Toxic Waste

After hundreds of drums of toxic waste were discovered in a rural Howard County landfill last fall, baffled county officials said they didn't have a clue where they came from. It turns out, however, that county officials didn't have to look very far to solve their mystery.County investigators have found that a former county supervisor allowed many of the 860 drums to be dumped at the county's Carr's Mill Landfill in Woodbine in 1976.They also turned up evidence of other incidents of illegal dumping there in the mid-1970s in which other county employees may have been involved.

Groundwater contamination from toxic waste dumped decades ago at a nearby factory in the Severn area has prompted widespread testing of residential wells and put eight homes on bottled water, state officials said. The eight households have been notified that they have unsafe levels of industrial solvents in their wells, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment, and two other homes have been found to have levels below those deemed to pose health risks. State officials said they are anxious to complete testing for the chemicals — including possible carcinogens — at dozens of other homes that had yet to respond to requests to check their wells.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Hundreds of people protested violently yesterday in the commercial capital of Ivory Coast against the open-air dumping of toxic waste, beating a Cabinet minister and burning down the home of a port director implicated in the dumping. The health minister said that seven people, including four children, have died in the West African country's main city, Abidjan, after breathing fumes from the wastes, which were unloaded at 14 open sites, including the city's main dump.

For nearly 30 years, local, state and federal authorities have wrestled with what to do about an old dump in North Point that's been leaking toxic waste into nearby wetlands and Back River. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the Sauer Dump a Superfund site, making it a priority for a federally supervised cleanup. When it will finally get cleaned up, though, remains an open question. An EPA spokesman said more investigation is needed and couldn't say when work might begin to deal with the contaminants lurking in the soil and sediments.

Acting in a "precautionary manner," hazardous materials teams spent more than four hours yesterday investigating a mishap at Lehigh Portland Cement in Union Bridge that turned out not to involve toxic waste.Lehigh officials said a private waste hauler arrived at the plant about 10:30 a.m. yesterday to pick up seven drums of nontoxic waste gathered from the cleaning of tanks used in cement manufacturing.As the tractor-trailer driver started to pull away from a building at the plant, the truck struck a dust collector, damaging the device and puncturing the side of the truck.

WARSAW, Poland -- The environmental organization Greenpeace accused the West yesterday of exploiting Poland's recently opened borders to dump huge quantities of toxic waste.Greenpeace activists called on the Polish authorities to protest vociferously to the governments involved.A Greenpeace report, released simultaneously in Warsaw and Brussels, Belgium, said the Poles had been "swiftly rewarded" for opening their borders to Western industry.The 45-page study detailed 63 cases of attempts by Western countries in the last two years to foist hazardous wastes on Poland.

So the last time your car wouldn't start, you thought all you had to do was buy a new battery. Little did you know you were contributing to lowering the IQs of Taiwan's schoolchildren.That's one of the many in-your-gut revelations in a disturbing hour that kicks off the new season of Frontline, the top-notch documentary series that is doing its part for Showcase Week -- PBS' premiere week -- with an hour produced in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Journalism and reported by Bill Moyers.

WASHINGTON -- The Tooth Cave pseudo scorpion in Texas. Petroglyphs in New Mexico. Toxic waste almost everywhere.These are just some of the bizarre and vexing problems the U.S. government has inherited in its bailout of the savings and loan industry. And they are likely to become more numerous as more thrifts fail.The Resolution Trust Corp., the new federal agency that has taken on the assets of hundreds of failed S&Ls, recently found to its horror that at least 2,000 of the properties it has seized cannot be sold on the open market.

The Army says it doesn't have the money to clear out a toxic waste dump in the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground that has contaminated Watson Creek."

The City of Baltimore has been ordered to clean up toxic wastes discovered behind a Brooklyn Park cemetery last winter, a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said.The city must removeat least 60 decaying chemical drums as well as contaminated soil from an 86-acre dump at the end of Snow Hill Lane, north of the Beltway,said EPA spokesman David Sternberg.The city owns 3,000 square feet along the eastern edge, inside its Pennington Avenue Landfill, Sternberg said.The EPA began the clean up in February after discovering alarmingly high levels of lead, which can cause brain damage, in the soil.

This is what progress looks like in cleaning up one of the most polluted industrial sites in the Chesapeake Bay region: A lone pump labors in a rubble-strewn field at Sparrows Point, making soft gasping noises as it siphons a thin stream of oily waste from underground. The pump is one of the first put in by steelmaker Severstal North America to tap the huge plume of contamination underlying the 2,300-acre peninsula in Baltimore's harbor, where the dirty business of making steel has been practiced for more than a century.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Hundreds of people protested violently yesterday in the commercial capital of Ivory Coast against the open-air dumping of toxic waste, beating a Cabinet minister and burning down the home of a port director implicated in the dumping. The health minister said that seven people, including four children, have died in the West African country's main city, Abidjan, after breathing fumes from the wastes, which were unloaded at 14 open sites, including the city's main dump.

Geobacter, a class of bacteria, is tiny and yet so talented that it can turn deadly uranium waste into harmless muck, generate electricity from rust and garbage, and even run a toy car. It's a lot to expect from an invisible bug less than a thousandth of an inch long. But the Energy Department, the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation are exploring the potential of geobacter and related microorganisms to perform useful work. "Geobacter gives us a cheap and simple alternative to a cleaner, safer environment and the generation of cleaner forms of energy," said Derek Lovley, the biologist who discovered the bacteria in 1987 at the muddy bottom of the Potomac River.

Jack Revelle doesn't mind his warehouse being cluttered. As co-owner of Pro Quo Books, a Baltimore online book distributor, he expects some of the more than 150,000 titles he carries will end up not just in their designated bins or shelves, but in the hallway, on the floor -- and even in the company's employee lounge. What Revelle doesn't like, however, are the useless monitors and aging computer equipment that gather dust alongside them. "We have six or seven monitors that are sitting in the warehouse," Revelle said.

Since the Environmental Protection Agency put Fort Meade on its Superfund list of the nation's most hazardous sites in 1998, regulators have been pushing for an aggressive cleanup of the 5,400-acre complex. Despite repeated requests, though, officials at the National Security Agency have refused to share with either Army officials or government regulators crucial information about environmental conditions on its section of the Odenton post. Regulators and citizen activists contend that the NSA -- a super-secret global eavesdropping agency -- still thinks of itself as separate from the post, and thus not subject to the laws regulating environmental cleanup.

Scientists are working to perfect a "superbug" to help clean up toxic wastes at thousands of radioactive sites worldwide. The mighty microbe - nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium" - combines the genes of two bacteria to perform a job neither could do on its own. The composite creature "can live quite happily in an environment with 1 million times the radiation a human cell could tolerate," Department of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said at a news conference...

Toxic waste discovered in Brooklyn Park will eventually find its wayto New York, South Carolina and Massachusetts.Meanwhile, it sitsunder 24-hour guard on an 86-acre site near Mount Calvary Cemetery.U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials had expected to remove 400 decaying chemical drums last week from the dump on Snow HillLane, north of the Beltway.Their plans went awry, however, when federal officials disqualified the private hauler whose low bid had won the government contract, said Walter Lee, EPA's on-scene coordinator.

Eighteen years after the passage of sweeping legislation to clean up the worst of the nation's toxic waste dumps, much of the job remains undone. American companies will have to spend billions of dollars in coming years to decontaminate the most polluted Superfund sites. But that is not at all obvious from scouring the companies' annual financial reports and filings.Many companies, including General Electric and Viacom, only hint at their obligations in their filings and annual reports, leaving the people who invest in their stocks, live near their properties and work in their factories in the dark about when they plan to make amends - and how much they expect to spend.

A decision by European regulators yesterday to derail a merger between General Electric Co. and Honeywell International Inc. may revive a plan to build housing and offices on a toxic waste site in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Honeywell, which owns the land, had agreed to explore a $300 million project proposed by local developers. The site near Caroline Street contains buried waste from a former AlliedSignal Corp. chromium ore plant. At 27 acres, it is the harbor front's largest undeveloped parcel.

As someone who has long railed against network television for ignoring social class differences, I should be dancing on the rooftop at the arrival of "The Oblongs," a new animated series on WB about a family of have-nots living in a valley of toxic waste. The series gets right to it, opening on the front doors of a mansion on a hill. The doors open, and out walks a young, handsome, blond-haired man in a monogrammed bathrobe. He picks up the morning paper, looks at the headline and smiles.