:: rawblogXport ::

:: Sunday, April 25, 2004 ::

Revisiting Love Canal By Glenn Scherer, TOMPAINE.com
Finally, travel to Love Canal on Newark Bay, to a derelict factory in the Portuguese working-class section of Newark, on a Passaic River bend. Here in the '60s, Diamond Alkali Company (renamed Diamond Shamrock) made Agent Orange, the herbicide that disabled thousands of U.S. GIs, (some compensated by the Pentagon), plus many more Vietnamese peasants (never compensated).

In 1992, investigators revealed that Diamond's Newark plant knowingly contaminated its personnel with dioxin, the deadliest of synthetic chemicals. Workers were disfigured. Others sickened and died. Though more responsible chemical corporations eliminated dioxin from their manufacturing waste, Diamond did not, since that would have slowed production.

Instead the company in a sense 'launched' Agent Orange as a weapon against the citizens of Newark. A deadly dioxin cocktail formed a perpetual slippery film on the factory floor. 'Every other week or so' workers were ordered to hose the floors with sulfuric acid. The poison flowed into trenches, into the Passaic River, and eventually to Newark Bay and beyond.

So much toxic waste went through the plant's industrial sewer that it formed a reef in the river. Employees were directed to surreptitiously wade in, and with shovels 'chop up' the toxic deposits so the reef wouldn't attract attention.

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