December 10, 1979
Page 35287
CHEMICAL POISONS: ITEM NO. 1, TORONTO, CANADA
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, on November 12 a train derailed near Toronto, Canada, releasing chlorine and other gases into the atmosphere. Nearly a quarter of a million Canadian citizens had to be evacuated from their homes in what could have been a catastrophic episode.
Such an incident could easily have occurred in this country. In fact, on a smaller scale it did — twice in the same week as the Canadian accident. In Florida, 200 residents had to leave their houses because three propane tank cars derailed and began burning. A tanker in Michigan carrying toxic hydrogen fluoride also derailed, causing 1,000 others to evacuate their homes.
Every month, and practically every week, a new incident involving the release, in some form, of dangerous chemicals into the environment makes its way into the news media.
We are all aware of the most infamous chemical incidents — Love Canal, the Valley of the Drums, Montague, Mich. But there are also the smaller cases which are no less serious to the victims involved.
The Nation cannot and must not get used to the news of chemical contamination and become numb to the warnings that new chemical pathways are leading poisons into our food chains, our drinking water supplies, and other elements of our environment.
The Committee on Environment and Public Works is in the process of developing legislation to deal with the problems created by dangerous chemical emergencies. As we proceed to mark up legislation to solve some of these problems, we must clearly state our goals and boundaries.
Do we provide protection for third-party damages? Or do we reject economic aid to damaged parties?
Do we concentrate on abandoned hazardous waste sites in the legislation? Or do we provide protection against other releases of poisons into the environment that are just as harmful?
We will experience many more incidents of environmental damage caused by chemical poisons around the country. As these are brought to the attention of my colleagues, I hope the full ramifications and breadth of the dangers will become more apparent.
Mr. President, I ask that the following Washington Post editorial, "Everyday Risks," of November 26, be printed in the RECORD.
The editorial follows:
EVERYDAY RISKS
A quarter of a million Canadians were evacuated from their homes two weeks ago because of a train derailment that released deadly chlorine and phosgene gases. The story made front-page news for one day and was quickly forgotten — which illustrates the strange and often perplexing ways in which society responds to the myriad risks of industrialized living. One can only imagine how bleak the future of nuclear power would be if 250,000 people had had to be evacuated from the vicinity of a nuclear reactor.
What accounts for the phenomenon that produces yawns over chemical accidents and instant headlines about even the hint of a nuclear danger? It is not a reaction to the ghostly qualities of radioactivity, though that part of it. Radioactivity can kill you without your ever having seen, smelled, heard or felt it. But there are also many chemicals — carbon monoxide, for example — that are colorless, odorless, tasteless and deadly. Nor is the difference simply that nuclear energy is relatively new and unfamiliar. Commercial nuclear power has been around for two decades now, and that is substantially longer than, for instance, people have recognized the relationship between chemicals and cancer.
Society, in other words, reacts differently to risks that a mathematician would say were equally grave. Coal, for example, is almost certainly more dangerous than nuclear power if the combined risks of mining accidents, black lung, air pollution, acid rain and carbon-dioxide buildup are considered. But Jane Fonda, et al., have yet to hold an anti-coal rally. We live happily with one technology, the automobile, that causes 50,000 deaths a year — an astronomical figure. And of course there is smoking. The death rate of smokers is double that of non-smokers, regardless of age. And smoking also increases the danger from a variety of other sources: asbestos workers who smoke, for example, get lung cancer at nearly 100 times the rate of their non-smoking coworkers.
People are naturally more willing to accept the risks of a voluntary activity — especially one from which they receive a direct and obvious benefit — than the risks of an involuntary one. But a larger part of the explanation lies in a general public confusion. Recently it has begun to seem as though just about everything is dangerous to your health — nuclear power, chemical wastes, pesticides ( which DuPont now advertises as ''crop protection chemicals"), occupational hazards, antibiotics in animal feed, air pollution and on and on. Just about everything seems to cause cancer — what you do, what you eat (or don't eat) , where you live. In the face of such a systems overload, it is difficult to be very rational.
Are the risks of ordinary living really increasing, or are they merely being advertised better? The answers aren't clear. We are running out of empty space where wastes can be dumped and forgotten. We are also able to measure tiny amounts of chemicals and traces of pollution that would have been undetectable only a few years ago. We have a slightly better understanding of which substances are likely to be carcinogenic, and a much improved appreciation of how closely various parts of the environment interact. In short, we are much more aware of risks that have been around for some time. But it may also be true that, because of more people, more industrial activity and declining natural resources, new dangers are now being generated faster than ever before.
A central theme of the 1980s will be coping with the discrepancy between the technical capacity to generate, detect and measure risks, and our much more rudimentary social abilities to control, accommodate and manage them..