Sulfuric Acid

EAGLE BAY, N.Y. -- The remarkable thing about Big Moose Lake on a bright summer day is what is not happening.Canoeists paddle across the sparkling lake, which lies close to this sleepy Adirondacks village. Teen-agers water-ski. Children mount a high-pitched campaign to win permission from their mothers to go swimming.Nobody is fishing.Anglers used to come to Big Moose Lake for the trout, but the trout have not been plentiful for many years, thanks to a long-distance pollution problem that was supposed to be well on its way to being solved almost a decade ago.But acid rain never went away.

WASHINGTON -- With world attention focused on global warming, some members of Congress are quietly taking up another environmental fight that most people thought was finished years ago: acid rain.Caused when pollution mixes with water in the air and falls back to earth, acid rain has been blamed for the deaths of entire mountainsides of trees and hundreds of lakes, primarily in the Northeast.By 1990 the problem had became so widespread that Congress enacted sweeping amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act that required dramatic cuts in sulfur dioxide, the pollutant believed at the time to be the main component of acid rain.

Scientists studying the rogue microbe that has bushwhacked thousands of fish in the Pocomoke River say that there is no easy way to control Pfiesteria piscicida.As organisms go, it's one tough customer. It can survive a bath of sulfuric acid or household bleach.In the Chesapeake Bay, it could have existed for millions of years. Now, the estuary's soup of pollutants may have made it more aggressive.The most frequently cited solution won't come quickly, easily or cheaply: nothing less than an accelerated effort to cleanse the bay of the chemical nutrients pouring from farms, fields, lawns, sewage plants and smog-choked skies.

A tanker truck containing sulfuric acid overturned on a ramp of Interstate 695 early yesterday morning, forcing the evacuation of about 1,000 people from the Lynnbrook neighborhood of Anne Arundel County.The truck driver was hospitalized in serious condition, but no other injuries were reported. Hazardous materials workers quickly contained the spill, which involved about 20 gallons of the acid diluted with water, according to police.Because the mishap occurred at 7: 30 a.m., the disruption to Beltway traffic was minimal.

Leak found in truck carrying sulfuric acidFREDERICK -- A tanker truck carrying 2,000 gallons of sulfuric acid sprung a leak while it was parked at an Interstate-70 truck stop late Sunday night, authorities said.The leak was discovered about 10:55 p.m. Sunday, said Frederick City Police Sgt. John Nolte. Central Alarm, Fort Detrick's hazardous materials unit and a spill response unit from Maryland's Department of the Environment responded to the scene, he said.The truck, owned by DuPont Co., was driven to the end of the access road leading to I-70 Truck City, and police closed the road, Sergeant Nolte said.

Overheated hot plate blamed in house fireBALTIMORE -- A fire caused by an overheated hot plate caused $3,000 in damage to an East Baltimore rowhouse yesterday afternoon, fire officials said.Firefighters arrived at the home in the 700 block of Montford Ave. about 2:35 p.m., and found a corner of a second-floor bedroom on fire. They extinguished the blaze within 10 minutes.Fire officials said no one was injured.Man, 27, shot outside apartment complexBALTIMOREBALTIMORE -- A 27-year-old man was shot in the head, neck and shoulder early yesterday near the front door of an apartment complex on Eutaw Place.

RICHMOND, Calif. -- A huge white cloud of sulfuric acid spewed out of a ruptured railroad car yesterday, engulfing thousands of homes and sending more than 2,900 people to hospitals with such symptoms as burning eyes and breathing problems.The stinging, smelly chemical poured out of the rail car for more than three hours -- sending up a cloud 1,000 feet high and up to 8 miles wide -- before rail yard workers were able to cap the leak.The thick chemical fog rolled east and north, growing larger as it spread through densely populated neighborhoods and industrial sections of Richmond, San Pablo, El Sobrante and Pinole, Calif.

NEW YORK -- Three men in a stolen car were arrested by federal agents on a stakeout near a mosque in Brooklyn, and chemicals used in bombs were found in a locker in New Jersey yesterday as authorities intensified the investigation of the man they described as an Islamic fundamentalist who is charged in the car bombing of the World Trade Center.There were no indications that the men seized in Brooklyn had taken part in the bombing a week ago, and in fact authorities sought to play down the importance of the action.

RICHMOND, Calif. -- A spectacular milky-white cloud of sulfuric acid spewed out of a railroad tank car, forcing more than 3,200 people to seek medical treatment and tens of thousands more to stay in their homes and alter their commutes.Many businesses had to close yesterday, and Contra Costa County health authorities ordered people in the area to stay inside their houses while the thick mass spread from the leaking railroad tanker in north Richmond at the General Chemical Corp. plant. Winds blew the plume east to El Sobrante and north to the Carquinez Strait.

WASHINGTON -- Mount Pinatubo's eruption in June had a profound effect on global climate, blocking out 2 percent of light from the sun and lowering global temperatures by perhaps a half-degree Fahrenheit, a group of scientists said yesterday.The Philippine volcano shot a plume of sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere that is cooling the planet so effectively, they said, that it has overshadowed the warming from this winter's El Nino, a periodic increase in the surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific.

Chestertown factory agrees to cleanup A chemical factory in Chestertown has agreed to clean up potentially cancer-causing pollution in the soil and groundwater on the Eastern Shore and pay $200,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the Maryland Department of the Environment, state officials said yesterday. Velsicol Chemical Corp. which makes ingredients for plastics and vinyl flooring, among other products, was accused by the state of violating the law by releasing benzene, a known human carcinogen, and other toxic chemicals into underground water supplies near the plant on Route 297 in Kent County, according to the settlement agreement.

Untraceable lambastes us for being amoral voyeurs as it panders to our baser instincts at the same time. Such apparent hypocrisy wouldn't be so bad if the film worked as either a suspense thriller or an airtight whodunit. But Untraceable, about a killer who tortures his victims on the Internet while inviting the rest of the world to watch, abandons any pretense of mystery by revealing the degenerate's identity about a third of the way through. Diane Lane, far-too-often better than the movies she's stuck in, plays Jennifer Marsh, an Internet specialist with the FBI. Her job is to track down the Web's bad guys, most of whom steal people's credit card numbers and go on big-time buying sprees.

A 2 1/2 -year-old boy was severely burned yesterday afternoon at the playground of a Middle River elementary school after going down a slide doused in sulfuric acid and landing in a pool of the corrosive liquid. Authorities said they believe vandals stole the industrial-strength drain cleaner from a storage closet at Victory Villa Elementary School and poured it over pieces of playground equipment. The boy, who lives less than a quarter-mile from the school, was in fair condition last night at Johns Hopkins Hospital's pediatric burn unit.

MIDLOTHIAN -- In the woods at the fringe of this Western Maryland town, a mountain of waste 50 feet high is slouching into a creek that's tinted an eerie orange. The "gob pile" is refuse from a long-abandoned coal mine. And the stream into which it's eroding, Winebrenner Run, is devoid of life - one of the state's worst cases of sulfuric acid pollution from mines. At least 40 of these potentially toxic heaps rise in the forested mountains of Allegany and Garrett counties like tombstones for the state's declining coal industry.

More than 1,000 gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid leaked out of a plastic tank at the Dundalk Marine Terminal yesterday in an accident that a state environmental official called serious but not a public threat. Crews worked furiously yesterday afternoon to clean up the leak before rain could react with the 1,200 to 1,500 gallons of acid to produce dangerous heat and steam, said Richard McIntire, spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment. The liquid leaked through a crack in the new tank and into a containment area surrounded by a 4-foot-high wall designed to prevent spills, McIntire said.

PHILADELPHIA - Over the last two centuries, abandoned coal mines leaking a toxic mix of sulfuric acid and heavy metals have fouled more than 3,100 miles of Pennsylvania rivers and streams, making them the chief source of water pollution in the commonwealth. Soon, the problem that state officials and environmentalists already describe as "terrible" could get worse, and present Pennsylvania with a grim choice: allow a new tsunami of poisons to contaminate dozens more waterways - or pay tens of millions of dollars a year, every year forever, to control it. `Deplorable condition' "Our streams are in deplorable condition, and they are hardly done paying for the games of the coal companies," state Rep. Camille George, a Clearfield Democrat and minority chairman of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, warned.

RAQUETTE LAKE, N.Y. - Acid-rain-caused compounds are decreasing in Adirondack lakes, lending further evidence that the region's waters are improving from decades of acid rainfall, according to new research by the state and two universities. The study, which was recently submitted to the journal Environmental Science & Toxicology, found that in 44 of 48 lakes studied, sulfates - the building blocks of sulfuric acid - had declined since 1992. And for the first time since 1982, scientists detected a reduction in nitrates, which form nitric acid in water, in 15 of 48 lakes.

EAGLE BAY, N.Y. -- The remarkable thing about Big Moose Lake on a bright summer day is what is not happening.Canoeists paddle across the sparkling lake, which lies close to this sleepy Adirondacks village. Teen-agers water-ski. Children mount a high-pitched campaign to win permission from their mothers to go swimming.Nobody is fishing.Anglers used to come to Big Moose Lake for the trout, but the trout have not been plentiful for many years, thanks to a long-distance pollution problem that was supposed to be well on its way to being solved almost a decade ago.But acid rain never went away.

WASHINGTON -- With world attention focused on global warming, some members of Congress are quietly taking up another environmental fight that most people thought was finished years ago: acid rain.Caused when pollution mixes with water in the air and falls back to earth, acid rain has been blamed for the deaths of entire mountainsides of trees and hundreds of lakes, primarily in the Northeast.By 1990 the problem had became so widespread that Congress enacted sweeping amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act that required dramatic cuts in sulfur dioxide, the pollutant believed at the time to be the main component of acid rain.

Scientists studying the rogue microbe that has bushwhacked thousands of fish in the Pocomoke River say that there is no easy way to control Pfiesteria piscicida.As organisms go, it's one tough customer. It can survive a bath of sulfuric acid or household bleach.In the Chesapeake Bay, it could have existed for millions of years. Now, the estuary's soup of pollutants may have made it more aggressive.The most frequently cited solution won't come quickly, easily or cheaply: nothing less than an accelerated effort to cleanse the bay of the chemical nutrients pouring from farms, fields, lawns, sewage plants and smog-choked skies.