=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #278
—March 25, 1992—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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‘HUSH-HUSH’ AT HUERFANO
MOUNTAIN–GOVERNMENT PERMITS ANOTHER TIME BOMB
A waste disposal company called ICU is seeking a government
license to bury 50,000 cubic yards of asbestos waste in the
ground on private land near Huerfano Mountain in northwestern New
Mexico, an area held sacred by Navajo people.
“Huerfano Mountain is a really sacred place to Navajos,” says
Lori Goodman, a Navajo from Durango, Colo. “They’re building a
dump where Changing Woman was born,” she says. Changing Woman is
an important figure in Navajo creation beliefs.
By now everyone expects such proposals by non-Indian waste
haulers seeking to dump toxic wastes on Indian lands.[1] But some
people still hold out hope that governments can act to curb the
worst excesses of human greed and stupidity. Isn’t that what
governments are for? they ask.
Asbestos is a naturally-occurring mineral that has been mined
from the deep earth since the first commercial mine opened in
Quebec province in Canada, in 1879. That year 300 tons were
produced, but the demand for asbestos grew steadily until
production reached four million tons per year by 1970. Asbestos
is composed of long thin fibers and it makes an excellent
insulating material. Most of the millions of tons of asbestos
mined from the ground this century have been used to insulate
pipes in electric power plants, chemical factories, oil
refineries and drill rigs, and in ships. It has also been used
extensively in automobile brakes and clutches, and in hundreds of
places where its resistance to heat and to chemicals made it
highly useful. Asbestos is “inert,” which means it stays around
unchanged for a long time–essentially forever.
Unfortunately, asbestos is highly dangerous to animals and
humans. When you breathe in an asbestos fiber and it enters the
deep part of your lungs, your body reacts to it by forming a lump
around the fiber. The lump forms slowly, sometimes taking 10 to
20 years, so you can be exposed to asbestos for a long time
before you realize you’ve got a problem. Once you get such an
asbestos fiber in your lungs, the fiber remains with you for the
rest of your life and goes with you to your grave. If you get
enough fibers in your lungs, the resulting lumps make breathing
difficult; you wheeze and cough and have trouble catching your
breath. These lumps also reduce the blood supply to your lungs,
which stresses your heart, so your heart grows larger and becomes
more likely to fail. At this point you have a disease called
“asbestosis” and you will be miserable for the rest of your life
because there is no cure for this disease.
You do not have to be exposed to asbestos for a long time to
develop asbestos disease. There are medical cases on record of
people who worked with asbestos for only three weeks as a summer
job and later developed fatal asbestos disease. There are also
many well-documented cases of people who never were exposed to
asbestos in the workplace, yet developed asbestos disease. They
simply lived within half a mile of an asbestos factory. Many
other people have developed asbestos disease simply because they
lived in the same house with someone who worked in an asbestos
factory; the worker brought asbestos home on his clothes and his
wife and children got sick as a result.[2]
Asbestos fibers also cause a different set of problems besides
asbestosis–cancer of the lung, and cancer of the thin lining on
the outside of the lungs (a type of cancer called mesothelioma).
There is absolutely no doubt that asbestos causes asbestosis,
lung cancer and mesothelioma.
People learned about asbestos the hard way. The first case of
asbestosis was diagnosed by a doctor in London, England in the
year 1900–just 21 years after commercial production of asbestos
began. Unfortunately this first case was regarded as a medical
curiosity and was ignored. The next medical report didn’t appear
until 1924 and it, too, was generally ignored. Many people were
getting asbestos-related diseases during this period, but it was
mistaken for tuberculosis or silicosis, the hard-rock miner’s
disease. During 1927-1931 a series of medical reports from Great
Britain described asbestosis in detail and the small lumps in
the lungs came to be known as “asbestos bodies.” By 1930 there
were at least 50 articles in the medical literature describing
human lung disease caused by asbestos.
In the U.S. during the same period (1927-1931) knowledge of the
dangers of asbestos developed rapidly. As early as 1928,
insurance companies began requiring a special increased premium
to provide life insurance to asbestos workers. In 1930, the
Raybestos-Manhattan Company, the second largest producer of
asbestos in the U.S., took chest x-rays of 126 of its workers and
found asbestosis disease in 67 of them and early signs of
asbestosis in 38 others. The company did not publish this
information, and did not advise its workers about their health
problems. During three decades of workmen’s compensation
lawsuits, lawyers uncovered documents revealing that many
asbestos producers knew as early as the 1930s that asbestos was
deadly to their workers. For nearly 50 years asbestos
manufacturers followed a policy, which they called “hush hush,”
by which they agreed to suppress evidence of asbestos-related
dangers.[4] Historian Paul Brodeur calls it “a fifty year
history of corporate malfeasance and inhumanity to man which is
unparalleled in the annals of the private enterprise system.”[3]
In 1964 Dr. Irving Selikoff published a now-famous study of 1117
insulation workers. Among them were 392 men with more than 20
years exposure to asbestos, and 87% of them had asbestosis. That
same year Selikoff published another study of 632 insulation
workers showed that lung cancer was occurring among them at seven
times the normal rate, and gastrointestinal cancer at three times
the normal rate. In 1978 the U.S. Public Health Service sent
letters to every physician in the U.S.–all 400,000 of
them–alerting them to the fact that asbestos caused serious,
irreversible and often fatal lung disease. By this time,
insurance companies were estimating that perhaps 1.5 million
cases of fatal asbestos disease had been caused by the “hush
hush” policy of the asbestos producers.
Still asbestos companies continued to sell asbestos, and
industrial firms continued to purchase it.
Now, as old machinery, old ships, and old oil drill rigs turn to
junk, the asbestos in them and on them presents a major hazard.
Where can this old asbestos be locked away safely forever?
Government’s first instinct is to bury dangerous problems in the
ground. Out of sight, out of mind is the prevailing philosophy.
Since asbestos remains hazardous forever, and since no
knowledgeable person believes any landfill will remain secure for
the duration of the hazard, the conclusion seems inescapable that
an asbestos dump is a time bomb with the fuse already lit.
Therefore government approval of asbestos dumps appears to be an
expression of the same philosophy that motivated the asbestos
producers when they conspired for nearly 50 years to cover up
evidence of harm to their workers: hush-hush.
The plan in New Mexico is to bury 50,000 cubic yards of asbestos,
wrapped in two layers of plastic, each layer 6 mils thick (the
same thickness as a heavy-duty garbage bag you can might buy at
any grocery store) and then “cap” it with ordinary dirt three
feet (91 centimeters) thick. The dirt will then be seeded to try
to grow vegetation, to try to hold the soil in place. We do not
know the exact characteristics of the proposed site near Huerfano
Mountain, but if it matches the characteristics of reclaimed coal
mines nearby,[4] the rate of soil erosion will be between 0.2
and 2.0 centimeters per year, meaning that the plastic baggies of
asbestos will be exposed to the sun within 50 to 500 years. The
plastic baggies will degrade rapidly, and then large quantities
of asbestos fibers will begin blowing throughout the region.
Humans, wildlife, and domestic animals will then have the
opportunity to breathe asbestos fibers, and thus to develop lung
disease.
Of course prairie dogs or other natural forces may disrupt the
site much sooner and release the deadly asbestos. No one really
knows precisely how the Huerfano Mountain asbestos catastrophe
will develop, but it seems inevitable that it will, if the
project goes ahead as planned.
The only real solution to this problem is to store asbestos in
steel-reinforced concrete buildings built above-ground where they
can be observed continually. (See RHWN #260.) Every century or so
the buildings would have to be replaced to protect the
environment. Does government have the sense and the strength to
impose real solutions? Time will tell.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: huerfano mountain; asbestos; nm; navajo;
native americans; asbestosis; cancer; lung disease; health;
raybestos-manhatten company; landfilling; gastrointestinal cancer;