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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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It's pretty depressing, but the fact that soil and groundwater are almost certainly contaminated anywhere that humans have touched. I've seen all kinds of places from gas stations, to dry cleaners, to mines, to fire stations, to military bases, to schools, to hydroelectric plants, the list could go on, and every last one of them had poison in the ground.
Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years. Now there are ground water pumps installed there which need to run 24/7 so that the chemicals don't contaminate nearby rivers and hence the rest of the country.
When taking samples from the pumped up water you can smell gasoline.
We're house shopping and there has been a house on a lake sitting on the market forever. I got curious and researched the lake and... It's a literal superfund site. The company that was on the other side of the lake just dumped their waste chemicals right on the shore and it has polluted both the lake and ground water forever essentially because they don't break down. I looked up the previous owner... Died of cancer. The shit that companies are and were allowed to get away with is just insane. Meanwhile right wing nut jobs want to get rid of the EPA (which was ironically created by Richard Nixon).
"That's the future guy's problem, my problem is making money."
No need to wonder. That's how.
Sounds cheap.
The largest lake in the UK by area got massively polluted and turned into a swamp of toxic green algae. It's crazy how people just let stuff like that happen.
It's just as depressing when something counts as "clean". My saddest example was a former sand pit, they spent 30 years digging out 15 meters of sand, then another 30 years filling it with anything from industrial to veterinary waste, "capped" it with rubble in the late 40s and called it clean enough.
Had a bigass job digging out the top 3 meters of random waste, including several thousand of barrels of whatever the fuck. And definitely no unexploded ordnance (spoiler, after finding several ww2 rifle stocks and helmets, the first mortarshells were dug up too). After makimg room, it was covered in sand, clay, bentonite and a protective grid.
So naturally, 3 months after that finished, some cockhead decided to throw an anchor and hit go all ahead flank on his assholes boat and tore the whole thing up. No need to fix anything though, just shovel some more sand it, that'll stop the anthrax!
This was all in open connection with a major river, of course. One people swim in.
What are they poisoned with and how does it happen?
Varies depending on the site, sometimes it's gasoline, or solvents, or heavy metals or PFAS. As for how it happens, accidental or deliberate releases. I've found military documents from the 50s that say the official place to dispose of used motor oil was a pit they'd dug in the ground.
Yep, the regulation is now a 5ft cubed hole dug around the soil in any spill. It's resulted in folks being more careful but also hiding where things are spilled. I've not once seen a hole dug. Corporations are roughly similar. Small organizations don't care at all.
Here's a recent article about PFAS in drinking water. Very unfortunate.
Heavy metals and PCBs are most common in my area, various VOCs aren't far behind. Prior to the EPA and associated legislation companies would commonly use waste process waters for dust control, dump wastes in to pits or on the ground, spills would be left to soak away, and general processes were dirtier and uncontrolled.
One terrible example from western NY that bugs me even more than Love Canal is the involvement with the Manhattan Project. Local steel workers rolled Uranium and they were never told what is was, given any protections, or cared for when the inevitable happened. Radioactive waste was later used as fill for residential and commercial properties in the area. These Hotspot still exist and it is a slow process to get any cleanup done.
I work in air quality and it's a similar story. It's crazy to me seeing how much is unregulated, grandfathered in, or simply not enforced.
What do you want? They moved it out of the environment. . .