By Richard T. Cartwright, PE, CHMM, (IHMM, AHMP and APICS) Fellow
The saying, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” is more than a cliché. It is a reminder that we must constantly be learning from the past. Here’s a look back at major historical events that happened today in the world of hazardous materials.
November 1, 1986
Sandoz chemical spill in Basel, Switzerland created by a warehouse fire and its subsequent extinguishing, released as much as 15,000 tons of agricultural chemicals into the Rhine River. The stored chemicals included bright red fluorescent dye, urea, organophosphates insecticides, mercury compounds and organochlorines. The bad news is that the chemical spill caused massive fish and downstream wildlife mortality. The good news is that the environmental disaster led to the Basel Convention, which resulted in an international treaty designed to reduce movements of hazardous waste between nations and to prevent the transfer of hazardous waste from developed to less-developed countries.
November 1, 1970
Fire broke out in a packed dance hall near Grenoble, France, where 142 trapped people (mostly teenagers) died. The fire was reportedly caused by a carelessly discarded match igniting a foam-filled seat cushion. Fueled by the highly flammable nature of the decor and furnishings, the building quickly became an inferno. The intensity of the fire completely gutted the building’s interior, which caused the roof to melt and collapse. In addition to the main entrance, there were two other external doors. At the time of the fire, the external doors were not marked and both were locked. Sixty survivors were admitted to hospital with burns on up to 90% of their bodies.
November 1, 1959
After seven additional stitches were added to his face, the goalie for the Montreal Canadians returned to the ice wearing a plastic face mask. It was made using fiberglass and resin. His design was so popular that goalies throughout the National Hockey League followed suit. Personal protective equipment face masks are now standard issue in the NHL.
November 1, 1952
The United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It exploded with a blinding white fireball more than 3 miles across. It left an underwater crater (6,240-feet wide and 164-feet deep) in the atoll where an island had once been. The blast lifted 80 million tons of soil into the air. The United States had a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. During the following year, the Soviet Union exploded its thermonuclear device, and by the late 1970s, seven nations had constructed hydrogen bombs. The nuclear arms race (using hazardous materials) had taken a fearful step forward.
In 1977, U.S. military began decontamination of Eniwetok and other impacted islands. During the three-year cleanup process, 111,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris was mixed with Portland cement and buried it in an atomic blast crater. A dome composed of 18-inch-thick concrete panels was constructed over the buried material. The final cost of the cleanup project was $239 million. In 2000, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal made a compensation award to people of Eniwetok consisting of $107.8 million for environmental restoration, $244 million in damages to cover economic losses caused by loss of access and use of the atoll, and $34 million for hardship and suffering. Rather than scrape topsoil off the island, replace it with clean topsoil, and create another radioactive waste repository dome (estimated cost $947 million), most areas still contaminated on Eniwetok were treated with potassium. Soil that could not be effectively treated for human use was removed and used as fill for a causeway connecting the two main islands of the atoll. The potassium decontamination project cost $103.3 million.
November 1, 1932
Wernher von Braun, a German scientist, was named head of Nazi Germany’s liquid-fuel rocket program. His first successful rocket launch in 1934 was powered by ethanol and liquid oxygen. When his research team of 80 engineers outgrew their facility outside Berlin, a larger secret facility was built at Peenemunde, a remote island off the Baltic coast.
November 1, 1880
Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, was born. He was first to collect scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of continental drift. He suggested that 250 million years ago all present-day continents came from a single supercontinent Pangaea, which eventually broke up and gradually drifted apart. Others had seen the fit of coastlines of South America and Africa, but Wegener added geological and paleontological evidence that these two continents were once joined.
November 1, 1865
The first railroad oil tank car arrived near Titusville, Pa., which was filled with oil delivered by the world’s first oil pipeline. The tank car design featured two iron-banded wooden tanks, each holding up to 45 barrels of oil, on a flatcar.
November 1, 1836
Hiram Mills, an American sanitary engineer, was born. As a research pioneer, he employed the talents of a cross-functional team of engineers, chemists and biologists to attack a single goal, the safe disposal of sanitary sewage.
November 1, 1755
An earthquake of 8.0 magnitude struck Lisbon, Portugal, where 70,000 people died. The city was rebuilt from scratch after the destruction by the earthquake, fires, and a tsunami.
Historical hazardous materials management events are posted 365 days a year at this LinkedIn discussion group.
