Toxic Waste

Living in the shadow of a Superfund cleanup site, Mary Minor and Sue Komick already had learned far more than most citizens know about hazardous waste. And they had seen serious medical problems strike family members or pets.What they learned at an international conference this summer frightened them even more.In June, Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Komick attended the second International Congress on Hazardous Waste: Impact on Human and Ecological Health in Atlanta.They learned from toxicologists that sites like the Keystone landfill in Adams County, Pa., near their home, are the most difficult with which to deal, because they contain a variety of substances accepted over a long period of time, and no one really knows what toxics are buried there.

"Environmental racism" isn't a new expression. The Rev. Ben Chavis, former director of the NAACP, first used the term in 1982 to protest the location of a North Carolina toxic waste landfill. Since then numerous speakers have attempted to stoke the fires of activism by calling pollution in the inner cities the next civil rights issue.It's true that both industrialists and governments have typically put smoke-belching factories, air-polluting highways and waste-leaking landfills in communities where the people are least able to fight them.

The phone call found me in the newsroom, staring blankly at the empty screen of a computer and wondering if the time had arrived to think about a career change, possibly running a small deli."

When state highway officials told Carroll County's top elected officials that the long-postponed construction of the Hampstead bypass might be further delayed because of the discovery of a four-inch turtle, community reaction was predictable.The thrust of the comments was: How dare this puny, insignificant reptile stand in the way of progress?For many Carroll residents, the possible delay in building the Hampstead bypass is another example of nonsensical environmental legislation designed to protect animals and inconvenience humans.

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.

What's in a name? Depends on what the name is. "Superfund site" is one such controversial appellation, supposedly designating toxic waste dumps for high-priority attention.That tag may apply to parts of the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, but it is not an accurate description of the entire 72,000-acre installation in Harford County where 5,500 people live and more than 15,000 soldiers and civilians work.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, however, proposes to slap that derogatory label on all of APG, urged on by local environmental groups.

LANCASTER, Pa. -- For nearly 300 years the gentle, God-fearing Amish have worked this land, their backs turned on an outside world whose modern ways they do not want.Now a proposed toxic-waste dump in the heart of these bucolic farm fields has cast a long shadow over their historic presence, portending a spectacular collision of cultures that has some Amish contemplating the first mass exodus since their flight from Europe.State environmental officials have already approved the dump site, an old clay mine on a mountain at the headwaters of four watersheds serving soil-rich Lancaster County.

Throughout Maryland, there are 40 toxic waste sites designated by federal or state agencies for priority cleanup.Two of the state-listed sites lie along the route of the proposed 5.8-mile Hampstead bypass, which has been under consideration for more than 20 years as congestion along Route 30 worsened.The contaminated sites continue to interfere with planning, years after the problems were discovered.State Highway Administration engineers have had to realign the southern part of the bypass to avoid one site, the land owned by Black & Decker (U.S.

A property on the Patapsco River near Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.'s Brandon Shores power plant is one of a dozen being considered as a repository for muck dredged from Baltimore's shipping lanes.If the Maryland Port Administration buys the 218-acre site from CSX Realty, a division of the CSX railroad, the state has promised community leaders to convert part of the property into a nature preserve and park."There is no doubt in my mind they are going to buy the property. They are in such desperate need" of disposal sites, said Mary Rosso, a resident of Silver Sands, a Stoney Creek community in the shadow of BG&E's smokestacks.

Maryland environmental officials, who this week fined Aberdeen Proving Ground for improper storage and handling of hazardous waste, have ordered the Army post to show that it is doing all it can to reduce or re-use the material.In a nine-page administrative order received by the Harford County installation Monday, the state Department of the Environment gave the Army 60 days to show that it had considered all ways to recycle or reduce the waste its ships to about 15 disposal sites across the country.