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<text> <title> (1980) The Poisoning Of America </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1980 Highlights </history> <link 07554> <link 07244> <link 02121> <link 00012> <link 00091> <link -0001> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> September 22, 1980 COVER STORY The Poisoning of America </hdr> <body> Belatedly, the campaign begins to control hazardous chemical wastes In the last 200 years, and with staggering acceleration in the last 25, the power, extend and depth of man's interventions in the natural order seem to presage a revolutionary new epoch in human history, perhaps the most revolutionary the mind can conceive. Men seem, on a planetary scale, to be substituting the controlled for the uncontrolled, the fabricated for the unworked, the planned for the random. And they are doing so with a speed and depth of intervention unknown in any previous age of human history. -- Barbara Ward and Rene' Dubos, Only one Earth Of all of man's interventions in the natural order, none is accelerating quite so alarmingly as the creation of chemical compounds. Through their genius, modern alchemists brew as many as 1,000 new concoctions each year in the U.S. alone. At last count, nearly 50,000 chemicals were on the marked. Many have been an undeniable boon to mankind, mitigating pain and disease, prolonging life for millions and expanding the economy in myriad ways by stimulating the creation of new products. There is, however, a price to pay for an industrial society that has come to rely so heavily on chemicals: almost 35,000 of those used in the U.S. are classified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as being either definitely or potentially hazardous to human health. Although cause- and-effect relationships between many chemicals and specific illnesses are still difficult to prove, the danger is clearly growing. Long concerned about the more familiar pollution problems of nuclear wastes, dirty air and befouled lakes and rivers, the nation has only belatedly begun to recognize the threat of chemical wastes poisoning America's earth and--more ominously--its underground reservoirs. Last week, sounding the most authoritative warning yet, Julius Richmond, the Surgeon General of the U.S. declared that throughout the 1980s the nation will "confront a series of environmental emergencies" posed by toxic chemicals that "are adding to the disease burden in a significant, although as yet not precisely defined, way." Said the Surgeon General's report to the Senate: "The public health risk associated with toxic chemicals is increasing, and will continue to do so until we are successful in identifying chemicals which are highly toxic and controlling the introduction of these chemicals into our environment." His report was supported by a study of 32 major chemical-contamination incidents that was conducted by the Library of Congress. The library's survey said these cases "represent the tip of an iceberg of truly unknown dimensions" and concluded that toxic chemicals "are so long lasting and pervasive in the environment that virtually the entire population of the nation, and indeed the world, carries some body burden of one or several of them." Experts may debate just how bad the problem is. Robert A. Roland, president of the Chemical Manufactures Association, attacked the Surgeon General's report for exaggerating the threat of toxic wastes. But one thing is certain: the rapid accumulation of chemical-waste products poses one of the most complex and expensive environmental control and cleanup tasks in history. Says Douglas M. Costle, administrator of the EPA: "We didn't understand that every barrel stuck into the ground was a ticking time bomb, primed to go off." Predicts Dr. Irving Selikoff, director of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory of New York City's Mount Sinai Medical School: "Toxic waste will be the major environmental and public health problem facing the U.S. in the '80s." The EPA estimates that the U.S. is generating more than 77 billion lbs. of hazardous chemical wastes a year and that only 10% are being handled in a safe manner. At least half of the wastes, says Gary N. Dietrich, an EPA official, "are just being dumped indiscriminately." There may be no greater threat than the steady rise in the number of wells found to be contaminated by chemicals. Fully 50% of all Americans depend on ground rather than surface water for their drinking supply. Water that may have fallen to earth as long as a century ago has percolated slowly down through soil and porous rock to collect in vast underground aquifers that were virtually void of chemical and bacteriological impurities. Now substances, mostly petrochemicals thought to have been harmlessly disposed of years ago, are beginning to show up even in the deeper U.S. wells. This contamination will grow as those forgotten chemicals of the past steadily reach more of the underground reservoirs from which Americans will drink in the future. After two years of investigation, the New York Public Interest Research Group, Inc., a respected private organization, charges that 66 companies dump nearly 10 million gal. of contaminated waste water each day into eleven municipal sewerage systems on Long Island. Since none of these systems can treat toxic wastes, claims the report, the drinking water for some 3 million residents is "in danger of deteriorating into a severely contaminated industrial sewer." In a lovely wooded area of New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens, more than 100 wells have been poisoned by chemicals leaching from the 135-acre Jackson Township dump. James McCarthy, who had drunk well water for ten years, had one kidney removed in 1977, and now has trouble with the other. Tara, his daughter, died in 1975 of a kidney cancer when she was nine months old. A 16-year-old neighbor lost a kidney to cancer; another neighbor is on dialysis for kidney problems; a third also has a kidney ailment. No scientific link has been established between the chemicals and the illnesses, but, McCarthy says, "you can't tell me that all our kidney problems and the poisons in our water aren't connected." Water supplies in 22 Massachusetts towns have been contaminated by chemicals. In Michigan, inspectors have found 300 sites where wastes have polluted ground water. Residents of some 90 homes near Muskegon now use bottled water supplied by the county. The polluted water there, says Tom Spencer, a country health official, "looks just like bock beer. It even has a head on it." Coal-tar residues have drained into an aquifer under the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. While the Twin Cities draw water from the Mississippi River, many of their suburbs depend on the threatened underground supply. Near Charles City, Iowa, some deep wells 30 to 40 miles downstream from a chemical dump have shown traces of contamination. At the waste heap, state analysts have found some 6 million lbs. of arsenic, as well as large quantities of other dangerous chemicals. Says Larry Crane, director of the Iowa department of environmental quality: "It's an organic chemists' cauldron." Growing recognition of the menace of chemicals has produced a series of state laws that make the casual disposal of wastes a criminal offense. Under a 1979 New Jersey statute, for example, offenders can be fined up to $50,000 a day for every day they leave wastes unprotected and may get jail sentences of up to ten years. As a result of such new rules, careless dumping has been declining--until recently. The reason for the upsurge: a tough set of federal regulations that will go into effect on Nov. 19 requiring dangerous chemical wastes to be tracked "from cradle to grave"; each person or company receiving any chemical wastes on the list will have to account for what happens to them and will be held responsible if the substances are not properly handled. To beat the deadline, some companies have been taking chemical refuse they have stored on their property for months or even years and simply getting rid of the stuff as swiftly and as surreptitiously as they can, often dumping by night and running. One day a field in Illinois was empty; a week or so later, it contained 20,000 bbl. of dumped wastes. Kentucky state police staked out a site just outside Daniel Boone National Forest, where some 200 containers loaded with dangerous solvents had been discarded. They arrested three Ohio truck drivers. Hundreds of toxic drums were found on three sites near historic Plymouth, Mass. State troopers and other authorities set up roadblocks to stop illegal dumping operations in New Hampshire, which, like the other New England states, has no legal disposal site. Declared New Hampshire acting Attorney General Gregory Smith: "We know toxic waste is being hauled through the state. We have to find out where and when." The upcoming federal regulations and new state laws will surely help, but what haunts the EPA's Costle and other environmentalists is the scope of the problem. In 1941 the American petrochemical industry produced 1 billion lbs. of synthetic chemicals. By 1977 that rate had soared to 350 billion lbs. In evolutionary terms, the rapidity and scale of this chemical creativity are frightening. Through the ages, most of the earth's varied organisms, from single cells to plants, animals and early humans, usually had ample time to adapt to the peace of natural change. They evolved protective mutations to meet the gradual shifts in the earth's vital balance between acids and alkalines, in the salinity of water, in levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. But man cannot patiently wait through the centuries for his body to develop a genetic defense against these chemicals if, indeed, such a defense is possible. Not only is the pace quickening, there is also a basic difference in the quality of change that modern chemicals make in the air, earth and water. Petrochemists have assembled the molecules contained in coal, oil and gas in new ways, producing compounds that do not exist in a natural state. These compounds are essential to such products as pharmaceuticals, plastics, insulation, textiles and food additives. But unlike many natural chemicals, most petrochemicals do not decay rapidly under the assault of such natural forces as bacteria, sun, wind and water. That puny plastic bottle once full of household bleach may well outlast the mighty pyramids. So far as is now know, bleach bottles pose no threat to health. But to an alarming degree, petrochemicals that are far less benign but just as durable have for years been discarded as casually as household garbage. Many bear mystifying names: trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, dichloroethylene, dibromochloromethane, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These, and many more, are suspected of contributing to the rising incidence of cancer in the U.S. But experts in the field are quick to admit the difficulty of proving the harm caused by chemical wastes. Says Mount Sinai's Selikoff: "When it comes to chemicals and illness, it's hard to prove cause and effect, though we certainly have our suspicions." The most sinister side of the chemical waste threat may be the very uncertainty of its ultimate impact. Adding to the dilemma is the fact that past disposal practices have been so haphazard that no one knows just how much chemical garbage must be cleared up--or even where it is. The producers, the users and the ultimate disposers of the chemicals have not been required to keep records on what they did with waste material. Most companies stack it in barrels on back lots. some pay haulers to cart it to reprocessing plants, high-temperature incinerators or landfills where thick clay linings prevent chemicals from leaching into the earth. But all too many waste handlers have merely tossed the refuse into leaky burial pits, or carted it off to municipal dumps to mix with household garbage, or paid farmers small fees to let them hide 55 gal. drums on unused land, often by dark of night. Some haulers have pumped liquid wastes into tank trucks and driven down rural roads with the pet cocks open, releasing the chemicals into ditches. Some of the companies that paid middlemen or haulers to get rid of the refuse asked no questions about--and did not want to know--where the chemicals went. As a result, the poisons have turned up in surprising places. Not far from home plate at New York City's Shea Stadium, a festering pond containing PCB, toluene, benzene and DDT turns red, blue or green as the mixture of the waste changes. The mess is so flammable that the pool has caught fire twice in the past year. In the marshes around New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex, home of the pro football Giants, some 200 tons of mercury residues have contaminated Berry's Creek, causing Selikoff to declare, "On a bad day, breathing in Meadowlands may be as dangerous as driving at Indianapolis." The abandoned shafts and tunnels in the hills above Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River lure illegal chemical dumpers. So much poison has been poured for so long into one deep hole near Pittston that Republican Senator John Heinz insists, "This is more dangerous than Three Mile Island because we don't really know what's down there." Six New Jersey men, including Russell Mahler, president of Hudson Oil Refining Corp., have been indicted in Pennsylvania on charges of illegally tossing chemicals into the shaft, thereby polluting the river. No accurate count of all the toxic-waste dumps is possible. Many reveal themselves only when a flash flood or gradual erosion exposes rusting and cracking drums. Searching for clandestine sites, some 100 EPA agents are tracking down reports of midnight dumping, or seeking out arid odors permeating wooded acres or strange colors staining rivers and streams. So far, the EPA estimates that there are some 50,000 sites where chemicals have been dumped. The EPA believes that 2,000 of these dumps may pose serious health hazards. The public got an inkling of the seriousness of the problem last year with the revelation of the horror that had occurred in New York's Love Canal. Contamination from a landfill laced with chemicals seeped into the area on the outskirts of Niagara Falls. A total of 1,200 houses and a school had been built near the site. Alarmed by studies of damage to the residents' health, the Federal Government finally paid for the temporary evacuation of families. At present, 710 families have been declared eligible to move, and about half have left the area. Researchers are continuing to probe the residents' high incidence of cancer, birth defects and respiratory and neurological problems. The Love Canal story emerged gradually, but three events this year in the New York region demonstrated suddenly and spectacularly just how heedlessly the chemical compounds have been stored. In April, residents of Elizabeth, N.J., and nearby Staten Island, N.Y., were jolted by explosions from a dump containing at least 50,000 chemical-filled barrels. The blasts rattled windows in Manhattan skyscrapers ten miles away. On July 4, an industrial-paint-manufacturing company that stored chemical wastes in its backyard flamed into a four-alarm blaze that spread toxic fumes over the city of Carlstadt, N.J. Three days later, storage drums at a chemical disposal plant in Perth Amboy, N.J., erupted in a barrage of explosions and a roaring fire that wiped out seven buildings and 16 businesses in an industrial park. Nearby residences were evacuated for several hours because no one knew how toxic the spreading smoke might be. After the Love Canal and New Jersey headlines, an ABC News-Harris poll found that 76% of those surveyed consider the dumping of toxic chemicals "a very serious problem," and despite a growing antagonism toward Government regulation, 93.6% wanted "federal standards prohibiting such dumping made much more strict than they are now." Is the public unduly alarmed? Federal officials charged with enforcing the long-inadequate laws against unsafe disposal practices do not think so. Declares Dale Bryson, an EPA deputy chief in the Midwest: "Every time we go into these cases, we find it's worse than we thought." Some Dantesque examples: ELIZABETH, N.J. On a small peninsula between New Jersey and Staten Island, the charred remains of what had been a collection of about 50,000 drums, some stacked four high, adjoin a brick-and-steel building once owned by the now bankrupt Chemical Control Corp. The containers had been left to rot for nearly a decade. Many of the drums had never been properly labeled; others were so seared by the explosive fire in April that neither the manufacturer nor the nature of the chemicals they contain can be determined from outside markings. Some barrels are leaking unidentified chemicals into the ground. Unknown wastes seep into an adjacent stream called the Arthur Kill and eventually ooze into the Hudson River. A huge tank holds a fluid laced with 4,000 parts per million of PCB, a chemical that has been linked to birth defects and nervous disorders. Explains George Weiss, coordinator of the cleanup from New Jersey's department of environmental protection: "No one knows what to do with that. No one even knows if we can touch it." Wearing a respirator and a suit like an astronaut's to seal out fumes, the operator of a front-loader cautiously picks up one drum at a time. He is well aware of the fate of a bulldozer driver who hit a container of flammable phosphorus at a landfill in nearby Edison, N.J.: the man was incinerated so quickly that he died with his hand on his gearshift. State officials have identified a horrific arsenal of chemicals at the site, including two containers of nitroglycerine; two canisters of a chemical similar in effect to mustard gas; barrels full of biological agents; cylinders of phosgene and pyrophoric gases, which are so volatile they ignite when exposed to air; wastes contaminated by lead, mercury and arsenic; plus a variety of solvents, pesticides, plasticizers, including dangerous vinyl chloride and even picric acid, which has more explosive power than TNT. Toxic wastes are trucked to New Jersey's single licensed toxic-waste incinerators in Logan Township, where the chemicals are burned at more than 5000 degrees F. After months of work, an 80-man crew has removed all but 700 drums from the site. Once the barrels are all gone, metal detectors and aerial photography will be used to uncover evidence of any additional buried wastes. The contaminated topsoil must be hauled away. Probing for possible poisoning of the underlying water will come later. How was the mess created? Chemical Control Corp. had signed contracts with some of the state's chemical companies and factories to dispose of their wastes. The company was supposed to solidify nontoxic materials for safe burial in landfills and detoxify the poisonous chemicals for similar disposal. Instead, the corporation just stacked the drums out back. Reacting to the fears of Elizabeth residents, state officials seized the site in March 1978 and began the slow cleanup. The companies, whose barrels were clearly labeled, included the 3M Co. and Union Carbide; the firms had no legal obligation to retrieve their drums but promptly did so when notified by the state. "We don't have any choice about cleaning this place up," says Jerry English, a lawyer who heads New Jersey's department of environmental protection. "We simply cannot allow a situation like this to continue." Wearing a white vinyl coverall over her fashionable suit, yellow plastic booties over her high-heeled shoes, a respirator and protective gloves, English recently climbed on a rooftop and looked out over the sea of barrels. She broke into a wry laugh, grandly swept an arm toward the rubble and declared, "Some day, my son, this will all be yours." SEYMOUR, IND. A neat stone wall graces the entrance to Freeman Field Industrial Park in the otherwise rustic small town of Seymour (pop. 13,100), about 70 miles southeast of Indianapolis. But in the park, there is a dry, mud-caked ditch, and the trees along its banks are dead. Inside a wire fence, an acrid scent brings tears to visitors' eyes. Some of the tidily stacked barrels bear household names: General Electric, Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, Monsanto. Paint sludges collect in sticky red and green pools on the porous ground, and such chemicals as arsenic, benzene, toluene, trichlorethylene and naphthalene ooze from rusty barrels. Near by, two former dairy trucks, one still bearing the faded invitation DRINK REFRESHING MILK, contain dangerous chemical wastes. Over a period of twelve years, some 60,000 drums of waste were heaped on this site by Seymour Recycling Corp., which, like Chemical Control Corp., contracted with its corporate clients to get rid of their wastes safely. After the company failed to comply with a state order to dispose of the chemicals, a court appointed a custodian: William Vance, an easygoing small-town lawyer and president of the Jackson County Bar Association. He inherited the mess in February. Says he: "Like most of the citizenry, I wasn't that concerned before--but I am now." In March, hydrogen gas began rising from a shed on the property where 25 badly corroded drums of chlorosilane had been stored next to 100 bbl. of flammable solvents. Rain soaking the chlorosilane had created a smoky chemical reaction. Fear of an explosion caused city officials to order the area vacated for several hours. Says Vance: "We had a 13-acre keg of dynamite." Firemen rushed to separate the drums. Now, Vance frets, "every time we have a thunderstorm I think, `My God, don't let lightning hit out there!'" Vance is even more concerned about the future. He fears that the ground water beneath the sandy soil has been polluted, and this will show up later in wells. "It's a perfect setup," he says. "We think what they did with some of the chemicals was just pour 'em out on the ground. Glub, glub, glub." When state and local officials failed to get results, the federal EPA declared a water emergency and took over the cleanup chore. So far, it has spent nearly $1 million and estimates that complete removal of all hazardous wastes at the site could cost more than $12 million. "They couldn't have located that dump in a worse place," says Roland Kasting, a farmer who lives near by. "There's a vast underground reservoir right underneath us. There have to be laws on this chemical waste. It's going to get worse and worse--it's going to be everywhere." MONTAGUE, MICH. It took years of local agitation and a lawsuit filed by the State of Michigan, but something now is being done by Hooker Chemical Corp. (which also left contamination at Love Canal) to help dispose of some 1.2 million cu. yds. of chemical waste, drums and contaminated soil on its 880 acres of property on the edge of Montague. The cleanup may be too late to satisfy many residents in the community, a small town (pop. 2,396) of gracious, shaded houses along the shores of White Lake. State water officials estimate that some 20 billion gal. of ground water have been laced with deadly chemical wastes in an underground flow of contamination that is half a mile wide and more than a mile long. Moreover, each heavy rainfall propels some 800 lbs. of chemical residues daily into the lake, which, in turn, drains into Lake Michigan. Children used to play in the dump behind the Hooker plant, where rusting drums sometimes leaked a tarry substance as sticky as soft asphalt. The site still contains at least 100 different compounds, many produced by spontaneous reactions among the discarded chemicals. They include hexachlorocyclopentadiene, more conveniently known as C-56. Toxicologists have found a C-56 derivative in the flesh of White Lake fish. As a result of a lawsuit filed by the state, Hooker agreed to build a huge vault to contain its wastes. It has dug a hole 19 ft. deep and 300 yds. long. The bottom and sides of the excavation were formed of course beach sand, which would have allowed chemicals to filter down to the aquifer lying 80 ft. or less below the surface. Therefore, Hooker is lining the vault with 10-ft.-thick walls of compacted clay. The vault will rise five stories into the air. "A monument to stupidity," snorts Marion Dawson, a leader in the long fight to force Hooker to clean up its act. Hooker officials do not deny their mistakes, though they rightly point out that they were made before the hazards were fully understood. The company is spending some $15 million to correct the problems, including sinking a series of "purge wells designed to draw water from the aquifer, decontaminate it and pipe it back into the ground. Hooker has also built a $100,000 pipeline to carry uncontaminated city water to houses on Blueberry Ridge, where wells are threatened. In addition, the company is paying the monthly water bills of these residents. Says Ken Hall, the Hooker official handling the cleanup: "You have to be careful about judging the 1950s by 1980s standards. I grew up thinking that if you put something in the ground it was safe. But that thinking was in error. If you don't do something about it now, you'll have an eternal problem." Indeed, much of the unsafe dumping occurred before the companies had a firm idea of how serious the waste problem was, and many disposed of material in ways they thought were safe at the time. The chemical industry generally approves the new federal regulations that will require the tracking of all toxic chemicals to the point of final disposal. Violators can be fined up to $25,000 a day and jailed for a year for a first offense. Says Robert A. Roland, president of the Chemical Manufactures Association: "We don't want irresponsible disposal. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for the Federal Government to do." The industry is more worried about the EPA's new rules requiring that only sites meeting federal standards be used. The companies are fearful that EPA standards will be so strict that an insufficient number of sites will be created. If that happens, predicts ROland, "companies will have two choices: they will either have nowhere to dump and they will close down, or they will go out and break the law." Conceding that "the EPA is between a rock and a hard place, with an enormous task to confront," Roland contends that the agency too often acts on the basis of insufficient information. The industry, for example, insists that the EPA has not carefully evaluated the hazards of various chemicals and that its regulations are needlessly complex and burdensome. Up to a point, the EPA's Costle agrees. "I know that things aren't perfect with us," he says. "But just imagine how they would be without us." On its own, the chemical industry has set up a hazardous-waste response center in Washington, where state and local officials who are worried about an abandoned disposal site can get expert advice about how serious the threat may be and how the dump could be cleaned up. The industry has also written a model waste-disposal-siting law for the guidance of state legislatures. Irving S. Shapiro, chairman of Du Pont, reports that his company is recycling waste material to reduce the disposal problem and keeps a watchful eye on the contractors it uses for disposal. The most critical problem, as he sees it, is to clean up widely scattered "orphan waste sites" that no one has supervised. Says he: "Let's start with today, not worry about who did what in the past. Government and industry should work together rather than get emotional. We've got to get going rather than sitting around trying to figure out who's wearing the black hat and who's wearing the white hat." Right now there are enough safe disposal facilities in the U.S., including incinerators and detoxification plants, to handle the toxic wastes, if the companies would go to the trouble and expense of using them. But as federal regulations governing the dumps become more stringent, and as the volume of wastes increases, the nation will need additional sites. Where to put them? "Everybody is in favor of safe disposal," says Costle. "They say, sure, let's have a safe landfill, but not in my town." Howard Tanner, chief of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, goes even further. "We have technical solutions for these wastes," he says, "but we don't have social solutions. You don't want them anywhere near where you live--nor do I." Looking for new waste sites, a private company purchased obsolete Titan I missile silos in an Idaho desert. near Grandview, three 160-ft.-deep holes, lined with 6-ft.-thick concrete walls and 13-ft.-thick concrete floors, are each being used to store some 1.5 million cu. ft. of wastes. Several European companies are using incinerator ships to burn chemical wastes at sea. Costle feels that U.s. private industry, rather than Government, should devise safe disposal techniques. Says he: "It's smarter and can do the job more efficiently than the Government." If the future remains a problem, so does the past. The immense task of cleaning up the accumulated wastes still remains. A bill is slowly working its way through Congress to create a "superfund" to be used by the EPA to neutralize hazardous waste spills and dumps as they occur or are discovered. The legislation, now in various forms, could create a fund of up to $4 billion in the next six years. But there are bitter fights under way over just how to split the costs between the general taxpayer and the various industries that generate the wastes. The Carter Administration expects a compromise will be reached on the bill this year, possibly before Congress recesses for the November election. Even if passed, this act would be only a start. The EPA estimates the eventual cost of a national cleanup would be as much as $22 billion. Insists Costle: "We can't afford not to clean up. All we'd be doing would be pushing the cost over to the next generation." He notes that when the Life Science Products Co., a chemical plant in Hopewell, Va., was found to be contaminating the James River with Kepone in 1975, the source of pollution could have cleaned up at a cost of $250,000. The company delayed and since has paid out $13 million in damage claims. Now, experts estimate, it will cost at least $2 billion to purify the river. Contends Costle: "In a misguided sense of thrift, we can save ourselves broke." Some officials charged with protecting water supplies fear that much of the chemical damage already done to underground reservoirs is irreparable. Says New Jersey's English: "What's in the ground is there. It's too late to do anything about it." Perhaps so. Yet the growing public concern, the increasingly cooperative attitude of the chemical industry and the toughening resolve of federal and state governments reflect a new willingness of the nation to grapple with one of modern technology's least understood and potentially most insidious threats to health. The circle must be made complete. The society that created the plethora of new chemicals that so enhanced human life must now use its scientific genius to make sure that those creations work safely for mankind. -- By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Peter Stoler/New York and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago Deep Concern: Ground Water At the very top of the environmental scientists' list of concerns about pollution damage is something that most Americans probably believe to be safely beyond the reach of contamination: ground water. This is water that lies buried from a few feet to a half mile or more beneath the land's surface in stretches of permeable rock, sand and gravel known as aquifers. In the U.S. there is five times as much water in such subterranean reservoirs as flows through all its surface lakes, streams and rivers in a year. While most ground water is believed to remain pure, concern is rising because it is one of nature's greatest nonrenewable resources. Unlike surface water or the air, ground water is all but impossible to purify once it has become chemically polluted. Ground water is not exposed to the natural purification systems that recycle and cleanse surface water; there is no sunlight, for example, to evaporate it and thereby remove salts and other minerals and chemicals. Nor can ground water be counted upon to clean itself as it moves through the earth, for it scarcely "flows" at all. Says Eckardt C. Beck, the EPA's assistant administrator for water and waste management: "Ground water can take a human lifetime just to traverse a mile. Once it becomes polluted, the contamination can last for decades." In the past, ground water was kept pure because the soil at the earth's surface could be counted on to act as a filtration system, a kind of geological "kidney" that would scrub out bacteria and other insoluble contaminants placed on or in the ground before they could seep down to the water table, the ground water's upper limit. But this filtration system does not reliably screen out the waste chemicals that now leach into the soil from a variety of sources, including cropland that has been sprayed with pesticides, and industrial dumps like he pools into which liquid chemicals are placed so that the water they contain will evaporate. The EPA has located 181,000 such "lagoons" at industrial and municipal waste disposal sites around the country. In a study of 8,200 of them, the agency found that 72% were just holes in the ground, not lined with concrete or other materials to prevent the chemicals form leaching into the soil; 700 of these unlined lagoons were within a mile of wells tapping ground water. Bacterial wastes, such as the effluent from the nation's estimated 16.6 million residential septic tanks and cesspools, can be filtered fairly simply out of drinking water. But chemical contaminants are another matter. Says EPA Administrator Douglas Costle: "We are not even sure if, not to mention how, chemical contaminants can be removed. It takes sophisticated testing just to determine if there are chemicals present at all." The most serious cases of ground-water pollution confirmed so far have been in the Northeast states, where the problem is largely the result of surface dumping of industrial wastes, and in California from agricultural chemicals. But awareness of the vulnerability of ground water is still so new that EPA officials do not really know how far the fouling of the aquifers had spread. Says Costle: "We cannot even begin to say how much of our drinking water, actual or potential, may have been contaminated. We are going to be going a lot of detective work." </body> </article> </text>