its mutations, and the costly measures used to cope with it.
Early this morning Brownsville found it was under siege. Reported hundreds of swarms of the agonizing and sometimes deadly insects had crossed the Rio Grande, entered the suburbs and were moving on the downtown area. Scores of citizens, especially school children, had been stung and hospitals were overflowing as agonized people were brought to them from all points, often by drivers severely stung on the way.
Latest reports indicate that emergency measures are effective. However, the first news to reach the world strongly indicated widespread panic and chaos. Marital law and a communications blackout by the military prevent any word of the real situation from reaching other areas.
End of the Dream Page 9
