posted on: 2010-11-04 23:51:38
Toxic spills take place a lot more frequently than people really want to believe.
Photo: Chornobyl radioactive ghost town
PRLog (Press Release) – Nov 04, 2010 – With 120 people wounded, the world watched in shock, at the images of the toxic sludge sweepingthrough a townin Hungary.
Yet this sort of spill is not a new advent asmining and other industries world-wide cut safety regulations, with devastating and lasting effects.
Hundred fifty people were killed by the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion in 2010, leaking approximately 200 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. All because of a cut in safety procedures.
Due to the collapsing of the tailings dams at the Caudalosa Chica mine, 500 metric tons of toxic waste was released into the Opamayo River,in the summer of 2010. Themine was fined $13 million.
At the Kingston Fossil Plant, near Knoxville, the retaining walls of an ash pond collapsed in 2008, pouring 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic waste into the local area, wiping out houses in its path.
More than ten times the permitted level of metals, acid mine drainage and sediments, was discharged into local water ways by Massey Energy in 2007. The company was blamed for violating the Clean Water Act, 4500 times. The $20 million fine was the largest ever levied against a company for waste water discharge permit violations.
100 tons of toxic waste was spilled in 2005 into the Songhua River from PetroChina’s Jiin Petrochemical C. plant. PetroChina was fined $147,000 by China’s environmental protection agency.
A Massey Energy pond spilled 300 million gallons of toxic sludge in 2000, polluting over a dozen communities. Massey spent $46 million in clean up, but only paid $5600 in fines.
130,000 cubic meters of cyanide-tainted water flowed into the local rivers and ultimately into the Tisza and Danube rivers, whena dyke holding cyanide at a mining operation in Baia Mare, Romania broke, in January of 2000.
Fire fighters managed to put out a fire, but not before creating a toxic solution of pesticide and water that flowed into Village Creek and then the Warrior Riverin October 1997. The warehouse in Birmingham, Alabama housed18,000 gallons of the termite killer Dursban TChad caught fire.
The United Nations officially set the death toll at 4,000. NGO’s place it much higher to even hundreds of thousands whenthe Chernobyl nuclear reactor at the town of Pripyat exploded, contaminating Belarus, Ukraine and Russia with fallout, in 1986.
According to the Indian government 15,000 more people have died as a result of 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas seepage from the Bhopal Union Carbide plant, in 1984. It initially killed 3,500 people.
The dam at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia holding mining waste collapsed, in 1972. A 15-20 foot wave of water poured through the Buffalo Creek hollow, killing 125people, wounding 1,100and leaving 4,000 homeless.
144 died, 116 of them children, when a coal mining waste tip in 1966 slid down a mountain side into the village of Aberfan in South Wales.
For more information about "Earth Threatening Toxic Spills", visit website http://www.tropicpost.com/toxic-spills-a-world-threat /
Dr Wendy Stenberg-Tendys and her husband are CEO's and founders of YouMe Support Foundation, providing high school education grants for children who are without hope. You can help in this really great project by taking a few minutes to check out the Sponsor a Student program at (http://youmesupport.org). It will change the life of some really needy kids in the South Pacific.
Feel free to contact Wendy on admin@youmesupport.org
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YouMe Support Foundation is a non-profit charity, raising funds for non-repayable higher-education grants for geographically and financially disadvantaged children.
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Issued By : Lynthomas
Phone : (678)26551
Fax : (678)26551
Address : P.O. Box 5101
: Port Vila
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Country : Vanuatu
Categories : Environment, Society
